Jim Brady had the kind of sailing career that ambitious young Optimist sailors dream about—world champion, Olympic medalist, America’s Cup tactician and Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. But these days, you’ll find him pottering with the family in his picnic boat on Portland’s Casco Bay.

Brady grew up in Florida, son of an Air Force pilot and colonel. “We were fortunate enough to live on the water in Florida, so I always had an interest in being not just in the water, but on the water as well,” he says. It was his father that introduced the family to sailing with the purchase of a Hobie Cat when Brady was 8 years old.

“One thing led to another, and I guess this was probably about 1978 when the J/24 came out and was starting to become a popular boat. A guy named Mark Ploch, who was a top 470 sailor at the time (now owner of Doyle Sails in New York City) had just moved to town and was starting a sailmaking loft. He approached my dad and said, ‘Hey, how about you buy half of this J/24, and I’ll take your two sons as my crew and help teach them how to be good sailors?’”

It was a fantastic opportunity for the young Brady. Together with Ploch they won the J/24 Midwinters in their first year in the boat; Brady was just 15 and living the dream. “I also bought a Laser and went on to the youth national championships. The best I did there was second. I kind of jumped into it with full force between the J/24, the Laser on my own, and at the same time, leading up into the 1980 Olympics, I started sailing in a Soling and ultimately joined a crew with Ed Baird as the helmsman and Steve Calder as the middleman.”

The United States boycott of the Moscow Olympics put paid to that campaign, but it was still something to be competing for an Olympic berth in your teens. A lot was down to Clearwater, a hotbed of competition at the time. Apart from Ploch, Vince Brun, Peter Branning and Steve Calder all lived locally, and both the guidance and the competition were excellent.

“I was very fortunate, frankly, to be tutored by Mark Ploch, and then by Ed Baird and Steve Calder,” Brady says. “What I learned from each of them was that if you wanted to win, you had to put in the effort—training, practicing and preparing for the race. It sounds simple, but they believed more time spent efficiently in the boat ­sailing and working on performance or mark-rounding or maneuvers would give you the confidence to out-sail the competition.”

The next step was clear to Brady: college sailing. Attending the College of Charleston in South Carolina, he was an All-American in his sophomore year but never graduated. He took a semester off to compete in the J/24 Worlds in Japan in 1985 and after that got an offer of full-time employment from UK Sails. He thought, “I’m trying to go to college to get a decent job. This seems like a pretty good job, so why go back?”

Not everyone agreed it was a good idea. “My dad has a Ph.D. in education, so to drop out of college and do this was probably not one of the things he would’ve been in favor of ­initially,” Brady says.

Success, however, changed things. “My mother came with me to the Pan-Am Games, and it was the first time she realized, ‘Wow, you’re actually pretty good at this stuff.’ From that time forward, I think I had a lot more support for doing what I was doing, which was a pretty nontraditional path.”

By the mid-’80s, he was ­driving, already one of the top sailors in classes like the J/24, in which he won the Worlds in Dublin in 1990. Brady also broke into the bigger offshore classes racing aboard Abracadabra alongside Ploch. He won the One Ton Cup in 1991 with David Clarke’s Vibes, a Bruce Farr design that was managed by Geoff Stagg, who then got him involved in more top Farr programs. He also moved to North Sails, and his career started to peak.

“I had a pretty good year and probably hit more than a dozen major championship ­regattas and won all of them. It was one of those things where the stars aligned,” he says. His 1990 Rolex Yachtsman of the Year selection acknowledged this purple period.

Meanwhile, Olympic sailing was about to come back into focus. After sitting out 1984 while he was at college, Brady and Baird made a late run at the 1988 trials and came in third. Kevin Mahaney had been fourth, and a few weeks later he got in touch with Brady and suggested they start early and do it right. The pair picked Doug Kern as the middleman and went sailing, eventually winning the US Soling trials and going all the way to the gold-medal match, where they met Denmark’s Jesper Bank.

“We made a couple of mistakes in the finals, and having dominated really the whole week, the whole Olympic gold-medal dream faded away for us in the last 30 minutes of the week of glory in Barcelona. Our biggest mistake was on the last beat of the first race. We were several lengths ahead and had pushed him early to the starboard-tack layline. Because we were easily laying the mark, we decided not to go back to tack on him one more time. He got a puff three lengths up on our hip, and we sailed into a hole, and that was that race. We were very fortunate to win a silver medal but, frankly, very disappointed that we weren’t able to have ended up with the gold, which was our ultimate target.”

Despite the ­disappointment, Brady put the dream aside. “I felt like I had kind of been there and done that, even though we didn’t win the gold. Kevin was moving on and thinking about doing the America’s Cup, and I had been doing more of the big-boat sailing because of the successes and name recognition from being the Rolex Yachtsman of the Year and an Olympic medalist. It gave me a real entrée into writing my own ticket on the big-boat side. Shortly after the Olympics in 1992, Dennis Conner approached me and asked if I would consider doing the America’s Cup program with him on Stars and Stripes.”

Brady checked in with Mahaney on his Cup plans and was told it was too early to make any kind of commitment. Mahaney’s advice was to go with Dennis. “So, I ultimately left Kevin and signed up for the Stars and Stripes program to do the America’s Cup in 1995. I remember very clearly coming off the starting line in race one in San Diego, and we were in a pretty even start. I would’ve said the Kiwis were just a boatlength and a half up on our hip. They sailed the same speed and about 3 degrees higher than we did the entire time. They just climbed off of our hip. And I thought, ‘This is going to be a really long week.’”

They went down 5-0 to the New Zealanders.

Afterward, Brady led a Mumm 36 program that would eventually initiate a dramatic change in his life. “We put together what I think was really one of the best sailing teams or programs I’d ever been involved with. We had a great boat. We had a great team. We had a great sponsor and were fortunate enough to do quite well in the Mumm 36, from the Admiral’s Cup to winning the Mumm US Nationals and European championships.”

Then the 1997 financial crisis hit Japan and the sponsorship dried up. “When things went bad in Japan, some of our sponsorship…the deal really kind of blew apart. I ended up having to fund the end of the program. The money never came through, but we had already made so many commitments to the sailing team that we decided to go do the SORC and Key West Race Week.”

It was a remarkable decision by Brady to underwrite the commitments he had made to his team—at his own expense—and the personal cost caused a serious rethink. “It made me really think hard about the fact that I had put a lot of eggs into one basket with this particular program. I was debating whether or not I really wanted to just think about something different.”

Brady’s wife, Julia Trotman Brady (Olympic bronze medalist in 1992 and Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year in 1993), was at Harvard Business School, and the couple was living in Boston, where Brady reconnected with Mahaney. Mahaney’s reaction to Brady’s career dilemma was to offer him a job with the family business, managing and ­developing hotels.

“So, I decided, ‘Well, what the heck? I’ll take the next six or 12 months and kind of see what this is like.’”

They raised some money, bought a rundown hotel, and successfully renovated it. “I stuck with Kevin for about a year, and then we didn’t have any deal flow in the late 1990s. I literally was making minimum wage. I was going to get some equity on deals we did, but if we had no deal flow, there was no upside. So, I left and went to work at Starwood Hotels and Resorts for a little while.”

This did not go well. “It became really clear to me in a very short period of time at Starwood that without an MBA, yet alone a college degree, I wasn’t going to get ahead in that organization. No matter how smart I was or how talented or experienced, or whatever things that I could bring to the table, without an MBA, I wasn’t going to be ­listened to.”

Fortunately, sailing wasn’t quite finished with Brady. He got a call from the New York YC’s campaign for the 2000 America’s Cup, skippered by Baird. In some ways, it was a backward step to an old life, but it came at an auspicious moment. “Julia was pregnant, and I saw the writing on the wall that Starwood wasn’t going to work out for me. So, I agreed to join in the 2000 America’s Cup with Young America.”

While the family was in New Zealand, Mahaney came and stayed, and this time they developed a partnership that stuck. The family moved to Portland, Maine, after the Cup, and Brady started to work for Mahaney. “I ran the development arm of the company. And I stayed there until 2008. I kind of turned my switch off on sailing. I did it because I’m the type of person who wants to really ­succeed at whatever I do.

“Eventually, you say no so many times that the phone completely stops ringing. I haven’t heard from anybody in years.”

“I decided that it was time for me to really make a living, and I just really singly focused my effort on this. So, for eight years, we developed a number of different hotels, mostly Hilton franchised properties, where we would build ground-up hotels and operate them. I was responsible for both site acquisition, getting all the permits and approvals, the design, as well as the construction, right through to getting the hotel open.”

Life might well have continued on this path if it wasn’t for the early shocks of another financial crisis. In the summer of 2008, real estate was slowing, and Mahaney suggested it was a good time to take a sabbatical. “I took the summer of 2008 and decided to move my family to Italy, with the idea that we would just take one year, and I would come back. Well, the world fell apart within months of us moving to Italy, with the Lehman collapse in the fall of 2008, which pretty much put a squash to virtually all real estate development.”

He got a job consulting to a real estate group in Italy for the next three years, eventually returning to the United States in 2011 to put their daughters back into the American school system. It was at this moment that Brady decided to take the plunge. “I decided that I would hang out my own shingle and find some opportunities on my own.”

He found the old Portland Press Herald Newspaper building, dating back to 1923. “I thought, ‘Jeez, that could be a really cool hotel.’ The market was strong, and ultimately I took some really big risks at the time because we were still kind of just starting to come out of the recession, and nobody had a lot of faith going forward.”

The hotel opened in 2015, winning plaudits and awards, and Brady has now started a company to operate it as well. “It’s been the market leader by a big margin since its opening. We’ve acquired another historic building and just did a rehab of that, and my offices are now on the top floor of that building, and we broke ground on a new 135-room hotel, which is called Canopy by Hilton. We’ll develop it, own it, and operate that project as well. That’s also right here in Portland.”

While the last 18 months have not been easy for Brady, the hotel and the hospitality industry, he feels he’s continuing to weather the worst of the storm. Meanwhile, the Olympic medalist and former America’s Cup tactician has barely been near a boat. He has done a little J/105 and Swan 42 sailing with Glenn Darden.

Things might change, though. He had a day out with Terry Hutchinson, and then with Peter Holmberg’s TP52 program while they were training in Europe. “I’m looking for the right opportunities to get back out there and get back sailing,” Brady says. “It’s interesting, after you step out for a while, and the phone rings for a number of years. Eventually, you say no so many times that the phone completely stops ringing. I haven’t heard from anybody in years.”

Brady regards his time as a professional sailor at the very top of the game as a stepping stone to his life now. “I don’t think I could’ve shortcut and gone straight to real estate,” he says. “I learned an awful lot from sailing and also made a lot of great connections that were ultimately the key to my success in moving on to another industry. I feel like I made some great friendships, got to see the world, and really enjoyed the competition.”

The post The Afterlife of Jim Brady appeared first on Sailing World.

My watch reads 1:58 a.m. as I step up through the hatch and into a darkness so complete that focusing on the horizon causes an instantaneous shift in perspective—all the angles are turned counterclockwise. At the helm, shadowy figures sway, illuminated by the green glow of the compass. Beyond the transom, whitecaps cut through the black sea before everything vanishes under storm clouds.

It’s our second night in the Celtic Sea, and we are well past Land’s End, sailing north for the Fastnet Light. I climb up to the rail and sit between my pals Craig Nann and Adam Perlmutter. Clipping to the jackline, I peer over the side at waves, maybe 10 to 15 feet from peak to trough. Turning forward, the red digits of the mast display glow through the moisture: WINDSPD 31.

Adam’s chin is on his chest. Confused, I turn to Craig.

“He’s been seasick for a while now,” Craig quickly points a finger at his open mouth, imitating someone vomiting. He then jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the storm clouds behind us and says: “Squalls. This will get messy.”

A wave hits the bow, and our backs press against the lifelines.

I twist around to get a better look at the approaching weather. About 15 yards away, a wave crests like a black wall, its glassy surface blotting out everything behind it. Suddenly, there’s a knot in the pit of my stomach. It closes on us quickly. Our bow wave’s white foam looks well below the crest when the wave hits the hull under my boots, dangling over the side. Water jets up through my legs, and my chest bounces off the lifelines as a thick wall of ocean lands on my neck and shoulders. Below me, the boat’s 10,000-pound keel bulb looks to be just a few feet underwater.

Adam blurts out, “Been getting worse all watch!”

His anxiety infects me quickly. The salty taste in my mouth turns metallic. It’s what I call “mouth sweats.” I stare at the horizon line and pray that I don’t puke.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

“Hey, guys!” someone bellows from the cockpit. “What sail is next?”

Sail change? I gotta go forward in this?

A creeping sensation of dread moves up to my throat, something I hadn’t felt in decades.

A quick glance at the red dial: WINDSPD 33-34.

From the helm, Jack Cummiskey yells: “We’re going to the jib top. Where’s Ted?”

Ted Cummiskey is already on the move, headed for the bow.

One of the boat’s veterans, Billy Schneider, comes forward from the helm and stops in front of the hatchway, raising his hands to cup his mouth.

“Hey, Ted! What track’s open?”

Ted can’t hear. Someone’s usually at the mast to relay messages fore and aft.

Sh-t! That’s me. But I don’t have the will to move. Fear has me in its grip, squeezing the nerve right out of me. I’ve been wondering all summer if I’m really cut out for this. Now it feels as if I’ve put myself in a ­situation I can’t handle.

Billy turns and yells something aft, but I am so far inside my head that I don’t hear it.

The sail change is going to happen, and if I don’t get up and do my job, someone else will—and this will be my last race on Snow Lion.

Back near the helm, Chris Huntington is pointing his long arm at the lone sailboat out beyond our stern.

“We’re keeping pace with her! Why are we changing sails?” he bellows.

Billy suddenly steps away from the hatch as our skipper, Larry Huntington, comes on deck.

Larry fills his lungs and yells, “Chris!”

Everyone turns to face him.

“OK,” he continues in his usual, steady skipper’s tone, “breeze is building, so let’s change to the jib top.”

Before Chris can say a word in protest, Larry raises his hand and says: “If it eases up, we’ll go back to the heavy jib. I’ll hand up the sail.”

As our skipper turns and disappears down the companionway, Chris steps forward next to Billy and jokingly says, “Good news is, I don’t think the heavy stuff’s coming down for a while.”

A broad smile flashes across Billy’s face as he rubs his hands together expectantly. “This is getting good!”

These guys aren’t scared. They’re enjoying it. This hit me, or rather my ego, like a hard slap. I’ve lost my confidence and my ability to get up and sail. Why?

I know the boat is more solid than most. The hull is Kevlar, and Larry has put all of his 40-plus years of experience sailing offshore into this boat. And the crew?

In the deadly 1979 Fastnet Race, Larry, Billy and then-19-year-old Chris had been aboard Carina, one of the great amateur offshore racing programs, in the worst conditions ever faced in this race. Force 11 winds with waves in excess of 40 feet caused havoc—75 boats capsized, 15 sailors died, and five boats sank.

I watch as Billy turns to yell at Jack about his steering—and it hits me. This is what they signed up for, and they are enjoying it. If the boat is good and the crew is experienced, then I’m the weak link. They picked me to come along, and I accepted, so it is on me to get up and try.

Lifeline in my left hand, tether in my right, I get to my feet and shuffle forward until I reach the shrouds. The mast is tilting away at about 15 degrees, so I drop back down to my knees, unclip my tether and start to crawl. Just as I do, the boat begins to stand upright. I spring to my feet, take two loping steps to the mast, and clip my tether to a halyard.

Behind me, the tall, lanky frame of Ben Millard creeps ­forward along the rail. At 19, Ben is the youngest of the new guys this season, which makes me, at 43, the oldest.

“Stuay!” I hear Howard Lapsley yelling to me from the hatch.

He stands up from the hatch and tosses the tack end of the jib toward me. I pass the sail forward to Ben and wait as Howard comes along the leeward rail, the ocean flashing under his boots. He ties the sheet to the clew and moves to the mast, while Ted connects the halyard to the head of the sail.

Howard turns and yells, “Ready forward!”

Jack booms,“Hoist!” 

Howard and I pull and jump until Ted yells, “Made!”

Both of us are winded, but before I can take a breath, Craig’s growl booms over the wind: “Heavy jib ready to come down!”

Howard has already switched his tether and is sliding on his butt down to leeward. As I change my clip to the jackline, the boat heels way over, and I start sliding. My throat tightens again.

C’mon, just breathe!

Ben Millard yells, “Release the sheet!”

The loud groan of the sheet unwinding itself around the big winch drum gives way to the loud flogging of a sail snapping in the strong breeze.

Howard reaches out over the ocean to pull the clew of the heavy jib under the foot of the jib top. Ben and I grab the foot of the sail as Ted yells, “Jib down!”

Thousands of pounds of ­tension release from the halyard, and it vibrates down through the mast like a tuning fork. We all lean back to pull the sail inboard, peeling the heavy jib down, right under the jib top.

Gathering up the sail, I hear a loud thud before I’m thrown forward to the end of my tether. Just as my chest hits my harness, the wave lands hard on my back, knocks the wind out of me and tears the sail folds out of my hands. I watch it slip over the lifelines, but Howard leans out, catches a handful of cloth, and shoves the folds back into my arms.

After a few more exhausting pulls, Howard and I are holding the bulk of the jib. Ben moves forward and pulls the head of the sail out of the track, while Ted squirms forward, flat on his chest, wresting the tack from its shackle.

Howard yells, “We bagging this here?”

“Weight off the bow! Get that thing back!” Jack roars. I’m exhausted and itching to follow his order, but Ted isn’t done, and we can’t retreat without him.

Sweating profusely, I pull my jacket open at the neck, and the breeze rushes in, filling my jacket like a balloon.

“Guys, weight off the bow!” Craig’s growl turns my head in time to see Howard’s hand as he thrusts a sail tie toward me. Pulling the other end of the tie under the sail, he feeds it back up through the loop I’m holding and cinches the folds of sailcloth together like an hourglass. Howard quickly lashes one more tie around the sail, then hands the sail to Ben, who turns and scrambles to the cockpit. Ben and I slowly get to our feet and start dragging the sail back. Ted comes up beside us, pulling the tack over the rest of the sail—­folding the sail in half.

Crack! Boom! An explosion like cannon fire goes off. Behind me, Ted yells, “Take this!”

He throws the sail at me and takes off for the bow.

A tremendous whip crack reverberates through the air—then I see it. The jib-top tack has broken loose. It’s flapping up in the breeze and smacking down the pulpit like a giant fly swatter. The steel grommet whacks the pulpit again and again.

The bigger concern? If that sail tears up the track, we’re dealing with an all-hands-on-deck, abandon-the-race kind of problem.

Something hits my leg. Below me, Ben is lying on his back, clinging to the heavy jib for dear life. He’s supposed to go forward, but he’s not going anywhere. I look up, straight at Jack. He takes one hand off the wheel, points a finger at me, jerks that hand back 6 inches and rams it straight at the bow.

Oh no…

I take a deep gulp of air, and out of my mouth comes, “Here we go!”

Jack asked. There’s no way I’m letting him down.

I drop the rest of the sail into Ben’s arms, and with an unexpected surge of adrenaline, turn on my heel and take off at a run to the bow.

Two steps, harness goes tight, feet fly out from under me, and I land flat on my backside. A jolt of pain shoots through my hip as I realize I forgot to unclip. Twisting around onto my knees, I free my clip and make a beeline for the bow, again.

Up ahead, Ted has his back against the jib and is sliding forward, flattening the sail against the pulpit as he goes. The boat lurches, I slip, and I’m on my ass again—this time sliding my right foot forward like a stolen-base runner. Momentum carries me across the foredeck and into the sail, just behind Ted. As I get up, Ted pins the sail tack between his knees. Without looking up, he shouts, “Pull the sail!”

I catch hold of the jib, but in 30-plus knots of breeze, the soaking-wet sail jumps right out of my hands. With another try, I get one hand on the foot of the sail and turn forward. Ted puts a sail tie through the ­grommet and threads it through the spare tack shackle. Standing up, he pulls the sail tie closed like a slipknot. With a second pull, the grommet is within inches of the tack shackle.

Ted yells, “Pull!” Using both hands, I throw all my weight into it, but the sail won’t budge.

“Pull the sail!” Ted yells again.

“I can’t!”

Suddenly, the boat drops off a wave. I’m thrown forward, my back slams against the pulpit. The hissing bow wave below is now close enough that spray covers my face. I try to get to my feet, but gravity has me pinned.

Ted looks up past the bow and drops the sail tie as he lunges forward, grabbing the pulpit, yelling, “Hang on!”

The whoosh of the bow wave vanishes as a wall of black ocean comes straight at us. I freeze as the pulpit plunges into the sea.

Deep breath. Freezing.

My left arm snaps straight as the ocean lifts me off the deck. I’m submerged when my hand starts to slip.

Don’t let go!

My feet float to the surface as my boots fill with water. In the darkness, time stretches out like an elastic.

I’m at the edge of my breath as the strain on my arm eases and the pulpit begins to rise.

Land inside the boat!

My eyes open in murky darkness as the white deck comes into focus.

My feet hit as my hand is ripped from the pulpit. The ocean sucks me down against the rail. Gasping for air, I get mostly seawater, swallowing a mouthful. A loud squeak catches my attention. It’s Ted’s boots shuffling forward. Something tugs under me. I roll over and watch the gray mass of sail slide forward. Getting to my knees, I help pull the foot of the sail forward.

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Ted fits the shackle through the grommet. I hear it snap as he yells, “Made!”

The sail goes taut with the boom-boom-boom of the sheet loading on the winch. The boat begins to heel, so I start crawling up to the high side. I gasp for air as cold seawater gushes out of my sleeves, my neck—hell, everywhere.

With a wild expression in his eyes, Ted yells, “Let’s get outta here!”

I try to hustle, but my boots are heavy with seawater. Just past the shrouds, Ted drops into the first spot on the rail. I maneuver my way into the next open spot and wedge myself between the lifelines.

“Suddenly, the boat drops off a wave. I’m thrown forward; my back slams against the pulpit. The hissing bow wave below is now close enough that spray covers my face. I try to get to my feet, but gravity has me pinned.”

On my right, Billy is eyeing me with a smirk. My mind is racing, my whole body buzzing with adrenaline. Turning to Billy, I ask, “Permission to empty my boots?”

Billy’s shoulders shake with laughter as the boat rolls over another wave and gravity pulls a salty stream of seawater from my nose. As I cough and choke, Billy howls, using the back of his hand to wipe the tears from his eyes.

Then I hear, “Ted, Stuart—why don’t you two go below and get some dry gear?”

I turn around to see Larry with a look of genuine concern. I turn to catch Ted’s eye, but he is staring out at the ocean with a funny smirk on his face, quietly shaking his head and clearly not going anywhere.

I turn back to the skipper and say, “Larry, we’ll sit our watch as is.”

He smiles broadly as he steps into the hatch and adds, “OK. You two are big boys.”

Staring out at the circle of moonlight in the clouds, my mind swings back to the moment the wave hit us. The sea swallowed me whole. Inside the cold, dark wave, I felt no anxiety, no fear…just a kind of serene detachment. There was something else in the wave, something I couldn’t quite get to, and just as I reached for it, the sea spat me back out.

As I look out over the rail an hour or so later, I can’t remember why I’d been so scared to go forward in the first place. In that moment, I thought about something my dad once said: “Sometimes in life, things happen that change us, and we’re not the same after. Something of the experience fuses to our DNA. They become the jewels in our own internal clocks—reminding us who we are and shaping who we become.”

The moment inside that wave revealed something to me I hadn’t found in 43 years ashore—the difference between danger and my reaction to it: fear. I’d been scared by the storm conditions but in no immediate danger. However, inside the wave—in real, immediate danger—I wasn’t afraid.

Later that night, the experience made sense. Getting up to do that sail change was what made that moment possible. Life is in the doing. We don’t know what we’re made of until put to the test. The self-confidence gained from that experience comes with me everywhere. Sailing offshore puts us in situations we’d never find in our daily lives ashore. The insights gleaned from this experience, and others like it offshore, are among my most treasured moments.

The post Sail Change in the Dark appeared first on Sailing World.

“Timing is everything,” the old proverb says, advising that success is related to the trigger of a certain chain of events. Be that as it may, as this relates to sailing fast and tippy boats, “Timing,” I would add, “is patience.” All sailors know the importance of a clear and audible countdown before anyone makes a break for the other side. We can think of “three, two, one” as our “ready, set, go.” When someone blitzes at “ready,” however, the outcome will inevitably be bad, as our careening catamaran crew can now affirm. Any good racing sailor will relate—it’s easy to get amped up in the heat of the moment, but next time, wait for the “go” before you go over the falls. —Dr. Crash

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Ahead, through bleary eyes, the lights of the Mackinac Bridge float on the horizon like a mirage. The twinkling blob is a distant target in the pitch-black night, the next waypoint on our 280-mile race from boisterous Chicago to sleepy Mackinac Island. All around us are blinking lights: reds, greens and whites of channel markers and the slower boats we’re creaming past at what sure feels like 15 knots. My co-skipper and I are sleep-deprived, hungry and thirsty for beer, and while we can’t yet smell the horse piss, we’re closing in on the finish at a wicked pace.

My concentration flicks between the bow, its angle to the waves, and the tightly curled luff of our bone-white masthead spinnaker. Standing so I can see better, my left foot is braced against the foot chock, tingling and numb. My right knee is bent, pressed against the side deck and the coaming, and my waist is wedged against the lifeline padding. When the load on the rudder lightens, I allow the tiller to glide away. The boat turns toward the wind, the luff flicks as the boat accelerates, and water jets across the foredeck.

The boat begins to surf, and the ­rudders howl like a banshee and then go quiet as froth tumbles out from the transom. A stronger gust tickles the hair on the back of my neck. I exhale deeply to calm my nerves and say to myself, Don’t wipe out…don’t wipe out…

My mate for this blitz through the Straits of Mackinac is Andraž Mihelin. He’s behind me, sitting wedged into the pushpit while navigating through a maze of markers using only his iPhone. He knows we’re pushing the boat and its runnerless carbon rig to a redline. This boat is his baby, and he knows better than anyone what will trigger a tantrum.

“Careful,” I hear him say to me. “You’re on the edge.”

Huh? On the edge?

I ponder that for a split second, afraid to ask what he means. Does my steering suck?

We’ve turned off the cockpit displays to save power, so I have no idea how fast we’re going or what direction the apparent wind is coming from, but it doesn’t matter. I’m sailing the 27-footer by feel, and I’m chuffed that I actually feel fully in control. The leeward rudder has a firm grip, and the boat, as the saying goes, feels as if it’s on rails. Tugging on the tiller keeps everything in balance.

“What do you mean by on the edge?” I ask him, without breaking my concentration on the bow.

“When there’s that much water coming across the deck, you’re on the edge,” he responds calmly. I hear what he’s saying, but I sure don’t feel as if I’m on the edge of anything, which is crazy because I’ve never driven a sportboat at such speed into the night—never mind with only two people and no one with a hand on the spinnaker sheet. If being on the edge means driving drunk on adrenaline and reckless confidence, well, bartender, give me another.

The finish line ahead of us is that of the 112th edition of Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac, which is a big deal to the sailors of this giant freshwater playground. It’s the annual gem of the Great Lakes yachting calendar, a race that any Windy City sailor worth their weight in rum commits to every year—birth of a child or family ­wedding be damned.

The storied northbound race is not an easy test of skill and seamanship by any stretch, and that’s its appeal. There’s no one winning strategy (do you favor Wisconsin or Michigan this year?) and big weather comes fast and hard. Sometimes boats break or capsize, and the race is not without its fatalities. Its two- to three-day duration is just long enough to get knackered and feel as though you’ve accomplished something cool and a little bit dangerous, but it’s not too long as to leave you bored, sitting on the rail for days on end wishing you had a platter of piping hot chicken wings. There are quick ones and slow ones, and when it does come to a crawl, out come veracious lake flies, those nibbling nuances for which there is no known defense. They are the scourge of the race.

The fleet of this 2021 edition is smaller than some years past, but there are thousands of sailors itching to earn a new brag flag. This year’s scratch sheet runs the gamut, from an 86-footer to the grand-prix Great Lakes 52s, the ubiquitous Tartan 10s, and the two smallest boats of all: the Beneteau First 27SEs (Seascape Edition). I’m on one of them, racing in the doublehanded division against two 29-foot J/88s.

When I accepted an out-of-the-blue ­invitation to do the race with Mihelin, I did so without actually contemplating how small a 27-feet boat is relative to Lake Michigan. I also did not contemplate one important aspect of racing with only one other soul: Should one of us go overboard while the other is down below having a nap, the chance of survival is greatly reduced, especially when the water is cold. And this, I now understand, is why race organizers enforce the most comprehensive safety requirements of any race I’ve ever sailed. The must-have equipment for every boat is pages long, and every crewmember on every boat must be schooled in safety at sea.

Before the race, I had no safety qualifications, and I also neglected to disclose to Mihelin that I’d never once sailed a double­handed offshore distance race, nor doublehanded at night. I owned no safety equipment, except my PFD, and had not a single minute of safety training—online or in-person. Only after I complete my online classes do I realize how much I didn’t know, and while I should’ve been more at ease with my safety book smarts, the opposite happened: I got spooked with the thought of racing such a small and unknown craft on such a notorious stretch of water. With zero experience. With an unknown mate.

The mandatory equipment does get expensive, but I now own a top-shelf Mustang inflatable PFD and tether, an Ocean Signal AIS/DSC man-overboard ­beacon, an ACR personal EPIRB, a high-­quality headlamp, and a one-handed blunt-tip safety knife. Plus, I have a sample set of North Sails’ new top-shelf Gore-Tex foul-weather gear to keep me warm and dry. Having all the right gear, as the ­seminars preach, is half the battle.

Properly kitted, I feel more at ease when I arrive at the boat and assess its sea­worthiness for the first time. It could fit on the foredeck of Natalie J, the 52-footer next door. It’s definitely a sportboat built for two.

There are two other First 27SEs at the dock at Chicago’s Columbia YC. There’s a new one straight off a ship from the Seascape factory in Slovenia (which was supposed to be ours), one belonging to an owner from Texas who is relocating to the Great Lakes (we’re borrowing his), and the third is owned by local Mike Tuman, who prefers to solo his boat but is doing the race with Tit Plevnik from the Seascape team.

Mihelin is standing astride our little white boat, holding court. He’s only just arrived in Chicago, having conquered the US COVID‑19 foreign-entry maze. This is not Mihelin’s first Mac Race, though. In 2016, he won the doublehanded division with British solo sailor Phil Sharp and then raced with a crew of four in 2018. Both races were on the Seascape 27, as the First 27SE was called back in the days, an award-winning design from the boatbuilding company Mihelin founded in Slovenia with fellow sailor Kristian Hajnšek. Both gentlemen are disciples of Mini-class racing, having completed two Mini-Transat campaigns (from France to Brazil in crazy-fast 21-footers).

I will soon come to understand that Mihelin’s experiences from those ­intoxicating days of Mini racing define his character as well as his company. He preaches the tightknit community of Mini, the performance of Mini, and how Mini takes you light-years outside your comfort zone and then brings you back to a better place.

Such is the ethos of Seascape, which started in 2008 with a Mini-styled 18-footer and has grown to include a 24-, a 27- and a 14-footer. Along the way, and now several hundred boats later, Mihelin and his young and industrious employees have nurtured a devout clan of sailors in Europe, especially around the Adriatic and Baltic, where coastal racing in Seascapes is what the cool kids do. They’re also now kings of the Silver Rudder, which Mihelin explains to be the largest singlehanded distance race in the world, where as many as 450 sailors race 140 miles around the second-largest Danish island.

The Beneteau Group, I’m told, was impressed with the quality and ingenuity of Seascape’s Sam Manuard-designed boats and the whole Seascape schtick. The company came knocking a few years ago, keen to buy the brand, integrate it, and get back into the rank-and-file ­performance-sailing game with a new spin on its “First” lineage. Having finally figured out how to integrate the two companies, there is a long-term joint venture with Seascape overseeing Beneteau’s First and First Seascape Edition, including a weapon of a 36-footer that will debut by end of the year. Developing the new boat and the company behind it has all but consumed Mihelin, and when we finally meet in person, he confesses he hasn’t raced much lately—at least not at the level he used to. He admits to feeling unprepared, and he acknowledges we might not be competitive.

“I’m here for the adventure,” he says with a smile as we board the boat in unison. “I’m here to get outside my comfort zone, again. I need to do it. I miss it.”

Two days before our doublehanded ­division start, we dive right into our worklist, stripping the boat of clutter and sorting our safety gear before the inspector comes knocking. We pass, except for one thing: our safety-gear location map. The inspector asks where it is, and Mihelin points to a single hanging bag to starboard where all the gear is stowed. “It’s a small boat,” he says. “It’s all in here. Do we really need a map?”

Once cleared and done with the day’s boatwork, we cast lines and head out past the breakwater for our first sail together, hoisting the entire upwind inventory of new North Sails 3Di Raw to make sure it all fits. We have a full-battened main, an all-­purpose jib, a Code Zero and a bright-orange storm sail, which will double as a genoa staysail. We toss up the masthead spinnaker for good measure and leave the fractional below—that one will never see the light of day.

The exercise feels a bit rushed and ­chaotic, but it’s our only chance to feel each other out. My main concern is deciphering which ropes do what, but I discover the boat is nothing but simple and logical. Our only headsail is on a furler, so there will be no middle-of-the-night changes. The jib leads go up and down and in and out, and the asymmetric connects at the usual three places. Halyards and sail controls are all led to clutches on the coach roof—nothing fancy.

On the morning of the start, we meet early in a hotel room, connected on a laptop with a professional weather router in Europe who’s been crunching the models. For days, we have been glued to the Windy app on our phones, trying to predict the behavior of a high-pressure bubble that will be wobbling over the lake for the entire race. There will be a gradient. There will be sea breezes filling and land breezes draining. There will be upwind work to start, drifting in the middle, and a fresh VMG spinnaker run to the finish. There will be a little bit of everything our forecaster assures us as he shows limited routing options concentrated on the rhumbline. He warns us several times to be careful about getting too close to the shore at the wrong time of day. If we get stuck, we’ll be there for a while.

And with that advice in hand, we schlep our gear and a single food bag to the boat and take one last sweep through to ensure all is ready. We call our families and say our goodbyes before slipping lines and heading out for our 11 a.m. check-in. Without much time to waste, we loiter near the race-­committee boat and devise our strategy. The line is absurdly long for only four boats, so we agree to keep clear of the committee-boat magnets. The plan is to go east early, so we port-tack the start, harden up, and settle into a breezy and lumpy upwind groove.

Mihelin’s plan is to tack sometime after sunset, once we get our nose into the anticipated overnight shift. Everyone’s going the same way, and eventually we’re in among the Tartan 10s, lined with crews on the rail twiddling thumbs.

We skip dinner, but the family-size bag of GORP trail mix between my legs is all the gourmet I need. We trade places on the helm for pee breaks and backstretches, talking nonstop about family and work and our next challenge in life—deep stuff, right off the bat. We barely know each other, but we’re gabbing like a couple of frat brothers reunited after 20 years.

Once darkness comes, Mihelin insists we go straight into a two-hour watch system. He takes the first, and I settle in, my hand reaching into the feed bag and me choking down lukewarm sweetened Starbucks Via. I enjoy the silence, alone with my own thoughts of the days ahead and simply concentrating on keeping the boat tracking fast on course as the wind slowly veers and dies.

I wake Mihelin on schedule, and he steps on deck and jumps right into steering as if he’s been awake for an hour.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I say as I step below, strip out of my foul-weather gear, and collapse into the beanbag to leeward. With water sluicing past the hull inches from my ear, I plummet into the deepest sleep until I feel a tap on my leg, burst open my eyes, and only see a dark shadow through the companionway.

Who is this? Where the hell am I?

I quickly realize it’s my watch. I slip my bibs back on and step into the cockpit, where Mihelin shows me our position on the small chart plotter on a swivel arm from inside the boat. We’re just off Little Sable Point, a few miles east of rhumbline and still following the master plan—all is right.

He disappears below, leaving me to stare in wonder at the stillness of the night, a low moon veiled by smoke from faraway fires in Canada. There is barely 5 knots of wind, and with the boat sitting upright on its lines, it’s impossible to get any feel from the rudders. I sense my driving is erratic, so I try to find a place to sit comfortably and not oversteer. Finally, I slide down to the cockpit floor and rest my hand on the tip of the tiller. From here, I can see the dimly lit displays and ­listen to the gurgle of the transom.

A few hours later, as we swap watches again, the breeze continues to drop. As I wrestle my jacket into a makeshift pillow, all I can hear is a faint trickle of water passing by, lulling me into a deep sleep again until I’m awoken by stomping on the foredeck. I hear a sail bag drag across the deck, and I wonder whether I should get up and help. But he already has autopilot assist. It’s his watch; he knows what he’s doing. If needs me, he’ll wake me, I think to myself before nodding off again.

Soon after, I get a tap on my leg again, and then rise through the companionway to admire the golden and placid morning light. We’re barely moving. The foredeck action, I now see, was Mihelin hoisting every upwind sail we have. A triple-headed setup fills the foretriangle, but the genoa staysail is gently flapping in the slot, so that ­eventually comes down. The Code Zero is not doing much, except adding a bunch of drag, so that is scuttled too. We’re back to jib only.

As the day drags on, we crawl along under beautiful blue skies. The flies appear at lunchtime with an appetite of their own. Nemo—our friends on the other Seascape—is west of rhumbline and behind by a good 6 miles or so according to the tracker. Exile, the lead J/88, is sneaking away, and the other is somewhere directly behind us.

While we scarf down prosciutto and warm cheese on torpedo buns, the wind frees enough for us to hedge toward the coastline for what we hope will be a few hours of sea-breeze boost, so we hoist and unfurl the Zero again, crack sheets, and enjoy our quickened pace. It’s a glory day of sailing, and for our first and only sunset dinner on board, Mihelin lights the new Jetboil we’re required to have. Within minutes, we’re slurping warm and salty soup while the autopilot steers us true.

After dinner, Mihelin excuses himself for a quick nap as we creep ever closer to the coast. At dusk, I have my eyes on a large expanse of slick water ahead near the shore. My gut tells me we better tack sooner than later, but it’s not a decision for me to make, so I wake Mihelin, who joins me on deck to witness boats ahead drifting listlessly back toward the middle of the lake into nothingness.

Soon, we’re drifting ourselves. A single knot of boatspeed is all we can muster. I see a sliver of a wind line ahead, and suggest we chase it and hope for the best. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we got one little zephyr to get out of here,” I say.

As if on command, a ribbon of breeze appears a few hundred yards ahead, so we carry on for another 20 minutes or so, enjoying our new speed and the heading breeze. Once we feel we’ve gotten the most out of it, we tack, running away from the shoreline at 4 knots. Behind us, the wind disappears. We laugh at our luck with the zephyr.

Once clear of Big Point Sable, Mihelin is confident in our course and returns below to finish his off watch, leaving me to the darkness again, in a surreal world of oily smooth water, abundant stars, and the hiss of water streaming from the transom. I feel as though I’m sailing across black ice, a magical experience that has me awestruck. I imagine myself a soloist in a Mini, letting the autopilot drive and soaking in every ­element of this unique moment.

Energized by my new surroundings, I’m tempted to carry on through the watch rotation, but I follow the code and eventually wake Mihelin, tapping his leg and delivering bad news: We’ve had a good pace over the past few hours, but we’re back to drifting.

The sun is soon up, hot and heavy, and the lake is a millpond again. Spinnakers hang limp on boats nearby. No one is moving, and ahead are Point Betsie and the Manitou Islands. As advised, we’ve kept our distance from Betsie, but not enough. To our west, Nemo is cruising past us at 5 knots to our 1, and over the next few hours, the tracker updates are depressing.

Our only hope is to chase what we think is a wind line to the northwest, so we abandon the rhumbline and crawl toward a faraway dark patch. Ripples finally appear in the late afternoon, and we set the masthead spinnaker for the first time. This is our moonshot. We know others are stuck near the coast, and out here in the middle there is no one with us. It’s possible we have sailed ourselves into oblivion. On the tracker, we’re last in our division by a good 6 miles.

We accept that there is no way in hell we’re going to win this race, but with the fresh new wind, a lazy following sea, and the finish line around the corner, the vibe subconsciously shifts. While we sail downwind, Mihelin tutors me on Slovenian culture, the young country’s history, and its competitive, adventurous and outdoorsy people. We share TED Talks nuggets and memorable sailing moments, and without even realizing it, we’re working the boat a lot harder, like two young sailors gleefully playing in the waves.

At one point, I enjoy a 9-knot surf and explode with delirious excitement.

“Beat that!” I challenge Mihelin, handing him the tiller extension.

He does, with a 10.2, and like a couple of dorks, we slap a high-five.

After a few more miles of this, we glide past Beaver Island as the sun sets and the southerly stirs tumbling whitecaps. Our sails are now fully loaded, and the boat gallops along at pace toward Grays Reef Lighthouse. Mihelin checks the tracker and reports we’ve actually closed on Nemo, shaving off a few miles. Maybe we have a shot at not being last.

So, we work the boat and sails a little harder, nail our first jibe of the entire race, and then start our exhilarating navigational slalom through the darkness, soaring out of my comfort zone and blissfully planing toward the lights of the Mackinac Bridge.

When we do finally pass under the metal-grated roadbed above, Mihelin rushes to snap a few blurry photos like a tourist refusing to pull over at the vista, and then two more smooth jibes later, we cross the finish line with a spotlight beam illuminating our port side. We’ve cut a 6-mile deficit to a mile or so, and hours down to merely 25 minutes to Nemo.

Mihelin reaches out to shake hands, but I’m too stunned to react. I’m not ready to stop. I can hear the raucous celebrations of cockpit rum squalls and the afterhours of the Pink Pony’s last call, but I’m feeling my inner Bernard Moitessier. It could be the adrenaline still coursing but, honestly, I just want Mihelin to put the spinnaker back up so we can keep on ripping into the ebony.

The post Mates of the Mac appeared first on Sailing World.

“Our win is completely due to the team we had,” says Jack McGuire, a 37-year-old yacht broker from Annapolis, Maryland, who raced with a band of brothers and childhood friends to win the coveted Everett B. Morris Trophy. “The camaraderie was unmatched.”

Trimming main and calling tactics was John Mollicone, McGuire’s coach while growing up at Rhode Island’s East Greenwich YC. His brother Josh and his brother-in-law, John von Schwarz, were the boat’s spinnaker and jib trimmers. Three longtime friends, Dave Jurkowski, Nick St. Jean and Doug Nisbet, manned the pit, mast and bow, respectively. His brother Todd helped deliver the boat and prepare it for racing.

“It was definitely a family affair both on and off the water, but Block Island Race Week always has been,” McGuire says. “I actually met my wife, Elizabeth, there eight years ago when she was handing out awards because her parents were volunteers with Storm Trysail Club. This year, we all stayed together in a house on the island with our wives and kids, who were the best shore crew a team could have. The week started off with seven kids under 7, and at one point during the week we had 10 kids out there. It was just so nice to sail hard during the day and then decompress as a team with family at the end of the day. Our house was spectacular, walking distance from downtown, so we all took turns watching each other’s kids as we went out to visit some of the local establishments. It was really nice to get out into the world again.”

Block Island Race Week served as the return of Dirty Harry after 20 months of being mothballed due to the pandemic. It sat under shrink-wrap on the hard before McGuire brought the boat to Peter Ross’ speed shop in Bristol, Rhode Island, which had completed a refit a few years earlier. As a result, the team was able to do a few events before Block Island to dust off the cobwebs. “It was amazing to be back on the water with friends and family.”

Dirty Harry’s return to glory adds another chapter to the boat’s long and storied history on Narragansett Bay. Its previous owner, John Lavin, was a legend of the local racing scene. “Growing up at East Greenwich, I always saw Dirty Harry on the mooring and knew it to be a cool race boat,” McGuire says. “Eventually, I met John and started sailing with him in my early 20s, even doing two Block Islands on the boat. He sadly passed away in 2012, and his wife, Judy, asked me to sail the boat that summer.”

When McGuire later bought the boat from Lavin’s widow, it needed some serious upgrading, and Ross took him under his wing. “He let me set up shop in his building in Bristol to help me make the necessary upgrades. By this time, I had moved to Annapolis with my wife. So, what started as a six-month project turned into a 20-month project. The boat is still a stock J/29, just everything has been updated from the 1980s. We redid the bottom, replaced anything that had a load on it, like tracks and winches, and got new sails, which is what really sets us apart. They’re designed and built by John Fries out of Connecticut—Fries Sail Design. He just knows the J/29, and our suite of sails is perfect for the boat.”

The 2021 edition of Block Island Race Week had 157 boats, including many top-tier professional programs from around the Northeast, and the caliber of the fleet was not lost on McGuire and his team, especially this year. “There is no better competition on the East Coast than Block Island Race Week,” he says. “Just watching everyone out there was amazing because clearly everyone was bringing it after a year of little to no sailing. All the divisions were competitive and deep with talent. We were in PHRF 3, which had 12 boats lining up against boats with so much experience. The Storck family in their J/80 Rumor was pushing us on the starting line every time, and Steve Thurston with his J/29 Mighty Puffin never let up as well. Everyone was just pushing hard the entire time.”

What set his team apart from the competition, he says, were the little things on the racecourse that eventually added up to bigger margins. “It was all about getting out and finding the lane to put the throttle down, followed by our clean mark roundings. When you can hold that spinnaker until the last second before the leeward mark or execute a perfect jibe set, you just extend every time.”

But that didn’t come naturally. With coach Mollicone on board, the team went out for two hours the day before race week and ran a windward/leeward session, focusing especially on mark roundings. Mollicone was even timing Nisbet on the bow so he knew how much time they had to pull off the maneuvers.

Practice paid off, of course, and when they were called to the stage to accept their Boat of the Week award, McGuire was elated. “Four years previous, we had just finished the boat and launched a month before, so we were just happy to be bringing Dirty Harry back to Block in honor of John Lavin. I think we finished fourth. Then, in 2019, we really went for it. I had six of the seven crew that we had this year, and we were so close to the top and just lost out to Interlodge, which is an amazing race program, so we couldn’t be too disappointed.”

This year, however, everything clicked, he says. “We won every race except the around-the-island, and we only lost that one by seven seconds after 18 miles and with a symmetric spinnaker against so many asymmetric kites. Winning overall was our goal, and we achieved it, which is just pure satisfaction. There were many who said a J/29 could never win top boat, so seeing my name on the list of other winners of Block Island Race Week is so rewarding. Anytime your name and Ted Hood’s are on a trophy together, it blows your mind. I wouldn’t have changed that week for anything, and to then share that stage with family and close friends is just the icing on the cake.”

The post Block Island Race Week’s Best Boat appeared first on Sailing World.

Close your eyes and imagine a 2,200-mile ocean race where you start out going upwind in light air. Not very exciting—yet. But within a few hours, you transition to a few hundred miles of brisk and sometimes rough close reaching across a chilly ocean under gray skies. Not fun—yet. Then, over the course of half a day, you go through the boat’s entire reaching sail arsenal until the wind is aft and you are surfing downwind in 18-knot trade winds for days. Now it’s getting good.

But wait—it gets better.

The wind builds into the mid-20s, and the swells stack up neatly. You’re shredding toward the finish as a full moon reveals dramatic volcanic peaks of an island chain, which is your final destination. You open your eyes to behold the iconic shape of Diamond Head crater on Oahu that marks the end of the race. That’s your Transpacific Yacht Race, the best point-to-point sailing adventure on the planet.

My first Transpac was 30 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I was just out of college and into an Olympic Soling campaign when I accepted Dave Ullman’s invitation to navigate a West Coast “sled.” This particular Santa Cruz 50 was one of seven Santa Cruz-built and Bill Lee-designed ULDBs entered that year. Thirty miles from the finish, we were side by side with a sistership, surfing huge swells in 25 knots while vying to be first to finish in our unofficial subclass of Santa Cruz 50s.

With a full moon providing just enough illumination to see dolphins playing off each side of our bow, and the Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam” cranking through the on-deck speakers, we slid forward wave by wave in 20-knot bursts to a two-minute margin at Diamond Head. Our elapsed time in that windy year was nine days and 15 hours, a respectable run considering the reigning record holder (the 67-foot ULDB Merlin) narrowly missed the course record by a minute with an eight-day, 11-hour passage.

Fast-forward to 2021. I’ve done my fair share of Transpacs, and even navigated a record-setter (Hasso Plattner’s 86-footer Morning Glory at six days and 16 hours), but I still got that tingle of excitement when Robbie Haines and Roy Pat Disney invited me to navigate Disney’s turbocharged Volvo 70, Pyewacket 70 (­ex‑Telefonica and Black Jack), in this year’s race. (Pyewacket is the name of a magical cat in a 1950s movie that was a favorite of Disney’s late father.) The Pyewacket 70 team is the preeminent West Coast ­offshore racing program, and it’s an honor to get the chance to wear the logo of the cat. The entire Pyewacket season in a Transpac year focuses on the July race, and we got off to a great start in March by setting the record in the Newport to Cabo San Lucas Yacht Race, which gave those of us who had not been around the planet lately a taste of what a turbocharged Volvo 70 was like on a VMG run in 20-plus-knot winds. Let me tell you, it’s fast, averaging over 20 knots, and very wet because the bow incessantly throws huge shards of spray over the deck as it catches up to the wave ahead.

After Cabo, a lot of preparation focused on getting the bow up (weight aft) and sealing all the little leaks that don’t seem little when there’s inches of water constantly running over the deck and into the cockpit. As the race date approached, it became clear that the coveted Barn Door Trophy for the first elapsed time was ours for the taking. The 100-footer Rio had withdrawn, so we had the fastest rating of the fleet—by a lot. Our closest rival was the Maxi 72 Lucky (ex-Bella Mente).

To get the fleet to finish in close proximity, the slowest boats started three days before the race’s big hardware, and a ­middle-speed fleet started the day before us. Unfortunately for them, an eddy spinning off Point Conception made for a painfully slow exit from the coast. The situation had normalized by the time we started, so we had an easier time getting to the synoptic northwesterly, which took us only a few hours to reach. As our meteorologist, Chris Bedford, noted on the morning of the start, race conditions looked to be “typical.” Transpac organizers handicap the fleet based on an average matrix of wind angles and wind speeds, and the models were looking just like the matrix. However, as Disney’s father used to say, “The devil is in the details.”

As we close-reached away from the City of Angels with an easygoing 15-knot breeze, the challenge was to shift gears in frequent lulls and puffs. This sort of unstable and shifty situation continued for almost two days, until we finally made it through the ridge and got our VMG gear ready to deploy. No one ever remembers the first, cold-reaching part of the race. Surfing downwind in the trades is what makes the price of admission a real steal.

Pyewacket 70 had its ­grinding pedestals replaced in favor of a super-powerful hydraulic ­system a few years ago when it raced Down Under as Black Jack. Push-button sailing makes a Volvo 70 a much different ride, with halyards and sheets adjustable by fingertip. It’s easy on the body, but it requires the engine to run during all major adjustments. The engine, therefore, runs nearly 24/7 when the wind is unstable, as it was during the reach, revving with every button push.

Inside the carbon-fiber drum of a hull, it’s incredibly loud, requiring ear protection to sleep or navigate. The mainsheet winch can operate under battery power, and when you are running VMG on Pyewacket 70, that’s the only sail that needs constant trimming. Pyewacket 70 sails downwind in 18 to 20 knots with a triple-head rig. Our big A3 gets the first look at the apparent wind. It’s set off the tip of the bowsprit, but it’s not like any other downwind sail used by the Transpac fleet. Pyewacket 70 is so fast that the apparent wind is always well ahead of the beam, so our downwind inventory looks more like a fast ­multihull’s quiver. The A3 looks and trims like a jib, and inside of it, the J4 (our heavy-air upwind jib) and a small staysail add area and deflect the flow around the mainsail.

With this setup, steering the boat downwind is really a game of apparent-wind management. All those big takeoff ramps provided by ocean swells look tempting to turn down into and go for a big surf, but this boat wants to keep the wind flowing across the sails. As a result, all three front sails are normally cleated, except when adjusting to a windspeed (apparent wind) change.

Unlike every other boat I’ve sailed to Hawaii, where a trimmer and grinder play the curl of the spinnaker, on Pyewacket 70, the helmsman just keeps it ripping, and the main trimmer provides the balance and the pumps when appropriate.

The main trimmer has a wireless remote control close at hand to do all the grinding. So, for a boat with a six-person on watch, only two sailors are actively sailing the boat downwind, and the rest stand around behind the wheel, keeping their weight aft (since the weather rail is stacked high with all sails, as permitted by the race rules). From the back of the boat, you have to stand on your toes to see the horizon over the stack. Sitting down on the cockpit floor is OK in some conditions, but if it’s windy enough, the deck is so awash, it’s like sitting in a bubbling stream—even on the high side.

All this standing around comes to an end when it’s time to jibe. Everyone but the helmsman and main trimmer turns into a glorified moving-van crew, lugging the extremely heavy sail package (even our medium air jib weighs more than 200 pounds) from the windward side to the leeward (soon-to-be windward) side. One by one, the sails are moved with the help of gravity. By the end of the race, we had the system refined and could be ready to jibe in 12 minutes.

A couple of days out from the finish, it looked as if the right corner (looking downwind) was the way to go, which gave us an opportunity to go for Transpac’s coveted 24-hour record, which had been set by the 100-foot supermaxi Comanche, navigated by longtime Pyewacket navigator Stan Honey (my ­college roommate).

We discussed the pros and cons of committing to the record attempt within a race. It looked as if it would not affect our corrected-time position much, if at all, but it would mean that we would have to close our eyes when sailing through squalls and big lifts. Luckily, the wind stayed on forecast for the most part, and we had an epic port jibe for about 27 hours. It was long enough to shred Comanche’s 482-mile record by 23 miles. In a 24-hour period, we averaged 21 knots in 20- to 22-knot winds. All 13 of the crew made sure they had a bit of skin in the game by driving for at least one fun session.

We pushed the record run as far as we could until we were in danger of not laying the east end of Molokai when we jibed, and then went back to work shuffling sails. Once on starboard, we decided it was “two and in” to Diamond Head, so we watched Pyewacket regular Capt. Gary Weisman revive a tradition that the Pyewacket 70 crew celebrates on Disney’s much-tamer 68-foot sled, also named Pyewacket. A couple of bottles of nice red wine appeared on deck behind the helm, and soon we were all enjoying a toast together. It didn’t matter that the wine had a hint of sea-salt spray in the nose. It did the trick.

Of course, none of us will remember the first part—just our final sprint with the full moon illuminating Oahu as we ripped into the finish in the biggest puffs of the race, a bit overstood on the layline (blame the wine, not the navigator). We saw 29 knots for a couple of seconds in Molokai Channel, which was also our top speed for the race. The workhorse A3 in its triple-head configuration with one reef in the mainsail saw us into the finish line with an elapsed time of five days, 16 hours and 53 minutes.

Because we finished at night, Disney was kind enough to accede to photographer Sharon Green’s request to take the boat out and do it again in daylight. So, two days later, after a bit of a rest, the Pyewacket team headed upwind into the Molokai Channel with a double reef and a number-four jib to set up for another victory lap past Diamond Head. This time we had a helicopter ready to get the money shot. When we finally turned and burned, we all remembered why we love this race so much. Downwind is the delight.

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If Alex Caizergues succeeds at breaking the speed sailing world record in 2022, it will be his third time around using a kite, but otherwise completely different from his first two records. Those marks—50.57 knots in 2008 and 54.10 in 2010—were set when foiling boards were continually upping the 500-meter mark, sometimes more than once a year. Caizergues’ 2010 run added 3 knots to what the famed trimaran L’Hydroptere had shown us only a year before. But all those efforts ran into cavitation trouble at about 52 knots, that point when flow over the foils boils into vapor—the point at which control vanishes. For his early records, Caizergues used a hydrofoil to lift him above the water. Now, with his Syroco team based in Marseille, France, he intends to use a hydrofoil to hold him down.

We’ll come back to that.

Nine years after Paul Larsen’s record run at 65.45 knots in Sailrocket, the French Syroco team has rivals in Switzerland following what they believe is a more conservative path. The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is a public research facility where the speed quest caught fire with student engineers and professors, including some who helped develop L’Hydroptere back in the day. SP80 is the team name, taken from the goal of achieving 80 knots, a goal shared with Syroco. They have a kissing-cousin relationship, competition aside.

SP80 envisions hitting 80 knots with a kite pulling a surface-skimming trimaran. A subsurface superventilating foil counters the lift of the kite, and a mechanical interface aligns the forces. Syroco’s purified vision aims to put a kite in the air connected by wires to a pod also in the air carrying two “pilots.” That pod will have a single, tiny-as-possible connection to a supercavitating subsurface foil holding it down. The concept strips the speed problem to its barest fundamentals, exponentially raising the complexity of execution.

Neither concept would pass as a boat in Blue Blazerville. Both owe their origins to Bernard Smith’s book, The 40-Knot Sailboat, published in 1963. Smith proposed a balance of opposing forces to avoid the ultimate instability that eventually and inevitably develops as power is added, and any ordinary craft will capsize. Sailrocket showed the way and validated the theory—using a canted wing, countered by a superventilating foil in the water. On November 24, 2012, with sponsorship money down to nickels and the weather window closing, Larsen clocked his 65.45-knot run at Walvis Bay, Namibia. These days, Larsen says he appreciates the respect shown by the principals of SP80 and Syroco when they call themselves “children of Sailrocket.” But when we keep this Australian-born Briton talking, we get to the part where he’s saying how the machine was packed away in a container in Namibia after just a few days of finally showing its potential, and there’s still gas in the tank and…

There’s nothing shaking right now, but don’t dismiss the current record holder, 49 years after the catamaran Crossbow set the first official 500-meter record at 26.30 knots. For bonus points, do you know how 500 meters became a standard record distance?

The simple answer: In 1972, when Crossbow was first contending at Weymouth, UK, that length fit the venue. If someone manages 80 knots in 2022, they will cover 500 meters in 12.15 seconds, a football field every 2.5 seconds.

Later, while we’re ­talking records, we’ll update the renovation of L’Hydroptere. First, let’s get up to speed on the essential terms. Supercavitation refers to a regime in which a small, highly loaded, wedge-shaped (­triangular profile) foil builds a stable vapor pocket that bypasses the limits of ­cavitation. Superventilation refers to the principle employed by Sailrocket, with a foil that encouraged ambient air pressure to travel down the entire length and span of the foil.

The SP80 team puts it this way: “A triangular profile allows air from the atmosphere to dive into the extrados side caught by the depression, forming a stable air bubble that will prevent ­cavitation inception.”

Got it? Hey, they’re engineers.

Caizergues is aiming for more than a speed record with his Syroco concept. He knows from experience that when you succeed, you’re done and, “It’s an empty feeling.” This time, he’s ambitiously building a scientific and technical company around Syroco with the aim of reducing carbon emissions in the transportation and energy sectors. Co-founder Olivier Taillard, a Mini-Transat veteran, relates: “We founded the company in 2019 and built a team of 20. That includes three Ph.D.s in physics. To date, we have created 12 innovations, with three in the market. One is a software tool now in use to maximize ­efficiency in shipping routes.”

Other developments are aimed at keeping that critical hydrofoil just barely under the surface of the water, doing its supercavitating thing. Under the rules of the World Sailing Speed Record Council, only ­mechanical systems are allowed. It can’t be computerized or fly-by-wire. To a pointed question about systems, Caizergues responds with a laugh and a cagey hint: “Because of the wire, we’ll have air coming down from the surface, so it’s going to be about managing ventilation along with employing the principles of supercavitation. Not a lot of work has been done in this area, so we’re leading the way.” Prototype testing began in summer 2021, with plans to go for the record in 2022. Alongside more sober developments aimed directly at the marketplace, the team calls this one “the moonshot.”

When these people talk to each other, they toss around stuff like “turbulent viscosity formula in the Standard K-Epsilon model.” It’s not “let it out till it luffs, then pull it in.” SP80 co-founder Mayeul van den Broek observes: “Like Sailrocket, both of the current record efforts are based on the concept of aligning opposed forces, but then you prioritize either efficiency, power or stability. Syroco chose ­efficiency as a top priority. We chose stability, which is why we are producing such a different realization of the same concept.”

The SP80 principals witnessed L’Hydroptere’s stunning record run in 2009 and never quite got over it. Then, during a university competition to design the most efficient radio-controlled boat, they developed a hankering to try a superventilating foil on a kiteboard. When Benoit Gaudiot easily hit 41 knots, van den Broek says: “We saw that the rider was the weak link, and if we wanted to go faster, we would need a rigid link between the kite and the foil. Then, well, we might as well go for the record. We will use inflatable kites, even though a wing might be more efficient, because new-­generation kites will serve at 80 knots. We can be versatile, launching kites from 20 to 50 square meters for different conditions.”

Their superventilating foils, Gaudiot says, “will have water flowing on one side and air on the other. Sailrocket used similar superventilating foils. That is less efficient than a supercavitating foil generating vapor, but it’s a lot more stable. A superventilating foil at low speed will develop more drag than a conventional foil. At high speed, it has no limits.”

SP80′s link between airfoil and hydrofoil depends upon a module that is, “mechanical but automatic,” according to van den Broek. “It will be close to the controls of a conventional kite.” Gaudiot adds, “Having one line carry all the power allows you to know exactly where that power will be coming from, and you can advance it into the window ahead for best ­performance, like any kite.”

In theory, there is no ­heeling and no capsizing because the power of the kite is countered by the force of the foil. As with Syroco, 2022 is the target record date.

Last year, we wrote in these pages about an ambitious plan to rehab the 60-foot ­foiling trimaran L’Hydroptere and put the old girl to work as a point-to-point record hunter. Gabriel Terrasse and Chris Welsh partnered to buy the legendary campaigner, once left derelict in Hawaii. They patched it up and had it sailed to San Francisco, where it was taken apart with an intent to rebuild it better than ever. Work was well along when Welsh—who would have carried on with or without sponsorship—died suddenly, and all bets were off, save for Terrasse’s persistence.

“We’re looking for ­sponsors,” Terrasse says, “and we have engineers studying how to add ground effect to L’Hydroptere 2.0 along with new foils, a longer and lighter main hull, a wingsail, global aerodynamic optimization and much more. It was hard to lose Chris. We shared the dream. But L’Hydroptere has great potential to serve science and catalyze innovation.”

L’Hydroptere’s 51.36-knot run in 2009 represented a last shot at setting speed records on water through pure muscle. Paul Larsen’s nine-year quest to solve the problem at a technical level culminated in that 65.45-knot run in 2012. Today the beast is still in a dark container in Namibia where Larsen packed it away. And yes, considering that Sailrocket had only a handful of runs in what turned out to be record-setting mode—fat foils, not thin foils, and according to the team’s VPP, 65 knots was a worst-case outcome; everything was structured to go 80 knots—it’s tempting to imagine putting Sailrocket 2 back on the track. What would change is the safety regime. It’s not hard to find videos online of early-­version Sailrocket 1 going aerial.

“In any future scenario, I’d want a roll cage and oxygen,” Larsen says, “and maybe I’m at a point where I’d be happy to see someone else sitting there.”

“Tell Paul he’s getting soft,” was the joking comeback from Richard Jenkins when I mentioned that to him. Jenkins holds the land-speed sailing record at 126.2 knots, which took him “only” 10 years of trying as his various iterations developed. As far as we know, no one is challenging that record today. Jenkins’ story speaks to the difficulty of these endeavors in any medium. He says: “I’m often asked if I would try to break the record again. If I had unlimited funding and built a new vehicle, based on my ­cumulative ­knowledge, it might take me five years or more, and then we’d probably see an increment of 1 or 2 percent. It takes being in the right place at the right time, with certified observers, which is hard to put together. You then have to be technically perfect, at the right moment, with virtually no testing because wind might come suddenly. It takes a great deal of time and experience—and then you shoot from the hip. I have better things to do.”

Running his company, Saildrone, for example, with which Jenkins does his own part to care for the planet by fielding autonomous surface vehicles for ocean research. Having built a kite-powered ­trimaran 20 years ago, Jenkins worries the Swiss are “barking up the wrong tree.” But technologies evolve, and 2022 bids to be a fascinating time. Of Syroco’s moonshot, Taillard says: “Half of our brain power is spent making it safe. If a foil breaks, or if it comes out of the water—which isn’t going to ­happen—all safety systems have to work perfectly.”

Caizergues, who will be in Syroco’s control pod with a co-pilot, adds: “One of the goals is to produce a craft that will be safe for me to drive. And to crash. Helmets, oxygen, padding, quick-release mechanisms for sure, and we’re not committed to air bags, but maybe.”

Syroco and SP80 intend to run in the south of France, where the Mistral roars down to the Med. It worked for L’Hydroptere, but these new efforts place ever more extreme demands upon managing the interface between air and water, which at sea level is 784 times the density of air. The world will be watching, and perhaps I speak for many when I say, “Gentlemen: May the alignments of force be with you.”

The post The Race to Break the Speed Record appeared first on Sailing World.

When Scott Harestad describes sailing MC Scows, his eyes light up with the expectation of a kid on Christmas morning. You can almost feel the exuberance. “The acceleration in the puffs is just amazing!” he says gesturing outward, his face slightly reddening with excitement and eyes widening like he’s suddenly been transported onto a wild reach on some distant lake. His speech quickens, and he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “And,” quickly catching a breath, “you’re constantly working the controls—cunningham, vang and mainsheet—to keep it there.” Then he’s suddenly on dry land again and just as quickly asks, “Have you sailed one?”

I have, so he pivots to Jen Edney, our photographer, who is standing nearby.

“How about you? Ever sail an MC?”

And before Edney has a chance to finish saying she hasn’t, he’s at work, trying to set up a time and place to make it happen.

Harestad is no fly-by-night MC Scow proselytizer. He’s earned his stripes through 40 years of participation and is on his fourth boat. From Spring Lake, Michigan, Harestad travels a lot, living by the adage “you go to their regatta and they’ll come to yours.” And as current class president, he’s eager to tick off the latest class success stories to anyone who will listen. Recently, he notes, they have five active sailmakers and a New Jersey fleet that’s blossomed from five boats to 30 in a year and a half. And now, at the class’s 50th Anniversary National Championship held at Clear Lake, Iowa, where there’s 119 boats, is a class record.

Anniversary regattas are nothing new in the one-design ­sailing landscape, but only a few draw such big fleets. When that happens, it’s not just a testament to longevity, but also a ­barometer of the class’s future. The MC has come a long way from its first national championship, held in early October 1971 in Shreveport, Louisiana. That event—won by hull No. 10—drew a dozen sailors, all with wide-eyed optimism about the future of this new Melges-designed scow. Andy Burdick is the president of Melges Performance Sailboats and holder of a Tom Brady-like record of 12 MC national titles. He says: “It wasn’t until the 1980s and ‘90s that production numbers started to get really big—over 100 MCs a year. Lately, it’s averaged around 50 a year.”

Still, that’s a number most classes can only envy.

Part of the MC’s success lies with the Melges traveling road show, where a trailer would be loaded up at the factory in Zenda, Wisconsin, and the driver would be given marching orders not to come back until the trailer was empty. It worked. There are now more than 2,800 MCs, with 662 of them holding class ­memberships—up from 574 in 2020.

As another indicator of the class’s well-being, if you want a new boat, the going wait is three months. And good used boats are rare as hens’ teeth. In fact, at the championship’s Saturday-night annual meeting, Harestad pushed the idea that everyone should buy new boats so the market would get an injection of affordable used boats. The demand is certainly there, and the boats hold their value, so why not? Dan Allen from Clear Lake, who has a new boat on order, sold his boat right after the regatta for just a few hundred dollars less than he bought it for six years ago.

Designed as a scaled-down, simplified version of the C Scow, the MC (the “M” is for Melges) is basic: a three-stayed rig and only five sail controls—mainsheet, traveler, cunningham, outhaul and vang. It’s easy to transport on a small trailer and simple to rig. It’s the least expensive of the Melges scows and, because it’s not sailed flat, is easier to hike on than most dinghies. Consequently, the class continues to draw a lot of master sailors. Witness the 2020 Masters National Championship, which drew 109 boats, also held at Clear Lake.

The class, however, is doing well at attracting racers from the opposite end of the age spectrum. “Some of the kids coming out of the junior program seem to feel that this is an old person’s boat,” says Dan Quiram from Pewaukee Lake, “but then they try a C Scow, which takes a lot of strength, and quickly realize this is a great boat for them.”

More than a half-dozen youth skippers are sprinkled into the 50th anniversary fleet.

Conceived as a singlehander, MC sailors regularly bring a crew aboard, especially when the wind is above 10 knots. In fact, unless you’re well over 200 pounds, you probably need to have a crew to be competitive when the wind’s up. The ideal total weight in a breeze is 210 to 380, which means it works well for a lot of husband-wife and parent-child teams.

The crew option has also been a great promotional tool. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve taken people with me on the MC who’ve never sailed before because all they really have to do is switch sides when we tack or jibe,” Burdick says. “They can get involved as much as they like with the sail controls and boards. I’ve seen a lot of people get into the sport just because they’ve gone for that ride.”

One case in point is Annie Samis, a 14-year-old junior sailor from Chicago, whose background includes Optis and Lasers. Never having sailed an MC, she was convinced to put her name on the 2021 Nationals crew list and was paired with Richard Blake, from the Hoover Sailing Club in Ohio. She got a chance to first sail with him in the practice race, but it didn’t take her long to get hooked.

“It’s so much fun!” she gushes with the enthusiasm of a high-school cheerleader. Samis and Blake already have plans to sail in a future Nationals as well as at the Hoover SC. As a bonus, her name was drawn in the raffle at the Saturday-night party that produced five winners of new sails, one from each of the class’s sailmakers—not a bad way to enter the class. The five sailmakers donated the sails, and raffle proceeds went to Clear Lake Youth Sailing.

Although the controls are basic, the MC is a bit like a saxophone—easy to play, but difficult to play really well. Excellence can sometimes take years. Maybe that’s why some of the best in the fleet are those who’ve been at it the longest—those in the masters, grand masters and mega masters groups. Almost 70 percent of the 2021 Nationals fleet were masters.

Quiram started racing MCs when he was 21, and at the time, he says, he thought to himself, “‘I hate those old masters bastards!’ Then I became a master, and I said, ‘I hate those old grand masters bastards!’ And now I’m an old grand master.”

There are also idiosyncrasies unique to scows. Former Finn sailor Andy Casy from Oklahoma says: “It’s challenging because you have a leeboard going out at one angle and the mast at another angle, and you have to get the right dynamics going to make it all work. You can have two boats in the same wind, and one will be 15 degrees higher than the other, just because that boat has ­everything working right.”

Matt Fisher points to the challenge of a blunt bow and big ­mainsail. “It can be a tough boat to sail downwind in a big breeze, as it’s easy to submarine the bow,” he says. “You have to go more by the lee than you’d think and really work to steer around the waves.”

Still, as Dan Wilson from Indianapolis points out, there’s a wide range of abilities at regattas. “No matter where you are,” he says, “you can find a group to race against at your level.”

The MC has one builder, Melges, which has been the case since the beginning, except for a period in the 1980s and ‘90s when Johnson Boatworks began building them, but it went out of business in 1998. Having one builder has added stability to the class, something highly valued in most one-designs.

There have been subtle changes over the years, such as the ­addition of a mast-base pivot plate, which allows one person to raise the mast instead of two. And from around 2010 through 2017, Melges produced a sealed-cockpit version, in part to minimize the amount of water in the boat when capsized. The builder then went back to the open-cockpit layout but removed the aft deck, which, among other things, made it easier to roll and store the sail. “Melges has been good at responding to what we want,” Harestad says, “and that’s been a real plus.”

Admit it or not, there’s more to a regatta than just the racing. Iowa’s Clear Lake YC proved this over a three-day national championship that was never completed, thanks to a rotation of no wind, rain, severe winds and thunderstorms. On this particular weekend, sailboat racing throughout the Midwest encountered similar conditions. Up north, A Scows were skunked on the first day of their US Nationals on Wisconsin’s Pewaukee Lake, eventually getting in four races over the next two days, and Chicago fleets racing on Lake Michigan reported tornadoes. For the purely race-centric, the apocalypse was surely at hand.

But from a broader perspective, the MC Scow 50th Anniversary event demonstrated resiliency to uncooperative weather and the ability to still chalk up a win of sorts, presenting a model for how to do a lot with just a little. While the weather allowed completion of just one race (the class minimum is three for a championship), the emphasis Clear Lake YC had placed on the nonracing side was the regatta equivalent of a winning lotto ticket.

Understand that this is no large yacht club, neither in numbers nor size—the 150 members occupy a small building on the site of a former Jaycee’s bathhouse at the base of Main Street. The building blends in well with the lakefront, evoking a late 19th or early 20th century railroad station, complete with wide roof overhangs around the perimeter. Founded in 1935 by “Cookie” Cook and a few others, it’s on public property, which makes it accessible for junior sailing lessons. There’s one ramp and a single dock with three fingers. Membership is $170 a year. Juniors are free. That the club’s volunteers pulled off the logistics of managing 105 visiting boats plus the home boats is nothing short of remarkable. Certainly, there was a ton of work, but they take it all with a dose of Midwestern modesty.

“We started organizing this right after the masters championship here last September,” says Stu Oltrogge, the event’s co-chair, “so we had the highway basically already built.”

Oltrogge’s wife, Judy, recruited 55 volunteers to handle the onshore activities—meals, registration, etc.—while another 25 took care of launching, haul-out and spectator boats. That’s a ­considerable volunteer corps given the size of the membership.

Clear Lake is just over 5 miles long, and the racing area at the south end of the lake is 2 miles in diameter, with an average water depth of 12 feet. It’s unique in that the water level is 100 feet higher than the surrounding area, which, in normal times, should increase the chances of good winds. Apart from sailing, Clear Lake is most known for the Surf Ballroom, where, in 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper last performed before their plane crashed a few miles outside of town. While those musicians put Clear Lake on the map, it’s a vibrant, iconic Midwestern town with lots of activities every week, ranging from concerts at the lakeside band shell, to boat tours on a stern-wheeler, to farmers markets on Main Street.

There was also an intentional effort by Clear Lake YC to keep this event “small town.” “We decided we wanted to put groups of folks all around the lake,” says Mark Tesar, Oltrogge’s co-chair counterpart, “having them stay with host families or at an Airbnb.” Such a move was in part a muted response to lingering pandemic concerns, but also just a large dose of Iowan hospitality. The result was a handful of encampments of sorts. For instance, 13 Michigan sailors stayed at the unique “Pyramid House” along the lake’s north shore, a crew that included three national champions.

And then there was “the Compound,” where I was lucky enough to land a spot. I’m not sure whether it was a group of three houses based around three docks full of scows or whether it was three docks full of scows based around three houses. Either way, Mark Tesar, his brother Todd, and Mr. and Mrs. Oltrogge opened up their homes to MC sailors and made it available as a base for other boats. With plenty of food, beverages and shade on the porches, it would be tough to find a nicer place to hang out when the wind doesn’t materialize. With 17 MC Scows in front of their houses, there were more one-designs than you might see in front of a lot of YCs.

With visiting as well as local boats in the water and on vacant hoists along their docks, one could be sailing in less than 10 minutes and efficiently to the race area. Even better, with the racing area so close at hand, box lunches were available each morning at Clear Lake YC for people to take to their lodgings, and the plan was to sail a couple of races in the morning, come in for lunch, then sail an afternoon race. It was all very civilized.

Each private home, like most along any inland lake, has the requisite lakeside deck ringed with chairs and chaise-style lounges, with coolers readily at hand, and those became the hangouts during nonracing times, which meant they got a lot of use at this year’s event.

No doubt, the MC 50th Nationals will go down in class history as the regatta that wasn’t. Yet it was an opportunity for those who hadn’t seen each other since pre-pandemic days to reconnect—a reunion of sorts. So, it certainly was a regatta for the sailors looking to visit after a year of COVID-19 social denial. For Todd Tesar, it all felt normal. “We usually travel to a lot of the lakes around here and see the same guys all the time,” he says. “We stay at their homes; they stay at ours; we go to their weddings.”

Cam McNeil, who decisively won the event’s one and only race, says, “Despite the lack of races, it was still great to see old friends and meet new people.”

And that really is what this particular national championship is all about—gathering with friends, in honor of a beloved boat that loves you back.

The post In Good Company with the MC Scow appeared first on Sailing World.

The problem with conventional jibes, where the main and spinnaker cross the boat simultaneously, is that the mainsail acts like a big wall, pushing air the wrong way across the spinnaker. That makes it harder to fill the spinnaker on the new jibe. And the longer it takes to fill, the longer you’ll be sailing slowly.

Picture this: You’re about to execute a conventional jibe, from starboard to port. The wind is flowing from right to left across the spinnaker—from luff to leech. Jibe to port and the wind now flows from left to right, still from luff to leech.

Now let’s consider the mainsail. While on starboard jibe, the wind flows across the main from right to left—again, from luff to leech. But as you jibe, the main starts pushing air ahead of it as it crosses the boat. That pushed air hits the spinnaker, which is also trying to fill at that moment, from luff to leech—in this case, from left to right. That means that, until you settle onto the new jibe, the flow moving across the spinnaker is countered by the flow created by the main. The net result? It becomes much harder to fill the spinnaker—no flow, no drive—meaning the sail is not working at its potential through the jibe.

Enter the late-main jibe. As its name suggests, you jibe the spinnaker first, then the main. Done right, the spinnaker is not affected by the main and can keep you on a faster track downwind.

Here’s how it’s done. As the boat bears away into the jibe, ease the active sheet so the spinnaker is just curling. Typically, that ease is a little ahead of the turn. Keep the sheet tensioned until the clew of the spinnaker is at the forestay. Simultaneously trim the new sheet. For a few seconds, the new sheet will be pulling slightly against the old sheet. The idea is to create a direct load transfer from the old sheet to the new, so don’t just let the old sheet go before the clew reaches the headstay. Do that and the spinnaker will go out in front of the boat, luff, and you’ll lose speed.

Rapidly trim the new sheet until the clew reaches the new leeward shroud. At that point, the boat should be pointing just by the lee, and the spinnaker should start filling. You might even end up wing-on-wing for a second. The helm watches the spinnaker clew, and once the spinnaker starts to fill, they will typically say, “Finish it off!” That is the cue to jibe the main.

The key is to initiate the flow across the spinnaker and get the spinnaker full and pulling before jibing the main. Done right, the main should almost float from one side to the other. Jibing the main a little late is always better than letting it cross too early. If you let the main hit the other side before the spinnaker fills, you’ll end up back in conventional jibing territory. It’s even OK if you’re wing-on-wing for a few moments.

In light air, your boom is probably not going to be all the way out because you’re reaching a little. When you turn down into the jibe, ease the main. That not only aligns the main with the new wind angle, but also allows you to bear off farther yet before the main wants to cross the boat. If you end up sailing by the lee, or the main wants to cross the boat early, have someone hold the boom out, especially if it’s bumpy. As a general rule, if the main wants to cross too early, try easing the mainsheet more before the turn down to jibe.

As the breeze increases to around 12 knots, a late-main jibe is easy because the apparent wind drops as you bear off into the jibe, reducing pressure on the main. Now when you bring the main across, the boom should land gently on the new leeward side. It’s not pushing any air, and throughout the jibe, the spinnaker is pulling you dead downwind, at speed, toward the mark.

At 15 knots, you’ll be sailing deeper, so the boom is going to be pretty far out when the jibe is initiated. If the main comes crashing across, bring the boom in a little as you go into the jibe. At 16 to 17 knots, when you turn down, trim the main instead of easing it. If the boom is over the leeward corner of the boat and the driver turns down to where you’re almost by the lee, the wind on the leeward side of the boom will help it across. In stronger winds, tail the mainsheet 100 percent of the time when bringing it across. When it lands on the new side, be sure to ease it immediately to avoid shock-loading the boom and mainsheet tackle.

RELATED: How to Use Jib Telltales

The top windspeed for a late-main jibe depends on your boat. If you have running backstays, when it gets windy, you’ll probably need to do what’s called a “priority main jibe.” That’s where the first goal is to get the main across. Above 20 knots, you might not be able to pull the main across, and sailing wing-on-wing might be really difficult, so there’s an upper limit, but it can be pretty high. If you lose control coming out of the jibe, you’re over the limit.

For the helm, a late-main jibe is great because it’s a slow jibe. It gives you more time to find the correct exit angle, and there are clear indicators of how the turn is going. Turn down until you’re by the lee, keep the boom out, see the spinnaker fill on the new side, and then say, “Jibe the main.” The landing is pretty easy because the full spinnaker helps keep the bow down, and the main just kind of flops across. ν

The post How to Do a Late-Main Jibe appeared first on Sailing World.

More than four years since work began on the largest-ever creation from Nautor’s Swan, the ClubSwan 125, Skorpios finally launched for its Russian owner, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and by the time you read this, the giant new craft will have competed in its first event, the Rolex Fastnet Race. The Italian-owned Finnish builder claims it to be the fastest monohull ever launched. This was further confirmed when the RORC Rating Office awarded the boat its highest-ever IRC TCC of 2.149.

Seeing the yacht at first glance, aside from the striking yellow scorpion design that extends from its black carbon sails down to the black carbon hull (a trust associated with Rybolovlev owns the Greek island after which the yacht is named), Skorpios resembles an elongated VO70. It feels like one too, from the moment you step on board. It’s lightweight for its size, rocking around in waves unlike a more displaced superyacht. This is less surprising given it was designed by the doyen of the VO70, Juan Kouyoumdjian. However, since then, Juan K. has designed George David’s Rambler 88 and even the ClubSwan 36 one-design, of which both have very different hull forms.

The reason for Skorpios’ ­relatively conservative shape is because it was originally conceived as a more traditional Nautor’s Swan cruiser/racer. However, since commissioning the design, Rybolovlev has come to enjoy his performance sailing and become better at racing on board his ClubSwan 36 and ClubSwan 50, which culminated in his winning the ClubSwan 50 World Championship in 2019. Thus, Skorpios’ design brief evolved. Its Spanish skipper, Fernando Echavarri, the former Volvo Ocean Race skipper and Olympic Tornado gold medalist, explains: “As he’s sailed the ClubSwan 50 more, he was telling us every time to make this boat go faster and faster. So, then we would have to make an investigation—where is the boat right now? How fast is it now? How fast can we make her if we take another step?”

Because of this ­progression, Skorpios’ hull shape has a more modest beam-to-length ratio compared to the aircraft-­carrier-styled Comanche, and far greater internal volume and higher freeboard. As is the trend these days, special focus was put on the foil and movable ballast package. Skorpios is fitted with twin rudders (with whale-flipper tubercles on their leading edges, as Rambler has) and a substantial keel that can be canted to 42 degrees. The keel is operated by one massive titanium ram on the port side, with a smaller secondary backup ram opposite powerful enough to center the 25-ton bulb and keel foil. In addition, in each aft quarter, there are ballast tanks into which 8 tons of water can be pumped to each side.

Two more unusual aspects of Skorpios’ foil package include the trim tab fitted to its canting keel and the single giant asymmetric, retracting C-foil (something with which Echavarri is familiar, albeit at a much smaller scale, on the Nacra 17 he used to campaign).

The latter resides inside a giant hoop of a case spanning the full breadth and height of the watertight keel compartment midship. Lowered to leeward, the foil prevents leeway and, thanks to its curvature, reduces displacement, but not enough to make Skorpios a flying machine. Downwind, the foil can be fully retracted, leaving roughly 3 feet of tip ­protruding on each side.

The trim tab is a flap ­fitted to the back of the keel foil. Conventionally an upwind device, when applied, it gives the foil an asymmetric profile, thereby developing lift and causing the boat to crab to weather. Trim tabs are nothing new, but it’s believed that this is the first time a trim tab has been used on a canting keel, and it remains to be seen if it could reduce righting moment when the keel is canted nearing the horizontal. Given all possible trim variables—plus the additional effect of the water ballast altering heel, and the fore and aft trim of not just the boat but of the foils too —how all of this interacts and can be used to optimal results on different points of sail, boatspeed and wave states will keep Skorpios’ crew and the brain trust behind her occupied for some time.

Echavarri has put together an exceptional crew that includes numerous Volvo Ocean Race and Whitbread heavyweights, such as Kiwi multiple winners Brad Jackson and Tony Mutter, Spanish bowman and Skorpios’ boat captain Pepe Ribes, crew boss Mikey Joubert, navigator Bruno Zirilli, bowman Antonio Cuervas Mons and many others. For the Rolex Fastnet Race, they had 26 on the roster.

On deck, of course, ­everything is huge. There are some cruising features left over, such as a lounge area aft of the forward companionway, and tiny pit areas to port and starboard, but otherwise it is a pure modern-day racing yacht. The sail plan is colossal. Sloop-rigged, its five-spreader Southern Spars mast (complete with Future Fibres’ low-drag carbon-­fiber AeroSix continuous rigging) is 175 feet tall, and its backstays are fitted with substantial deflectors. The boat can carry 11,324 square feet of sail area upwind, and 21,108 square feet downwind. (The mainsail alone is 7,093 square feet, compared to Comanche’s 4,413 square feet.)

Sails are North 3Di, and when we went out in light conditions, given its prodigious speed, the boat seemed to be going faster than the windspeed, even during maneuvers. Its foresails are all on giant furlers, and there are five tack points from the end of the bowsprit for the masthead sails, via the J2 on the forestay, back to the farthest aft for the IRS staysail. Such is the span of the foretriangle that Skorpios might at times fly three headsails simultaneously like the cutters of old.

At the time we were on board in late July, the boat had already undergone sea trials in Finland and been delivered to the UK. The crew was on a steep learning curve trying not to break things, as well as figuring out issues such as how to equate the windspeed and direction at the top of the rig with the significantly different figures at deck level and on the water.

Skorpios’ core area of complexity is its extensive hydraulic systems. This differentiates it from most other Northern Hemisphere offshore maxis, even as recent as Comanche, which were initially launched with manual winch systems (albeit with powered canting keels) to make them eligible for records under World Sailing Speed Record Council rules. However, on Skorpios, everything is hydraulic, with a system designed and built by Cariboni and seeming to comprise almost everything in its catalog. This includes the keel canting system and its many sail and mast/rig controls, all operated by rams or nine hydraulically powered Harken winches. Even for propulsion, the boat has a propeller at the end of a drop-down shaft that is powered by a hydraulic drive.

To make Skorpios more of a racer than superyacht, the boat has been on a huge diet over the course of its build to get it under 66 tons. Its original canting/lifting keel, for example, was dispensed with in favor of its present arrangement, albeit featuring a 24-foot draft.

Ahead of the owner’s ­accommodations in the center of the boat is a smart but minimalist salon, where there are some tastefully designed pipe berths. Many of the panels here are fabric-covered frames rather than cored panels. Going forward into the front half of the boat, there is a sealed compartment for the C-foil and keel, and then the engine compartment to port, while the bow area is an empty cathedral.

Aft of the owner’s quarters is another unpainted crew area accessed by its own companionway. This houses the nav station, more pipe berths, a crew galley, and a carbon-fiber head and shower compartment, along with large-diameter carbon tubes that run laterally for the water-ballast transfer, and fore and aft for the engine exhaust.

Given that Skorpios was built in the middle of a pandemic and is so fiendishly complex, it is a miracle it was launched at all. A tentative program includes the Rolex Middle Sea Race, and then the boat will go transatlantic for the RORC Caribbean 600. Records have also been mentioned, including west-to-east transatlantic. If all goes well—and by design—this big Swan could very well be the first 700‑mile monohull.

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