Tactics and boatspeed go hand in hand, and that’s why you look smart when you’re fast. But before we can display our speed and tactical prowess, we have to first develop a big-picture ­strategy. Weighing all three elements in the heat of a race can be overwhelming, but simplifying the decision-making process helps us focus on what matters most in the moment. The winning formula is to make unemotional, repeatable, high-percentage decisions that, in tandem with solid boatspeed, get us the consistent results we seek.

Let’s start with strategy. This is your big-picture game plan, which you will lay out before the race starts. Once the race is underway, this strategy is constantly assessed and updated to adjust to conditions and the tactical options available to you.

Here’s a hypothetical to consider: Before the race, you decide the winning strategy is to start at the boat end of the line and tack for the right side immediately. But you get fouled at 20 seconds and start in the third row. You now have new information: There are a lot of boats between you and the right side. Your strategy changes. Now your goal is to get to the right side of the course in the cleanest air ­possible. It’s time for tactics.

Tactics are the decisions we make to ­execute our strategy in the moment. Sticking with our example: You’re sailing off the line on starboard tack, suffering in bad air. You see a port-tack boat, which also had a bad start, and they’re looking as if they’re going to duck you. You want to get to the right, and if this boat ducks you, they’ll be on your lee bow if you tack, making it hard to control your mode and get to the right with speed. The alternative is to continue for a few more lengths to open up a lane, but that’s not your strategy, right?

Right. So, you make a quick tactical ­decision and tack to port before the port-tack boat is able to duck. Now you are on its lee bow, and you’re sticking to your strategy. You still might be in the bad air of other boats going right, but you were already in bad air on starboard tack. One boat ducking you might not seem like a problem, but abandoning your strategy in that moment will most likely come back to haunt you later. You can now adjust your strategy as the race progresses, but make sure your tactical decisions set you up to execute your initial game plan.

When establishing your pre-race ­strategy, focus on four basic considerations: the big-picture weather forecast, current, geographic effects and the wind in which you’re currently sailing. This requires tracking the wind patterns before the start—how big the shifts are, how long they last and what happens when there are changes in strength. Take your best educated guess at the type of racetrack you’ll have, and then do your starting line and racecourse homework: Is the line square to wind direction? Is the weather mark square to the middle of the line? Is the signal boat lying in a direction that indicates current? And if so, how will you approach the line? If you’re confident the right side of the course is favored, then you don’t care as much about which end is favored; your strategy is to start where you can tack to port, with a clear lane immediately. Let everyone else fight for the ends and claim the middle so you can be one of the first boats onto port with a clear lane, sailing fast toward the favored side.

If the wind is oscillating, ­however, the favored end of the starting line becomes more important. Go ahead and start near the favored end, but the priority is to set yourself up for a quick exit to the right. If there is a major line favor (10 degrees or more), then fight harder to be near that end; if the favor is closer to 5 degrees, you can be more comfortable moving away from there.

Keep tabs on what the wind is doing throughout the pre-start. You can assess this by noting what your angle is to the line on either tack. Maybe you’ve observed that the major wind oscillations come about every three minutes. At 3:15 before the start, you are on starboard tack below the line and notice that you have to sail nearly closehauled to lay the pin. That’s a red flag: The wind is in a left phase, which favors the pin end, and there’s more traffic there as a result. Based on your pre-start observations, you expect the wind will oscillate back to the right between now and the start. If that’s the case, set up closer to the boat end of the line to take advantage of the next shift. Maybe some boats at the pin end have a great start, but as that righty comes in, you will be in a better position.

If the wind is steady and there’s no reason to sprint to one side of the course, then line bias becomes the most important factor. If you don’t anticipate any major shifts, think of the favored end as a head start. You’re simply closer to the weather mark at the beginning of the race. But keep in mind that if there aren’t likely to be major wind changes, limiting your tacks and sailing in clear lanes becomes an exponentially more important strategy. Consider avoiding the favored end by setting up just below or above the pack, in a place where you can be fast and going straight right away.

In addition to being the ­fastest boat on the racecourse, the best at starting, the best at seeing the future and now the best strategist, every race will be easy, right? Not so fast. In sailboat racing, we deal with myriad variables that are beyond our control. When one of them goes against you, don’t panic. Just weigh your options.

If you know there is a favored side to get to, do it. Sacrifice the perfect lane to go the right way. If your lane is compromised but you are going the right way, look for small opportunities to clear your lane with two quick tacks. Duck a big pack coming across your bow, and let that pack clear out other boats that have been affecting your lane. Here a high duck (slow down by pinching high before a duck) is better than a ­conventional speed duck.

If the wind is oscillating, always be lifted, on the tack that points your bow closer toward the mark. It’s OK to sacrifice the ­perfect lane to stay on the lift, because sailing in bad air toward the mark is better than sailing in a clear lane in the wrong direction. If you are sailing in steady breeze, think two steps ahead to manage your lanes so you can sail in clear air for as much of the beat as possible.

Suppose your strategy is wrong—yes, it happens all the time to even the best strategists. Don’t get emotional. Quickly assess why it was wrong and update your strategy. Rinse and repeat all the steps above to adopt this new strategy. Don’t be afraid to look around and check out where the top boats are going. We all do it. If your strategy isn’t panning out, there’s nothing wrong with observing what the ­hotshots in your fleet are doing and letting them help you ­figure it out. Connect with their pack and look for trends in their ­decision-making. Watch and learn from those who have ­consistent success—that’s always a sound strategy.

The post Smart Racing Strategies appeared first on Sailing World.

ν Downwind finishes used to mean ­squaring back the pole, sailing as perpendicular to the line as possible, keeping your air clear and crossing at the favored end. For boats with symmetric spinnakers, that’s still the norm. But if you sail a boat with an asymmetric spinnaker, the game has changed. True, you’re still looking for the favored end and working to keep your air clear, but you’re now sailing higher angles more parallel to the finish line, and jibing is expensive. There are also more interactions with other boats as people approach from different angles, so choosing a clear lane and getting the layline correct is more critical. On the macro level, treat a downwind finish line like a gate—come in from an edge, with a clear lane, and finish at the favored (upwind) end. With some boats, such as the J/70 and J/105, wing on wing into the finish also adds another dimension, allowing you to shoot the line. In addition to the general goals, it’s wise to know a few things that can go wrong and avoid them. Let’s look at some specifics.

Judging the Layline

Similar to approaching a gate, one way to pick a good layline to the finish is to make it easy on yourself. I have watched many great sailors pick an angle toward the finish that puts them about 50 to 100 yards outside the finish line. From this position, it’s a much easier one-and-in call for a ­precise layline to the finish. Another benefit of targeting that area from far away is that if you get a header as you sail toward the line, you don’t overstand. You just get closer to, or lay, the finish. And if you happen to get lifted or jibed on by another boat, you’re free to jibe and keep your options open.

It’s difficult to pick the layline from half a leg away, and even if you get it right, you have limited options to play shifts or jibe away if someone steels your breeze. It’s nice to have real estate to work with as you approach the finish line, especially in a shifty breeze where things are changing rapidly.

When it’s time to pick the short layline in and you see that someone might jump you on your final jibe into the finish, it often pays to jibe early, before layline, to force the interaction sooner. Doing so gives you options to jibe away if needed, or possibly hold for a little bit and jump them on the final jibe.

The Port-Tack Approach

One thing that can make your finish go very wrong is coming in near the port-tack layline (from the right side as you look downwind) and being forced to jibe by a starboard tacker. When doing so, anticipate any starboard tackers who might be heading your way. If you see a starboard boat that will intersect with you, slow down to go behind them rather than being forced to jibe. We often see these types of interactions about four to 10 boat lengths away from the finish, and the jibing port-tack boat usually loses huge. Besides slowing to sail behind the starboard tacker, the only thing that can save you is meeting them in the three-boat-length zone of the finish line. If this is the case, they owe you room to finish.

There are a couple of ways to handle the slowdown. The toughest situation is when you’re almost crossing, requiring you to make a big duck. In this case, it’s better to slow down early by bearing away and over-trimming the kite. Another method is to luff the kite, but the bear-away/over-trim is better, quieter, and it’s easier to get going when it’s time to reload and head up behind the starboard boat. For the reload, everyone needs to hike hard, and the main must be eased to sail behind them.

If the starboard boat is ahead and it’s a smaller duck, you might be able to just head up and go behind them without slowing down. In a big breeze, heading up and going behind someone can put you at risk of wiping out, so if it’s really nuking, slow down early, probably with a luff of the kite. Going low with a tight kite and then heading up in a huge breeze is tricky because the head-up-ease portion might cause you to wipe out. Sometimes, when slowing down to pass behind, the starboard boat will jibe, and that’s fine. Just follow them into the ­finish or, if they jibe late enough, you might be able to roll them on port.

Winging It Across

I remember racing in the Helly Hansen Marblehead NOOD Regatta right before the Marblehead J/70 Worlds, and Tim Healy, a previous J/70 world champion, smoked us twice by winging into the finish in planing surfing conditions. Until then, I didn’t know that was an option in planing conditions. It was blowing around 15 knots, which is a low-plane mode in the J/70, and there were three to four boats coming into the finish line, all pretty close together. Both times, Healy bore away and winged the chute, shooting the line. While the rest of us were bow up and planing, he cut the corner and won the group each time. By sailing more perpendicular to the line in the final moments before finishing, he shaved valuable time off his race. It’s like shooting the upwind finish line by going head to wind and using your momentum to take the shortest path to the line.

How do you know if shooting the line by winging works best on your boat? My experience is, if you sail an ­asymmetric boat where a late-main jibe is fast, then wing into the finish if trying to beat nearby boats. A late-main jibe is when you bear away, pull the kite around, and hesitate with the main for a second while you’re going dead downwind. Then you throw the boom over and head up. Boats like J/70s and J/105s that have roller fuller jibs jibe that way and are prime candidates for ­winging. Boats that keep their jibs up all the time, like Vipers and skiffs, are not.

Of course, if you’re on a massive header and your course is somewhat perpendicular to the line anyway, don’t wing. But if you’re sailing an angle that’s a little more parallel to the line, you’re in prime winging conditions, and it’s probably faster than jibing. A jibe involves an 80-degree turn or so, while winging is closer to a 40-degree turn. The goal is to cross the line sailing at a 90-degree angle to it, so do whatever is right to make that happen.

Ideal conditions for winging into the ­finish line on a boat like a J70 are when the windspeed is around 7 to 17 knots. The light end of that range is not quite sustained winging conditions, so you must use momentum to make it work, and you might start your wing into the finish line as close as one to two boat lengths by winging the kite. If it’s breezier, you might already be on the wing; if you have marginal planing conditions, you can wing about three to five lengths away using the boom-over or kite-over technique.

There comes a point where it’s too breezy to wing to the finish line because, by doing so, you’ll wipe out. We prefer to always douse the kite on the port side of the boat, and we were on port-tack, so the main and the kite were on the starboard side. Once, in one race in 20 knots, we said, “Let’s bear away, wing the kite and douse it.” We bore away, pulled the kite over, and boom! Death roll to windward with everyone hanging from the stanchions—it went bad really quickly and all we could do was laugh. Luckily, we had it on our GoPro and got more laughs out of it later. That’s why I picked 17 knots as a top-end number for winging into the finish, and at that point, it’s probably best to wing the boom for a less violent “pop” of the sail.

At some point in big breeze, you’re going so fast that it doesn’t make sense to wing. You’ll be planing at such a high speed, you’ll just rip right through the line. Plus, as it gets windier and windier, you’re actually planing pretty low—sailing fairly deep. And the fleet’s usually pretty spread out, so you can just rip through the finish line.

Choosing the Favored End

I’ve found spotting the favored end of the downwind finish to be fairly difficult. It’s easier to choose the favored end at a gate because the marks are the same size. But at a finish line, the ends are a big RC boat and small mark, which makes spotting the “bigger” mark to determine the bias doesn’t work. If there’s a flag on the pin, it will always point upwind toward the favored end. But don’t trust flags on a committee boat, unless the flag is well above the boat. Big boats tend to skew the wind. In either case, it’s difficult to see a flag unless you’re really close, especially from upwind.

The most important thing is to sail fast and have a clear lane all the way through the line. And, as mentioned earlier, if winging makes sense, do so. Having said all that, if you have the luxury of picking the perfect layline into an end, I’ve found that most of the time race committees favor the pin end simply because they don’t want a bunch of sailboats anywhere near their nice ­committee boat.

If you’re midfleet and it’s going to be a photo finish with a group of boats, just like the gate, it pays to be on an edge, ideally right in the race committee’s face. This is true for all boats. It’s tough for them to write down numbers of a lot of boats all finishing at once. Boats that are blocking the rest of the fleet from their view inevitably get scored ahead.

On the final downwind, close to the ­finish line, I’m always looking around and ­constantly asking myself, How can I keep a lane all the way in and how do I minimize maneuvers? I always want to do one-and-in. If you can satisfy those requirements—one-and-in and a big lane—you have everything working for you to give you a great finish.

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There’s a buzz in the air on Kaneohe Bay. It’s not the buzz you might hear after a Transpac finish, or the buzz you will inevitably succumb to if you wander into the Waikiki YC bar on Friday night after beer can races. Nope, this buzz is coming from the waters off Oahu’s windward shore: a mob of Waszps buzzing the coach boat.

Oahu’s local Waszp fleet has grown to nearly a dozen over the past two years, with Kaneohe YC recently purchasing its second charter boat with the help of private donors and local hero Mark Towill, who hosts annual lectures to help fundraise for the Kaneohe Sailing Foundation. “I was a benefactor of the foundation when I was coming up,” Towill says, “so it’s great to be able to give back.”

Like many other junior ­sailors in Hawaii, Towill grew up sailing El Toros, Lasers and 420s. After successful junior- and college-sailing campaigns, he made the jump to the big leagues when he transitioned to ocean racing and competed in the Volvo Ocean Race with Team Alvimedica. With the next edition of the Ocean Race making the shift to foiling monohulls, it’s fitting that Towill, CEO of 11th Hour Racing, is helping to grow a foiling platform on his home waters.

“The best sailors are the most interdisciplinary ones,” Towill says. “The Waszp teaches a completely different skill set than the average youth dinghy. You might not learn the same kind of strategy and tactics, but the sport is getting more high-performance each year, so the more exposure we can give junior sailors to different kinds of sailing, the better.”

“If you look at the Olympics, three of the classes are going to foiling,” says KYC junior-­sailing director Jesse Andrews. “Half of our Waszp kids go foil-­windsurfing. The kite-foil has been popular here for a while. The Nacra is foiling now. We could even see a singlehanded foiling boat in the Olympics at some point, so it’s definitely the thing to be learning right now.”

Oahu has many obvious advantages as a sailing venue, but its major disadvantage is geography. The Hawaiian Islands is the most isolated island chain on Earth, making travel for big events prohibitively expensive. Such isolation has forced local youth sailing directors to get creative with their programs. For instance, program directors use El Toros instead of Optis as the introductory singlehanded dinghy, and 10 years ago, they transitioned to the Open Bic, which has become wildly popular with the advanced race kids.

“The Open Bic is way harder to sail than an El Toro or an Opti,” Andrews says. “They are also way easier to maintain. They sail like a skiff or a Laser downwind, so a lot of our kids go into those classes afterward. Balance and coordination are key, so we end up getting some pretty awesome athletes out of that fleet.”

Whereas most American kids flock to the coasts for regional championships, Andrews has taken his KYC groms to New Zealand to compete. Andrews sent a few sailors to the 2019 Open Bic Worlds at Manly Boat Club just north of Auckland. One of Andrew’s sailors, CJ Perez, was the top female at the regatta, with a 6th place overall. She has since began sailing the 29er and the Waszp, which has quickly become her favorite boat. “Being up on the foils is such an amazing feeling,” Perez says. “I like being with a fleet or just going out on my own. The Waszp is good in light or heavy wind, which means I can sail it almost every day.” Perez says that the Bic and the 29er have given her the maneuverability to be confident steering her Waszp, so it’s looking like Hawaii’s push toward high-performance junior sailing is beginning to pay off.

Yet Kaneohe YC is by no means the first American junior program to make the leap to foiling. Many clubs across the country have experimented with various foiling platforms, often running into similar problems: Cost is one primary factor, as well as maintenance issues and the technical prowess of coaching staffs. In many instances, foiling is treated as a freestyle sport, with many people opting to go for solo rips around the harbor instead of ­lining up for formalized racing.

“I feel no need to race the Waszp at all,” says Mark Zagol, managing director of sailing operations at New England Science and Sailing. “In fact, the Waszp might be hurting itself by trying to make everything so racing-centric, like the windsurfer. People keep hounding me to go to regattas, but there’s nothing like going for a solo run on a breezy afternoon. It’s awesome.”

Zagol says few people ­realize how much the sport of sailing depends on the recreational sailor. As a veteran of the International 505 Class, he spent many years “getting his head bashed in” before rising through the ranks to win a North American Championship in 2013. “Without that bottom half of the fleet, the racing wouldn’t be nearly as fun,” Zagol says. “We need more outlets for sailors to go out and have a good time, and for many people, that’s what the Waszp is for.”

NESS has owned two Waszps for four years and introduced a UFO foiling catamaran in 2019. They use the boats to break the monotony of their typical Opti and 420 race classes, keeping sailors engaged through the sheer thrill of speed. Including foiling platforms in their youth program, however, was a significant investment; all of their foiling equipment was purchased through private donations. They also had to get creative with their coach boat after their 17-foot Carolina Skiff shredded the trampoline fabric on one of their Waszps. Zagol and his team engineered a solution with PVC pipe, allowing them to rest the Waszp wing on a nonchafing surface while assisting and side towing.

“The biggest issue is ­coaching,” Zagol says. “We’re in this new foiling era, but we don’t have regular junior-sailing coaches who can handle the boats or the equipment. One of our coaches is a 29er veteran, and under some guidance, he’s been extremely helpful with the boats. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of coaches out there with the technical ability to run a foiling class, particularly when they’re on a summer salary between college-sailing seasons.”

RELATED: Hawaii’s Top Crew Aims High

And then there’s the ­question of progression. Where does a high-performance junior sailor go after ­becoming ­proficient in foiling? Do they spend thousands on their own foiler? Do they join a college sailing team and transition back into traditional dinghies? For traditional sailing platforms, the progression is fairly clear, but for high-performance ­racers, the path still unpaved.

“You never know who is going to be good at trimming a wing sail until they are on the boat doing it,” SailGP Team USA skipper Rome Kirby once told me. Virtually all of the sailors on his team spent their youth sailing days in traditional one-design dinghies and didn’t get into high-performance sailing until after college. Learning on the fly on an F50 is a high-stakes process of trial and error, and points to an obvious gap (and a wide one at that) between high-level high-performance racing and the traditional youth sailing structure in America.

“The US has always been an innovative country though,” Kirby says. “We’ve been on top of the technology game for a while now, so this should be the perfect fit for us with the sports culture we have here. But at the end of the day, we just have to roll up our sleeves and do the work. There’s no other way around it.”

SailGP’s Inspire program aims to tackle this issue with a grassroots effort to attract youth sailors onto more high-performance platforms. Several Kaneohe sailors applied for the 2020 event before the COVID‑19 pandemic halted the SailGP season. Only time will tell whether Oahu’s nascent Waszp program will be the ultimate incubator for the next generation of flight-savvy youth sailors, but one thing is clear: It’s taking off.

The post The Foiling Groms of Kaneohe appeared first on Sailing World.

When we slowed to 22 knots, it felt like sailing in molasses. I had just driven one of the most celebrated boats in the world, L’Hydroptere, at 34 knots. Later, I’d look at 44 and try to imagine what it was like in 2009 to achieve a record-­setting 500-meter run of 52.86. That one, and a nautical-mile record of 50.17 knots, were both set in France. I sailed aboard in California leading up to 2015, when this icon of French speed sailing set off on the classic Transpac course, Los Angeles to Honolulu, only to prove that the route held too many downwind miles for such a specialized machine. Unlike the even more specialized Vestas Sailrocket that eventually took its records away, L’Hydroptere could get around a racing triangle, but that would be awkward. It’s happy only on a reach. In 2015, this was no longer the fastest sailing craft ever, and there was no new Transpac record. Sponsors lost interest. The boat sat. The boat was impounded. The boat baked for five years in tropical sun and then went up for auction. What could possibly go right?

Well, L’Hydroptere’s situation could come to the attention of a true individual among West Coast sailors, Chris Welsh, who saw development potential and a future in more-manageable point-to-point records. And plenty of yoodles along the way. The choice fits his profile. For 15 years Welsh has been the owner of Ragtime, a unique, hard-chined, plywood, downwind-flying John Spencer design that has been a star—and competitive—for all of its 55 years. Ragtime is iconic in itself. No boat has sailed more Transpacs than Ragtime’s 15; few have been more successful and none more successfully updated. Its reputation, Welsh says, “hovers somewhere between revered and notorious.” When Welsh took Ragtime back to its birthplace in 2008, that was a national occasion for New Zealand. To round out Welsh’s credentials for going his own way, I’ll add that last year he bought submersible manufacturer Deep Flight out of receivership. Until COVID-19, you could find him touring Asia with one of his submarines slung between the hulls of the derigged giant catamaran Cheyenne, formerly Playstation and holder of trans-Atlantic, 24-hour and round-the-world records. The man has toys, and of course, when he flies around on the West Coast, he pilots his own. L’Hydroptere would not make sense in the hands of just anyone.

When L’Hydroptere went up for ­auction in 2019 in Kihei Harbor, Maui, Welsh says, “I suspected that an auction held on an island in the middle of the Pacific might not draw a lot of bidders.” He got that much right. But he was not quite alone. Enter Gabriel Terrasse, a French IT ­project manager who had history with the boat. Terrasse has been infatuated with L’Hydroptere since sighting a photograph at the 1997 Paris Boat Show, and he was part of the team during the glory years. He was out to save the boat “somehow—I could not let it go.”

So, what are the odds? Terrasse and Welsh sat down the night before the auction, discovered they had ­complementary ­qualifications, and agreed they would make better partners than competitors. The upfront cost was nothing compared with what it would take to get the boat sailing again, and then it would need much, much more work to become mission-ready. And Welsh (did I mention?) owns a boatyard on the shores of San Francisco Bay with a very hefty crane. Terrasse has access to all the people who had contributed to the boat’s history “as a human adventure and an engineering adventure.” They would need all of that and more.

“Before the auction, I had already made attempts to find another harbor where I would be able to work on the boat,” Terrasse says. “That proved impossible. A mooring in Kihei Harbor was going to be the best I could do, and I could see it was going to be hard, but then along came Chris. I know now that without him, it wouldn’t have been hard; it would have been a nightmare.”

Truth to tell, these two rescued each other from stepping into quicksand. The boat was nonfunctional. The main had been left on the boom “and birds were nesting in it, and of course, it was toast,” Welsh says. “At one point, Gabriel and I were sitting in the harbormaster’s office with a to-do list and a new motor waiting to be installed through a hatch that was too small for it, and they were telling us we were taking too long. They had no concept of what it means to send a boat to sea, and they just wanted this thing gone. They threatened to impound it again in 72 hours [and break it up for scrap]. Gabriel saved us by getting the French Consul involved. Thanks to the Consul and his understanding of the boat’s place in the pantheon of French ­sailing craft, we had a new lease on life.”

Not that working on the boat on a mooring was ever easy, nor was Maui the center of the universe when it came to shopping for L’Hydroptere parts. Terrasse spent the summer of 2019 working with Welsh’s people, and eventually the boat was ready enough for a 15-day crossing to San Francisco Bay. “She came home on a delivery main and a jib from Ragtime,” Welsh says. “With a mast 25 feet taller than Ragtime’s, that makes about a 35 percent main.” The new motor gave out with an impeller issue, so as the boat neared the coast and winds shut down, Welsh set out in his Protector with Terrasse aboard to tow L’Hydroptere to its new base in the East Bay, the boatyard known as Sugar Dock.

There in 2020 I found her again, this time in parts, a mostly-good-news story that had begun as the dream of Éric Tabarly, a man whose place among French sailors is closer to deity than mere legend. After Tabarly’s death at sea, the mantle fell to another member of the development team, Alain Thébault, to guide the project through to speed records and a legendary status of its own. “Every time L’Hydroptere was in the water, she was in the news,” Terrasse says. “Sports news. Science news.” Welsh adds: “Gabriel has done a special job of inspiring the leading figures of French sailing to align with us and care about what we’re doing. And there’s a connection. Tabarly was a boyhood hero of mine. When I won the 2008 Los Angeles to Tahiti Race with Ragtime, I was awarded the same trophy that he had won with Pen Duick III in 1972. When I had a win in the Sydney Hobart Race a year later, I was awarded the same trophy that Tabarly won in his time. It’s rather strange and wonderful.”

At the Sugar Dock, the real work got underway, providing a focus for life under pandemic lockdown. The dock has space but not enough for a complete L’Hydroptere on the hard, so the boat was dismantled in the water. The various components polished up nicely, but they did not come apart without a struggle. Welsh says: “The boat is put together with universal pin connectors. Pins hold the dog ears that lock the frame to the amas, and they were solidly corroded in place. No one five years ago imagined it would be this long before they came out. To get them out we used sledges, hydraulics, dry ice and patience —lots of patience.”

Terrasse adds, “We spent a week apiece on some of them, to not damage the boat.” Welsh continues: “They’re off-the-shelf items, so it’s no problem to replace them. The boat will go back together a lot more easily than it came apart.”

But it won’t be the same L’Hydroptere that left California for Hawaii, and that is why there’s a story to tell.

“The boat can be faster,” Terrasse says. “It’s a good platform for developing high-speed foils and for using ground effect. The AC boats are using ground effect. It’s very important to their design. “L’Hydroptere is 78 feet wide. That’s a lot to work with.” Along that line, Welsh says: “It’s 78 feet of beam—think about it. The structure has never been optimized to generate lift to take some of the weight of the boat. It’s just been pushed through the air.”

Going forward, there are two levels of ambition. First, Welsh says, “I just want to go sailing.” To make that happen with a set of faster features that can be mustered by “mere mortals,” Welsh and Terrasse intend to start with aerodynamics: fairing the beams, housing the crew in bobsled-style cockpits, and improving efficiencies aloft by adding 3D sails. Perhaps that means hard sails, perhaps inflated sails, perhaps sleeving the mast. There’s a lot to ponder, but with that much done, Welsh believes, the boat will be ready for point-to-point record attempts.

Beyond that, and this is where Terrasse really lights up, L’Hydroptere could be a platform for pushing the envelope. The possibilities are dazzling to anyone susceptible to an engineering adventure, but how quickly these things come, or if at all, will depend upon sponsorship. Suddenly we’re talking in-depth research, high-end fabrication, and money to support the project through risks of failure. CAD simulation has come a long way since the boat’s early breakages, but bleeding edges tend to bleed.

It’s a tantalizing prospect, for example, to imagine incorporating super-cavitating foils to operate in the realm above 50 knots, where standard foils develop vapor-inducing low pressure and lose their bite. The concept has been around for decades and applied in high-speed propellers, but a sailing hydrofoil would have to transition from a shape that develops lift on one surface (at lower speeds) to the opposite surface (at higher speeds). There has been plenty of technical speculation on how to accomplish that, but no one has solved it at a practical level. Terrasse and Welsh have ideas specific to L’Hydroptere—but. Before tackling super-cavitating foils, it would be expensive but not hard to build lighter passive foils with lower drag than the ­existing passive foils that, frankly, are Jurassic leftovers. It would be even more expensive, and harder, to try actively managed T-foils, and then fly-by-wire. Terrasse says, “Maybe we should build a wing for pure speed work and keep this rig for offshore sailing.” And ­modify it for active canting and…

Dreamers gotta dream. First, simplify things and just go sailing. Frozen pins were not the only challenge in disassembly. There were mysteries. “We relied on Gabriel and his connections,” Welsh says. “We’d be doing something by day, and he’d be doing research by night, chasing answers as to how the next thing came apart, maybe coming up with drawings because he knows the people. The critical path is the overhaul of the struts. They’re built like aircraft parts. They’re aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber, and we’ll rebuild mostly as-is but with better aerodynamics. Redesigning for ground effect—we can save that for later.”

There’s a chance L’Hydroptere could be sailing by winter, and whether it is or not, one unknown is where. In California, Welsh figures, the boat could make it from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 10 to 11 hours by picking a weather window. “And we could probably do the Newport to Ensenada Race in two and a half hours, but we might have to sail 50 races before we got ‘that’ day. I don’t know if the boat will stay in California long enough for any of that. If we get a sponsor who’s interested, we’ll go to the America’s Cup in New Zealand and fly on the Waitemata when the wind exceeds the limit for the AC75s. As much as anybody, I miss the chess match of the keeled monohulls, but today’s unbridled advancements are fascinating. I’ve already told you we want to turn the fuselage into a wing, and that development is very much in play at the next AC—how the fuselages deal with drag and ground effect. That’s going to determine this Cup match, not the foils.

“L’Hydroptere has a future with or without sponsorship,” Welsh says, “and with or without going to Auckland. Eventually the boat belongs in Europe, again, hunting point-to-point records in the Med and maybe looking for a 24-hour record. It’s startling how much response Gabriel has received. In America there might be a thousand people who know L’Hydroptere. In France there might be a thousand people who don’t.”

One question hangs in the air: What would Tabarly do?

The post Saving Hydroptere appeared first on Sailing World.

In 1964, Ched Proctor had a serious case of the slows. He was 14 and competing in Turnabouts in Scituate, Massachusetts, just southeast of Boston. “I remember coming in to the dock and being very frustrated,” he says. There was Bill Mattern, high school teacher, part-time garage sailmaker and unofficial mentor for the junior racing crowd. Proctor asked him what he thought of his sail. Mattern studied it and quickly confirmed the young sailor’s suspicion.

Seventy-five dollars later, with a new sail in hand, Proctor headed for Quincy Bay Race Week. Though he hadn’t been that competitive in his local fleet, he mustered the courage to sign up for the championship division—and won it. With that victory came an epiphany—at least for a 14-year-old—that would determine the trajectory of his life: “I learned then that a sail with the right shape makes the boat go faster.”

Professionally, Proctor would go on to work almost 50 years with North Sails, taking him to lofts in Wisconsin, Australia, Germany and Connecticut. Competitively, he would roll up an unparalleled list of one-design North American and National titles, notching 17 major victories in the Lightning class alone, including that class’s 2018 and 2019 North American Championships. A lot of the one-design sails North Sails sells today were designed by Proctor.

Proctor is a waterman who grew up on a bay in Weymouth, just south of Boston. He remembers, around age 5, spending time in an old, derelict rowboat in the backyard. “I pretended to row it using a couple of brooms,” he says. “It got to the point where I wore out the ground under the brooms and wore the bristles right off them. About that same time, my father tried to teach me how to sail and steer a boat upwind. I just couldn’t do it.” There’s a subtle shrug and hint of disappointment in his voice as he tells that story, and then concedes, “It seems that 7 is more the right age to learn that sort of thing.”

A few years later, he bought a Turnabout, paying for it by mowing lawns. “I gravitated toward sailing because all I wanted to do was be on the water. I was fascinated by boats, and I was too uncoordinated to do anything else. I just had no interest in playing other sports. I like to say I couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time until I was 15.”

His family purchased an International 210, which had a strong New England fleet. Mattern made them a genoa, but Proctor kept going back to him to make changes in the sail. “Finally, he said: ‘Here’s the seam ripper; it’s all common sense. Do it yourself,’” says Proctor, who estimates he recut that genoa close to 100 times. That experience led him to a job at a boat dealer, Multihull Associates, after graduating from Hartwick College in New York. The dealer set him up with a small loft area and a sewing machine, and Proctor started making his own sails and doing canvas work, a job not particularly in line with the economics major he earned at Hartwick. “I told my father I really wasn’t that interested in economics, and he said, ‘Well, you better figure out something that you’re interested in to make a living—maybe this sailmaking thing can work.’” With work at Multihull Associates tilting more toward canvas than sails, he decided it was time to seriously pursue the sailmaking thing.

He interviewed with John Marshall, who ran North Sails East, and Phil Mariner, who ran the now-defunct Hard Sails loft on Long Island, but the connection was really made through the International 470, which he had begun racing just before his senior year at Hartwick. The class was in its heyday in North America, and at one of its regattas, he met Peter Barrett from the North Sails loft in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. Barrett urged him to sail in the fall 470 regatta on Pewaukee Lake. With his Multihull Associates-branded sails, Proctor won the breezy Pewaukee event and was promptly offered a job at Barrett’s North loft.

As the 1976 Olympics were on the ­horizon, Proctor continued to focus on the 470, not an easy task for someone 6′2″. “I was trying to stay light enough to skipper the boat, and I got down to around 140 pounds,” he says. “It wasn’t a healthy thing.”

Then he met Australia’s John Bertrand, who was campaigning in Finns and would go on to win a bronze medal as well the 1983 America’s Cup. The Australian was in Pewaukee to learn the sailmaking business in preparation for starting a North loft in Melbourne. “One day, in the offseason, I was at Bertrand’s house, and we both got on the scale, him a Finn sailor and me a 470 skipper. We weighed the same.” It was 10 months before the US Olympic Trials for the 1976 games. “I thought, Oh my God! I need to get back on my diet.”

So Proctor resumed his routine of ­cabbage, vegetables and a lot of running. “That lasted a couple of weeks before the light went on. I thought, Even if I were going to win a gold medal, this isn’t worth it.” He went from 140 to 185 pounds and shifted his focus to the Finn. Greg Fisher, one of Proctor’s close competitors in the Lightning, says: “We were amazed he could go that quickly from one weight to another. But that’s Ched. That’s the kind of stuff he would do.”

While 185 pounds today is pretty light for a Finn, in the 1970s, singlehanders regularly wore water jackets, which quickly evolved from sweatshirts sewn together in the basement to commercially made vests that carried bottles of water high up on the body. “You could wear a maximum of 45 pounds of total gear,” Proctor says. “I would wear a thin wetsuit, some boots and four water bottles that totaled around 35 pounds. With that, I was competitive upwind.”

But like many others who shouldered the weight, it took a toll on his body. At the 1979 Finn Gold Cup in Weymouth, England, he carried four bottles. “I remember pulling the boat out of the water and lying on the beach for 10 minutes before I could get up and walk away from it.”

Today you can easily pick out Proctor ashore or on a boat by the pronounced stoop in his posture. He says it dates back before sailing. “My parents were always concerned that my posture was terrible. I remember being taken to different specialists early on to try to correct it. Sailing probably didn’t help. It’s so easy to hunch over while sailing. Even today, I’m always trying to make an effort to straighten out when hiking. I’m always complaining about crews who don’t hike out enough so that I have to hunch and tilt my head in to see.”

But getting the crew to hike way out isn’t just about his line of sight. Jay Meuller recalls sailing with him on a Thistle. “He would say, ‘Jay, if you can droop-hike all the way up this beat, we’ll be first at the weather mark by 100 yards.’ We’d get a good start, I’d be drooped over the rail the entire way, and sure enough, we’d have a big lead at the weather mark.”

Meuller, who started crewing for Proctor in his early 20s, says: “He knows how to keep the boat constantly moving through the water, making it most efficient. He’s always paying attention to the balance, constantly looking at the draft of the sails and making a lot of minuscule adjustments that you wouldn’t think mattered, but every single time, they did.”

But it’s not all done through ­memory. “He writes down all these things on the deck—the setup, how fast we were going, how many seconds it took to get to full speed from a dead stop,” Meuller says. “By the time we were done, there was ­writing everywhere.”

Ched has been married to his wife, Judy, since 1984. She sailed with him before they started having kids, the two of them finishing second in the Thistle Nationals. Now they sail together mostly in Pequot YC’s Ideal 18s. “She steers. I give instructions and get frustrated,” he says. “She seems to enjoy that.”

They’ve had two children, Tom, who sailed in high school, but a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and his marriage sent him in other directions, and Charlie, who never stopped sailing. On the bulletin board in Proctor’s office is a photo of Charlie frostbiting with him in Interclubs at the Larchmont YC. The boat, No. 27, is ­sailing toward the ­photographer. Proctor is poised to windward in his customary pose, slightly hunched over, steering and trimming the main. To the leeward side is Charlie, wearing a yellow slicker and blue stocking cap. He’s focused on making sure his gloves are on securely. “He must have been 7 or 8,” Ched says, looking at it fondly. The two of them raced for three or four winters before they sold the Interclub, bought Lasers and raced in the frostbite series at the Cedar Point YC in Connecticut. Charlie had a successful run in Blue Jays on Long Island Sound, competing in a boat he rehabbed with his father’s help. In high school, he continued to sail but added cross-country running to his interests.

After high school, he was accepted at Tufts. Although athletics was not his primary reason for going there, he had talked to the cross-country coach as well as the sailing-team coach, Ken Legler.

“In June, the cross-country coach sent out a training schedule. It read: ‘Don’t worry if you don’t do 60 miles every week,’” Proctor says. “Ken’s letter read, ‘Have a nice summer!’ Charlie said, ‘I think I’ll go for sailing.’”

The young Proctor was a standout sailor over his four years with the Jumbos. “I think I always tried to impress upon him the importance of enjoying the effort,” Proctor says, “and the result would be whatever it is and not to worry a whole lot about the end result.”

But the end results have been ­exceptional. In 2016, Ched finished second at the Lightning NAs; in 2017, he was fourth at the Lightning Worlds; and in 2018, he won the Lightning NAs. Charlie, along with Meredith Killion, crewed for him. “Sailing with Charlie definitely increased the fun level,” Proctor says. “He was very organized and always dealt with things in a calm way. At one of the NAs, the vang broke just before the start. He calmly got out a spare piece of Spectra line, lashed it back together, and we were set. Something else failed at that regatta, and I remember him saying, ‘Dad, if you learn anything at this regatta, it should be that lines wear out.’”

In May 2020, Charlie was killed when hit by a car while riding his bicycle in Massachusetts, three weeks shy of his 28th birthday.

“That’s been one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to deal with,” Proctor says. “No one should have to face the loss of a child.”

I got a chance to sail with Proctor while he was preparing for the 2019 Etchells US Nationals. He and his crew, Chris and Monica Morgan, needed a fourth for some pre-event two-boat tuning, and I jumped at the chance. The boat was still on the trailer, with Ched studying the bow. Something was not right. His eyes settled on the two deck chocks.

“I don’t like things like that in my line of vision,” he said, pointing at them. So, Monica crawled under the deck with a wrench while Chris climbed out on the bow with a Phillips head screwdriver, and the chocks ­disappeared. Peace was restored.

Once on the dock, one of the biggest challenges was making sure the main and jib were removed from their bags and correctly unrolled to his satisfaction. He took care of unrolling and rigging the jib himself while we stood on the dock and watched. The main, however, required two people, so he enlisted me, and with a fair amount of instruction—”Don’t unroll it too fast; slower, slower; keep some tension on the leech”—we got it on the boom and hoisted. It was a far cry from the “drop, unroll and hoist” method I’m accustomed to, but, these sails were from his private stock. He handled them like they were religious relics, which in his book, they probably are and have been since the first new sail he bought at age 14.

Even though this was just an informal tuning session against one other boat, which wasn’t even in the water yet, we were in race mode the instant we left the dock. It was blowing around 15 knots, and with Monica on the foredeck, me just behind her, Chris on the main and Ched steering, we were all hiking hard. As the puffs came and went, it was clear that Proctor sensed them first, and he coached us through them: “OK, hike hard, now!” and then, “OK, relax!” With just a little advice, Chris had the main looking better than any Etchells main I’ve ever seen, and he had Monica squeezing the jib in slightly as we tacked and then easing it slightly out on the new tack, trimming as he got back on the wind. He was in his typical hunched mode and occasionally had to remind me to hike out farther so that he could see. But it was all done in a low-key manner.

“I think, over the years, I’ve come more to just enjoy the opportunity to compete and the people I sail with and not worry about the results too much—not take it too personally if I don’t do well,” Proctor said. “When I was sailing the Turnabout, where you needed a crew, I would have trouble finding people to sail with me. I remember my mother taking me aside and saying something to the effect of: ‘You need to treat people properly if you expect them to come back and sail with you.’ I think I took that to heart.”

Monica also crews for Proctor in his Lightning, and sailed with him in their 2019 Lightning North American win.

“Ched changed everything for me,” she says. “He made sailing fun for me again. He proved to me that you can sail and compete at a high level without losing sight of having fun. If we have a crappy race, we have a sandwich, an apple, water, then check the wind and focus on the next start. At the NAs, we had one or two bad races, but each time we just focused on moving forward.”

“He never gets frustrated,” Mueller says. “He just asks questions. He’ll even ask, ‘What are they doing that we’re not?’ and I’d say something like, ‘Their forward crew is hiking out a bit to leeward,’ and he’d say, ‘OK, let’s try that.’ He’s never negative. If we’re getting passed, he wants to find out why because his theory is that there really shouldn’t be a reason why we’re getting passed. And he knows that if you start talking negatively to your well-trained crew, you start losing focus on what’s going on outside the boat.”

A couple of weeks before the Lightning 2019 NAs, at the Canadian Open, his boat flipped and turtled during a jibe. “I came out of that with my ego a little bruised,” says Monica, who was crewing for him. “I had never flipped a Lightning. But Ched’s biggest worry about flipping—other than, of course, maybe destroying our mast—was our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They were drenched. But he just said: ‘It’s OK. Get back in the boat.’ For his age, his energy was more than anyone I know. He was the first one back in the boat, ready to go, and said, ‘Let’s get the water out of the boat and see if we can pass some boats.’”

The appeal of one-designs runs deep for Proctor. Vince Brun, who worked for many years with him at North Sails, says, “Through my whole career there, Ched was always the Lightning guy, the Thistle guy, and all those types of one-design classes.”

Proctor, however, did some work for the 12 Meter Courageous in 1983. It wasn’t his thing. “I remember sailing upwind and thinking, this doesn’t seem like much fun. It’s about as lively as standing on a sidewalk.”

Newer boats? “I sailed a J/80 at Key West Race Week once. On that boat, people sit with their legs over the side, under the lifelines, and it always took a while to get organized to tack. That’s very frustrating to me. When I want to tack, I want to tack.”

Which is probably why he has always stayed true to dinghies, and there, the Lightning is at the top of his list. “The simplicity of the boat in terms of logistics—easy to transport, easy to rig, quick to put in the water and go sailing—and it’s lively, sensitive and somewhat ­intellectually challenging.”

Plus, he adds, “I think I’ve figured out how to make it go faster than most people, and that makes it fun.”

However, Proctor doesn’t keep secrets. In 1993, he came up with an innovative way to quantify tuning a Lightning. “Up until that time, people always looked at how much you blocked the mast partners. I realized that varies considerably based on the location of the chainplates, which there’s quite a wide tolerance on, so the mast doesn’t always sit in exactly the same place. I figured that it really had to do with thinking about the mast, the boat and the headstay as three sides of a triangle, with where the mast goes through the deck as one side of the triangle.”

The Proctor Measurement System is still widely used in the class.

More recently, at the 2019 Lightning Midwinter Championship, his team was out practicing in Miami with a team from Chile, which had a chartered boat that was not going well. They switched boats, made a few changes, and the team from Chile went on to win the regatta. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I just sacrificed my own regatta and helped them win.’ Instead, he was happy he had helped them succeed,” Monica says. “A lot of people don’t do that. They just want to win. The selfless stuff he does, like this, often gets overlooked.”

“It wasn’t unusual for Ched and me to sit down together, even when we were rival sailmakers, and have a beer and talk about pretty much everything,” Fisher says. “On the racecourse, it was full-on, but it was always fair. When we would approach each other in a port-starboard situation, it was rare that either one of us would slam the other. It just wasn’t the way we wanted to play the game. When people get to the level of expertise Ched has, some people, you could say, earn the right to have a little bit of an attitude. But Ched is humble. He is one of the first guys to say, ‘Hmm…. Why do you do that?’ He’s always hungry to learn, to try new things.”

Proctor has long been teased about his ability to put food away, Fisher says. “I remember my wife and I, along with my father and Brian Hayes, going to dinner with Ched. As we all finished, one by one, we would all, without saying a word, hand our plates to him, and he’d finish up ­whatever was left. It just went around the table like that. We didn’t say a word.”

Now, at age 70 and recently retired from North Sails, Proctor is plenty active—­usually biking 20 miles a day and running 3, maintaining a careful diet, reflecting on life, and, of course, spending a lot of time on the water looking at sails. It’s the Proctor way.

The post The Ways of Ched Proctor appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s 8 a.m. Monday at the loft, and a weekly ritual is taking place. Most of us are just back from weekend regattas. It’s time to Monday-morning quarterback our performances and, more important, those of our sails. We talk about how the new Melges 24 jib we’ve given to the current North American champion did in a local event, how the new Star main sent to Italy did in the Star Europeans. There will be emails and reports about how we can make the sails even better.

My turn. I’d gotten into bed about six hours earlier, having towed the loft-owned J/24 from San Francisco to San Diego, behind a retired plumber’s van. We’d sailed a long City Front day in 20-plus knots of wind against tide, so it’s a rough ride on the water followed by an even tougher ride home on the freeway—the glamour of a sailmaker. We’d finish fourth in a regatta we should have handily won. Not good, considering North Sails is paying for the boat, sails, crew food, airfare and all incidentals.

My explanation of our poor performance starts with criticism of my crew: The cockpit person couldn’t tack the genoa in 16 knots of wind. The tactician always had us headed the wrong direction and, more often than not, in bad air. In a place that puts a premium on good starts, my starts were inconsistent. In this venue, it’s all about winning the start and getting to the current relief first. Whiff the start and there’s a lot catching up to do. We whiffed plenty that weekend.

My boss, Vince Brun, stood sipping his coffee silently, listening. He raced or tested sails every weekend; he’d won more world championships in more classes than any of us combined and did not suffer fools gladly—especially when it came to sailboat racing. After about 15 minutes, he could contain himself no longer.

“Chris, you know what I think?” he blurted out in his distinct Brazilian accent. “I think you were slow.”

I stammered back, “No way.”

How could we be? We sailed a proven boat that Brun himself had just sailed to a close second at the J/24 Worlds in the same venue. The sails were new and identical to what the regatta winner used. We were at max weight, and I followed the tuning guide that I myself had written.

I debriefed with my team a few days later, telling them about Brun’s comment. To my surprise, they agreed, ­recalling times we had to tack off a lift because we could not hang off a leeward boat, or the time, even after a good start, we were quickly back in the noise of the fleet.

Later in the week, Brun reminded me that everyone is going to get a few bad starts now and then, and everyone is going to have a hard time tacking a big genoa in 18 knots of wind. Having more boatspeed than your competition erases those inevitable mistakes. True as that might be, the most frustrating part to me was that we hadn’t realized we were slow and therefore could not fix what we didn’t know was broken. If you want to do well in one-design racing, you at least have to be as fast as the top boats. And equally important, you must be able to tell when you’re not. I vowed to ­figure this out, and with the help of Brun and my team, we eventually did, pinpointing the need to identify problems and then making changes on the fly to rectify them.

Some obvious signs of being slow upwind are when you get a good start, on the lifted tack, but often have to tack soon after because of the effects of other boats; you are midfleet and fail to move up in the fleet on the upwind legs; in shifty conditions, you are most often on the wrong (headed) tack; boats to leeward and ahead or to bow even quickly pinch you off; boats to windward are always getting the puffs first and shearing up and away from you. Sound familiar?

The same is true downwind: You rarely gain boats; you can never get your boat down below the line of the boat ahead to be able to “crush” them when you jibe; you often find yourself jibing only to keep your air clear, not because of a shift.

The best way to know you’re slow is to watch boats close to you—the ones sailing in the same wind and waves—and monitor how you are doing relative to them with regard to your height and speed. If I am steering, I like the tactician (or one of the most experienced sailors) to constantly call how our performance stacks up against boats closest to us. To ensure clear, concise communication, always reference your performance against the other boat or boats.

The audio track should be quite simple: “We are lower and slower, net loss; even, even; net even; higher and faster, net gain;” Information that helps the helmsman, jib, main and spinnaker trimmers adjust to keep the boat at maximum speed. This monitoring is important no matter where you are in the fleet. Human nature makes the feedback easier to give when you are near the front of the fleet, but from an overall ­performance ­perspective, feedback is much more valuable when you are working to dig out of the back of the fleet. The same talk track needs to continue downwind with the references reversed (lower and faster being good).

When making calls for relative performance upwind, always reference your boat’s performance, and always have the same person calling relative performance. When starting a new lineup (like after a tack), immediately note the compass heading or, if the boat you are racing is far away, use a hand-bearing compass get a bearing on it. Being on the outside of a lift or the leeward boat in a header can throw off your judgment if you do not know your initial heading.

The performance caller must note the distance that the boats are separated from each other athwartships. Being in the same wind makes comparisons more accurate. The more separation, the more likely you are to be in different winds.

The person calling is looking for two things and then a combination. First is comparative speed through the water. Second is how close you are sailing to the wind compared with the other boat. A boat sailing closer to the wind is “gaining gauge,” while a boat sailing lower is “losing gauge.”

Combining speed and height also gives the total performance of one boat versus the other. A boat that is higher and faster has better velocity made good. A boat that is lower and slower has worse VMG. Where the call gets tricky is when your opponent is better than you on only one of the two parameters. For example, if a boat is higher and slower, its VMG could be better, worse or the same as yours. These judgments come with experience, and that is why having the same person calling them is helpful. The more you do it, the better you get.

Your judgment about relative performance can be thrown off as a line of wind or a puff approaches, so take note of the relative position of the boats before that happens. Of course, the boat that gets the pressure first will gain.

It gets harder to see ­relative differences when there’s a significant distance between boats because the other boat will very likely be in different wind. In that case, use a hand-bearing compass to “shoot” the angle of the other boat. Doing this multiple times can tell you whether you’re gaining.

The real gain in judging ­relative performance comes when your team starts recognizing what’s making the other boat faster or slower, and then acting on that information aboard your boat. The toughest question in ­sailboat racing is, “How do you do tactics on a slow boat?” The answer is always: “You can’t.” Sail fast, and good tactics will follow.

Ed.’s note: Chris Snow now offers private coaching services; more at www.thefavoredend.com

The post How To Make Adjustments When You’re Slow appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s a hot late afternoon at the Houston YC, and the sea breeze that kicked in earlier in the afternoon is winding down. At the boat ramp, two Finns have just been hosed off and are being put away for the day when a nondescript, silver Toyota Tundra pickup truck pulls in and stops a short distance away. One sailor, still in his kit from the afternoon training session, walks to the pickup truck and holds his cellphone to the truck window. The driver does the same on the opposite side.

It’s not a high-tech drug deal, but rather an airdrop that exchanges a file over a Bluetooth connection. The driver, Luther Carpenter, is the US Olympic Finn coach, and the sailor is Luke Muller, who has just been named the US Finn representative for the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Carpenter is transferring video of the day’s training session, which Muller, along with his training partner, Eric Anderson, will pore over after dinner until it’s time to call it a day. It’s all part of the new normal for Olympic training—no traveling, lots of training at one venue, and an intentionally over-the-top focus on health that includes keeping one’s distance from others, even the coach.

The challenge adds an additional layer to an already complex program of preparedness for what is arguably one of the pinnacles of the sport, but one Muller and team fully embrace. It’s part of a trajectory he’s been on since establishing himself in the Laser class, ­winning the 2013 US Nationals at the ripe old age of 17. As the 6-foot-3-inch teenager got bigger, it was a natural progression to the Finn. “He started showing up at European championships,” Carpenter recalls. “He was somehow finding a boat—not the best boat, didn’t have the best mast, had a borrowed sail—and was just doing it.”

RELATED: Detours To Tokyo

He joined the US Sailing Squad in 2014 at age 18 and became a member of the US Sailing team two years later, while attending Stanford, where he captained the sailing team for the 2016 to 2017 academic year. But the goal, maybe unspoken, always quivered on the horizon. “I have friends and family who say, ‘Oh, you always wanted to go to the Olympics,’” Muller says. “I always wanted to, but I never believed I could until much later.”

He got his first taste of the Olympics when Carpenter brought him to Rio to train with Caleb Paine in preparation for the 2016 Games. “We got him some good gear to use,” Carpenter says. “That was very encouraging for him.”

Paine would go on to win a bronze medal and took the next year off. Carpenter, meanwhile, traveled with Muller on the Finn circuit. “I wanted to get a good sense for what he was good at and what kind of work we still needed to focus on,” Carpenter says.

Paine returned the ­following year, and the two of them worked as training partners. “It was the veteran bronze medalist trying to impart his wisdom to the young pup,” Carpenter says. “And of course, when the young pup threatened him a bit, it unnerved him a little.”

But still, all eyes were on Paine.

On the second day of the 2018 Sailing World Championships in Denmark, 22-year-old Muller revealed a glimmer of his potential, winning two of three races in very difficult conditions. Carpenter recalls: “The entire Finn world opened their eyes and asked, ‘What’s going on here?’ It’s not an easy class to go out there and win any given world championship race, and winning two in a row on a tricky day was huge.”

Muller says, “I got a lot of kudos from the fleet that day, but my good fortune didn’t last, and I struggled for the rest of the event.” Muller barely finished in the top third of the fleet; Paine was 12th.

“That was when I decided to leave school because I knew that if I dedicated all my effort into sailing the Finn, I had a chance of becoming ­world-class,” Muller says.

Why the success in those two races? Says Carpenter: “The Finn is a free-pumping class, and in those races, the wind was a very fragile 10 knots, so it was a ton of work, but not real obvious about how to pump most efficiently to get down the waves. And Luke just had one of those days where he really had the angles and technique figured out. In both races, he came from behind to win on the runs.”

As the Finn circuit continued, Muller’s results improved. “I started beating [Paine] in a series of events, and I started believing I could make it to the Games. I wasn’t focused on him, per se, but things were going my way.”

The events to which he refers determine the US Finn representative to the 2020, now 2021, Games: the 2019 Finn World Cup in Melbourne, Australia, the Hempel World Cup Series in Miami, and the 2020 Finn Gold Cup. In the 2019 Gold Cup, Muller finished 17th to Paine’s 25th. In Miami, Paine finished first, with Muller third, leaving Muller still ahead in Trials points. And when the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 Gold Cup, that was it—Muller was going to Tokyo.

“I didn’t think it was likely I could go to the Games until I was leading on points,” he says. “It was a good feeling, and gratifying that all the hard work was paying off. At the same time, I just wanted to improve. It wasn’t all about qualifying for the Olympics or getting a certain race result or ranking. It was about improving and consistently being at the top of the fleet.”

Now Muller, Anderson and Carpenter’s world is circumscribed by Galveston Bay. “We’ve been in Houston because Luther lives here, and it was fine when we arrived. But when it deteriorated, we tightened up,” Muller says. “We were living with family and friends, and though we were super grateful to be with them, it just wasn’t a situation we could control, so Eric and I moved into our own place.”

On the water, they carry their own drinks and food, and when they talk with Carpenter, in the coach’s boat, it’s from a distance. “When campaigning, we get to see so many different local cultures all over the world, and things are a little different now,” Muller says. “We cook a lot more at home, and I’ve learned how to make a darn good cup of coffee.”

But there’s a lemonade-from-lemons element to their situation: Without practice time eaten up by long flights, they can focus entirely on time in the boat. “We are sailing much more consistently and for longer blocks without rest than we normally would,” Muller says.

Carpenter says it allows them to better progress on specifics. “Things we know we need to work on,” he says, “like how to steer around a patch of bad waves or how to keep the angle of the bow into a difficult wave set of three, and so on.”

The fact that there will be no “next” Olympics for the Finn is a lingering reality, but one they’ve learned to accept. “On the one hand, it’s disappointing,” Carpenter says, “but on the other, it gives a real sense of urgency to our work. You can’t have the mindset of, ‘Well, I might not get there in the first quad, but hopefully I’ll get there in the next.’ You can’t say, ‘I can work on this tomorrow.’”

For Muller, it’s an ­opportunity. “I want to represent the US sailing community really well, and the fact that this is the last time the Finn is in the Games makes that responsibility even greater.”

The post Muller’s Winding Path to the Olympics appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s a December night in 2015, and Matt Scharl is restless in the “guest room” set up for him in an office inside Gougeon Brothers boat shop on the bank of the Saginaw River in Bay City, Michigan. Out on the shop floor is the unmistakable white trimaran Adagio, designed and built in 1969 by the Gougeon ­brothers, Meade and Jan.

Earlier in the day, Scharl stood alongside Meade and Gougeon Brothers’ president and CEO, Alan Gurski, assessing Adagio’s winter worklist. Meade’s primary concern was a 3-foot section of track that kept separating from the mast. Now, late at night and alone, Scharl can’t resist “popping a few screws,” and before long, he’s extracted the entire track. When he finally stops, the track is on the shop floor among chunks of epoxy and bits of wire.

“It’s wasn’t what they had in mind,” Scharl says, recounting the story with a chuckle, “but I did it anyway.”

He finally turned in at 3 a.m., and when he heard voices inside the shop a few hours later, he got up and walked out to the boat to find Gurski and Gougeon bewildered. “With my toothbrush hanging from my mouth,” he says, “I lean in between them and say: “Huh. That was on there when I went to bed.”

That night was the beginning of a transformation for Adagio, the most legendary craft among the tight-knit Great Lakes multihull crowd. Over 50 years of racing this unique and experimental trimaran, the Gougeons amassed a trove of trophies and accolades, but with Meade’s health declining in the years before his passing in 2017, he had handed the responsibility to son Ben and son-in-law Gurski, both of whom seized the opportunity to ensure that the boat remained competitive. Work on boats is what they do at Gougeon, especially in the winter, and they were honored to continue Meade’s great experiment.

“I knew then the boat was famous and unique and had quite a history to it,” Gurski says. “That being said, she was getting old and showing her age. Meade had a philosophy that the boat needed to last only as long as he would last. As he got older, some things on the boat went undone—or got done quickly for another day of sailing.”

For Ben Gougeon, one of 10 children, the boat was never really more than another vessel used for family outings and weeknight races in the ­once-thriving Bay City racing scene. As a kid, he says, he was more or less ballast. “Sailing came so naturally to my father, it was hard for him to teach others how to sail. It was more like, pull on that red line until I tell you to stop,” Gougeon says. “At the time, I never appreciated her for what she was. To me, as a kid, it was normal. I didn’t realize the vast differences between Adagio and all the other multihulls.”

Nor did he realize how fast the boat was, and still is today: “It used to drive me crazy because whenever we’d finish a race, my dad would hove to, and we’d sit there and wait for every boat to finish. We’d be around the course in like 20 minutes and then wait for what felt like hours. It wasn’t that he wanted to show everyone that he’d won; he was too humble for that. He just thought it was customary to wait for all the boats to come in, and that’s what he would do. He would talk to people as they came by and congratulate them on a good race and that kind of thing.”

Only once Gougeon, who now works for the company, and Gurski, who also considers himself a late-comer to competitive sailing, started learning how to sail the boat under the tutelage of the Gougeon brothers did they realize what they’d been bestowed. “We fell in love with it,” Gurski says. “Then came the caretaking part of it, which comes from building a relationship with the boat, sailing it and racing. It’s like your dad’s old Chevy; you develop an affection for it, and then find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time maintaining and repairing it. Part of what makes us unique as a crew—and as a family, and us as a company—is that we really like to work with our hands. It’s therapy for us in the boat shop; it keeps us closer to our customers, using our products to constantly maintain and repair our own boats.”

Initially they didn’t really know what the boat needed, but by the second season, they started to have a long-term vision of what its restoration would look like over the next 10 years, being realistic about what was most important—and ­having the budget to do it right.

“For example, a few years ago, a crack developed in the centerboard trunk, and every time we went over a wave, the boat would fill up with water,” Gurski says. “That winter’s job was to tear the boat in half, tear out the centerboard trunk, and then put it back in. That wasn’t fun.”

It was Meade who eventually enlisted Scharl to assist his son and Gurski himself with updating and racing the boat. “He said he was getting too old to sail Adagio, and he asked me to come to Bay City to help with the boat,” Scharl says. “I said, ‘Sure, but I’d like to sail it once to get an idea of what is involved.’ What I realized right away was that her sails were unforgiving, the lead positions were not optimal, and the hardware was aging on the boat.”

So began Adagio’s transformation at the hands of Gougeon, Gurski and Scharl.

“Over the years, Meade would try stuff, put it on the boat, but then never take it off if it didn’t work. There was a lot of unnecessary stuff on the boat,” Scharl says. “So the primary thing was to simplify it and get a good set of modern sails. It was about making the boat easier to sail. It weighs only 2,600 pounds to begin with, so there wasn’t much room to take much weight out.”

Roughly 300 hours of labor went into the boat in the first year, 200 the next, and by the third, the work list was much smaller. That was when they finally added a traveler, engineered by Gurski and built in-house by the company’s craftsmen. “We had to do quite a bit of reinforcing to support the traveler on the transom,” Gougeon says. “It’s sort of odd the way it’s laid out because there’s a back cabin with a hatch. The traveler currently sits over that hatch, but no one goes back there anyway. It has made a huge difference on the boat. Before, we’d be blowing the sails in the gusts and have to reset them. The traveler greatly ­simplified the sailing of the boat.”

Adagio’s sail number is E5, Gurski explains. The E stands for experiment: “Adagio is Meade’s fifth experiment in boat design and construction, so I like to say there were four failures before it. It took until 1969 to get to Meade’s E5. And it just so happens that Adagio, for what she’s built do to—which is light-air sailing in the Great Lakes—holds true. She’s a light-air machine, and when it’s 8 to 10 knots, any boat in any fleet can’t hold up to her. We could make her stronger, sure, but we’d be hard-pressed to build her stronger at the same weight, or lighter. He got it right, so why change a good thing?”

Gougeon says his father was never really attached to any one particular idea, and that’s why the boat was forever evolving: “He was all for making changes for a tenth more speed and open to any changes that might allow for that. He would try to reduce the weight to make something work better, pushing it lighter and lighter until it broke, and then he’d go back to that point so it didn’t break again.”

Today, not much of his father’s tinkering remains, Gougeon says. Most of the original tiller is there, but ­everything’s been pretty much replaced on the boat, except the main center hull.

Scharl says Adagio is now close to perfect. “It’s crazy how fast the boat is,” he says, “but the number one thing is how quiet it is. It doesn’t make any noise going through the water. Up to 18 knots downwind, it’s absolutely quiet. Meade’s vision in 1969 is so spot-on today. I look at a lot of designs today, and I’m like, ‘Meh…they’re good, but they’re all condition-based.’ What Adagio does in all conditions is incredible. In winds less than 10 knots, no one is touching that boat. In the right conditions, Adagio would beat every boat by 15 miles—I guarantee that. It destroys TP52s and Great Lakes 70s because it’s ­incredibly slippery.”

Scharl’s boasts, of course, are backed by results, including a multihull division win in the 2020 Port Huron to Mackinac Race, a brutal upwind slog that saw most of its competitors retire. The previous year, the team of Scharl, Gurski and Gougeon finished second—by 14 seconds—to the 60-foot trimaran Earth Voyager. In 2016, 2017 and 2018 Adagio took home first-place honors. Countless victories beforehand with Meade and Jan and many others on board stand as a ­testament to its prowess.

Adagio’s results reflect its proof of design, and its construction technique as well, Gougeon says. “It’s been around since the very beginning of the company,” he says, “so, after so many years, it stands out as a longevity thing. This boat was built with no mechanical fasteners in it—other than the stays that hold down the amas. It’s a testament to the epoxy, and certainly as she got faster in the earlier days and won a lot of races, it certainly helped promote West System to what it is today.”

As a sort of ­sailing shrine to the Gougeon family and the company it built more than 50 years ago, Adagio is an everlasting experiment that continues what they started when they put glue to wood. While nobody has ever tried to buy the boat, Gougeon says, it’s never been for sale anyway. Some things are not for sale, especially something this unique. There’s just not a better experience on a sailboat than Adagio going downwind, surfing waves, Gurski says. The sensation under spinnaker on this boat is magical. The quiet, the speed and the stillness are fantastic—just as Meade knew it would be.

The post Gougeon’s Everlasting Experiment appeared first on Sailing World.

As the bow soars past a mark on Italy’s Lake Garda, 22-year-old Odile van Aanholt isn’t admiring the view of the cliffs behind her or the shoreline ahead, packed with European sunbathers. Her eyes are scanning critical points around the 22-foot foiler as the apparent wind swings forward: the flapping luff of the loaded spinnaker, her mainsail trimmer fighting to balance the boat on the skinny, V-shaped foil skimming below the surface to leeward and the explosion of activity as Van Aanholt and her three teammates, the 20-somethings of Kingdom Team Netherlands, make rapid adjustments before everything goes quiet and the boat accelerates downwind. She takes it all in, pinching herself at the awesomeness of the experience.

But there’s a maneuver coming up and only 20 seconds to get set for the turn. “We’ve learned we have to do things early,” says van Aanholt, who has been alternating between skipper and mainsail trimmer in the early stages of training on the new boat. The Dutch squad is using the one-design Persico 69F and its 2020 racing circuit to train for the Youth America’s Cup in Auckland in 2021, which will also be sailed in foiling monohulls.

This is a brave and fast new world for van Aanholt, the Olympic49erFX helm born in Curaçao, who will be missing a Tokyo appearance as she and her teammates prepare for an Auckland appearance instead. The craft of choice is the Persico 69F, built in Italy by the same composite builders responsible for foil arms of all the AC75s, among many other high-tech things. The one-design class has been several years in development, and 2020 marked its official arrival on the world stage. It’s the only thing close to the AC9F to be used in the Youth America’s Cup, van Aanholt says, and for a team of four young sailors with minimal foiling experience, it was the obvious choice to prepare. Van Aanholt and her Dutch 49er counterpart, Bart Lambriex, chartered one earlier this year and trained in Holland along with Emma Savelon and Jorden van Rooijen. Organizers of the Persico 69F Cup circuit on Lake Garda were thrilled to have a youth team, and now have Youth America’s Cup squads from Italy, Hong Kong and Switzerland getting in on the action with boats of their own.

“We tried it in the Netherlands first, and while it’s a fun boat to sail, we had a lot to learn,” says van Aanholt, whose father, Cor, competed in the Laser class in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and sister, Philipine, in the London and Rio Olympics. “There are a lot of things going on in the boat. The first day of sailing was super chaotic because we didn’t know how to find the balance. It was hard to get it stable right from the beginning, but it’s like a big 49er, so for skiff sailors it should be easy to step into. The foiling is a whole different aspect requiring faster reaction times, so that took some getting used to. A sailor who knows what they’re doing would quite easily jump into it and then figure out the foils.”

The boat weighs only about 800 pounds, and while it’s originally designed for a crew of three, they’ve adapted their roles to sailing with four, given they’re all relative featherweights. Foiling comes easy in 7 knots of wind, downwind, van Aanholt says. Upwind, it takes 9 knots to get flying. In displacement mode, it’s a vastly different experience, she says, which requires patience and resisting the urge to put the bow down and reach around the course on the foil. “To go foiling takes effort and boatspeed,” she says. “So you have to make sure you can when you make the call.” From off the boat, the 69F appears to be quite a complex machine, with the ­high-aspect daggerboard, adjustable rudder rake, manually adjustable foils (in/out and rake) and hiking racks. For the Dutch team, the helmsperson controls rudder rake; the main trimmer balances the boat; the headsail trimmer manages the jib and kite; and the foil controller manages the appendages. With three crew, van Aanholt says, there’s quite a bit of shared responsibilities. “Every tack and every jibe you’re pulling the foil up and down. You can play with it a lot. And there’s a lot of sheet movement on the main, which is why it is such a physical position on the boat.” It’s also why she prefers it to the helm.

Boat setup is relatively straightforward, she adds. The first time they sailed in Holland, they had it rigged in four hours: Hiking racks go on, foils inserted from beneath, rig up, sail controls on, and off you go. “It looks more difficult than it is,” van Aanholt says. With the benefit of their training sessions in Holland, van Aanholt says they were better prepared than other new teams when they entered the second event of the Persico 69F Cup series on Garda. As relative unknowns, their strategy was to learn from others and avoid hitting anyone, a strategy that worked fine—they won five of 12 races and sailed to top of the standings.

“It was fun racing and very close,” van Aanholt says, “so we’ll see in the next regatta where we really stand. For now, we need to improve boathandling and our communications as a team because we need to make fast decisions and be clear about who has to do what. We know we need to be even quicker than we thought.”

The post Garda’s Fantastic Foilers appeared first on Sailing World.

From where Dan Morris ­usually stands on board American Magic’s 75-foot ­foiling America’s Cup yacht, the view is pretty spectacular. It’s a perspective only a handful of humans will ever experience. It’s wet and windy, and it’s Zen-like when the boat soars at 40 knots. As the portside headsail trimmer, Morris has the luxury of full visibility of his towering sail. He can see up the leech and across the acreage of black cloth, its dozens of yarns flickering and painting a picture of the wind as it streams across both sides of the sail and exits with full force in his face. He can observe the leeward side of the twin-skinned mainsail as well, plus the big grinder in front of him, relentlessly pumping hydraulic oil so he can make microadjustments at will. This is life in the slot for Morris, and life is good when all senses are being bombarded.

Sights in the Slot

I’m on the port forward ­pedestal, facing forward, so I can see what’s coming on the water from only about 30 seconds out. I can’t see what’s coming at 10 seconds. Because I’m trimming on the leeward side, I can see the jib really well, but with all the end-plating we do on the mainsail, I can’t see the windward side at all. I can see way out in front of me, but I can’t see the gust that’s going to hit in three seconds. It’s quite different from a normal boat in that way.

On starboard tack, I’m in this deep chasm of a cockpit—up to my shoulders more or less. The wind rushes through the slot, and there’s so much wind in my face that my eyes are always watering. I don’t wear sunglasses when I sail because they change the way I see the breeze and the sails, so I’m always squinting as hard as I can to keep them from ­watering too much.

One of the coolest things about being on the leeward side trimming the sail is there’s never that mental trade-off of “should I be hiking or trimming the sail perfectly?” like I would on normal boat. I always have sight of my sails, something I never get on most boats.

When I look to leeward, all I see is a massive plume of spray coming off the foil. That’s when I realize how fast we are going. I’m looking at our targets on the display, and trim to them most of the time—unless we are in a different mode for tactical reasons. I’m looking at the leech, the entry of the sail, and trying to balance the power from top to bottom.

If we want to go fast, we need a flatter, more twisted sail. If we want to go high mode, we want a deeper sail, so I have to balance the power across the whole sail. That’s the coolest thing about these boats: I can see the entire sail and make continual adjustments. When I sail a conventional boat, I can get only a snapshot of the sail profile when I go to leeward, and then go hike and try to know what the sail looks like from the leeward side. On the AC75, trim is instantaneous; I can make any adjustment I need at any time. I never have to decide whether it’s worth leaving the rail to make an adjustment. It’s always worth the adjustment.

When I’m on the weather side, on the opposite tack, I’m grinding more, but I get to have a look out of the boat and see the breeze; that’s when I can sort of calibrate myself. I have a better look at what the main trimmer and driver can see with the mainsail; I can see the wind, see how the boat is reacting, and link these mental images together when I’m back on the other tack.

The other part of my sight is that I have this massive human in front of me pumping away, and he can block my view sometimes, so I have to look around him as well. Also, the mainsail is big and always moving, and it can block my view of other things. That’s the big trade-off: I can see my sail, but I can never see upwind of what I’m ­trimming to.

The Sounds of Efficiency

When I’m on the leeward side and trimming, I can’t hear anything that anyone says on the boat. Ever. Terry (Hutchinson) is right behind me, and he and Dean (Barker, helmsman) and Paul (Goodison, mainsail trimmer) all have comms, and they can speak into their microphones. The rest of us have earpieces, but there’s so much wind going over my face and past my ears that a lot of what I hear is like having my head out the car window on a freeway.

I feel changes to the boat, for sure—with my entire body—and in my position, I really have to anticipate. If I know it’s going to be shifty and we just got into a puff, I know we’re probably going to be going into a lull pretty soon, so I’m planning for what my next move is going to be and what needs to happen in what order. It’s not quite the same as visual anticipation, but it links into the hearing part of sailing the boat in that any verbal cue I get off Dean or Goodie saying, for example, “The breeze is building” or “Shot coming,” I can be ready for it. On regular boats, the trimmer is usually calling the breeze back to the driver, but with this, it’s opposite. Dean calls out what he sees in the breeze, and that’s a call to me to be prepared to make an adjustment to match what he’s going to do with the wheel and what Goodie is going to do with the mainsail.

Going into a tack, I hear the calls coming from Dean—always super calm and neutral. It’s a steady, “Set up tack, and then 3…2…1….” The cadence from Dean is always the same. He’s soft-spoken, so I always have to be searching for it. Then I go straight to my processes. Once the boat starts to turn and we start to slow down a bit, some of the wind noise goes away. The foils get a bit quieter, then the traveler car and sails cross the boat, and that’s quite noisy. When the mainsail pops, ­everyone knows it. It’s a big mainsail with two skins and twice the sets of battens popping. As we build speed again, all the other noises come back. Hopefully the foils are not making too much noise, but sometimes they do, and that’s just water over the trailing edge, just like the hum on a 420 ­centerboard on a windy reach.

In and out of any maneuver, we’ve got the guys pumping a lot of oil to get the boat settled. Imagine coming out of a maneuver on any big boat; there’s a lot going on with sails being eased and retrimmed or flattened and deepened, and that takes energy, so everyone is just hammering away at the handles. I hear the grunts of the big dudes as they’re putting in massive effort. The electric pumps for the foils are whining away, like they do on a canting-keel boat. Then it gets quiets right out the maneuver, and I just hear the wind rushing over my ears and the comms from Dean and Goodie about what we’re going into next.

The Feel of Fast

The AC75 feels like a big Airbus jumbo jet. Everything is so big and loaded. It’s not the same as with a Moth, which is loose and fast; this thing is very locked-in and smooth. It’s a giant piece of machinery, which makes it feel slower, but the speeds are really high. And even though it is this big locked-in thing, when we go through gusts and lulls and have big changes in lift on the foils, the speed changes fast, so the boat can get loose sometimes. If it does, my feet are trying to hold onto the deck as best I can, which sounds silly, but I’m always trying to stay connected to the boat. If I don’t, I get tossed around a bit. It’s like standing in the back of a pickup truck doing doughnuts in a parking lot. My hands are either on the handles or on the sheet so I have something to hold onto, but when we bear away, it’s full-on G-forces, so I have to brace myself against something. One thing for sure is it brings real fatigue into my lower body from stabilizing myself all day.

When I’m trimming, the sheet is pretty loaded and I have to be accurate with every adjustment, so I really have to have a firm hand on the sheet so I never accidentally overease it. The jib is very high-aspect, so a small ease on the sheet does a lot to the shape of the sail, top to bottom.

When we take off, I get a good hosing from the foil arm. It’s worse for the guys on the windward side. Water comes at me with pretty good force when we’re going that fast, so it’s cold. Usually it’s really cold at the beginning of the day, but once I’m warmed up, it’s not a big deal. The wettest part is takeoff because the whole boat is in displacement mode and both foils arms are submerged, but once we’re up on the foil and in the air, it’s pretty dry.

The Smells and Tastes of Team Effort

I sail with Luke (Payne) ­opposite me on the pedestal. He’s one of my best friends and an awesome guy to sail with, and yes, he’s got proper odor. We used to sail against each other in the match racing and he had the same scent, but it’s a very comfortable scent to me to go racing. Other than that, it’s hard to smell anything on the boat because your nose gets really dried out because of the wind flow. But the one defining smell of this campaign, for real, is the smell of good, hot coffee. We are now in the land of coffee. New Zealand has some of the best coffee in the world, and I guess that’s because they love it so much. All the boys in the boat love coffee. I suppose we all drink a bit too much, but there’s a camaraderie to it as well. You have your best meetings when you have a coffee together. (Team testing manager) Anderson Reggio is also a coffee lover. He has a little 12-volt espresso maker that he brings out with him on the chase boat. He’s an analytics guy, so he likes it right. He’ll have his espresso that he makes midday, and if I’m lucky, I might get one off him. I’d be in favor of having a proper espresso set up on the chase boat. If I were at the top and in a position to make big team decisions, that would be the first thing I would do.

RELATED: Weighing In On The AC75

There’s also the smell of the base in the morning. It’s the smell of work. These boats are heavily reliant on hydraulics, so the smell of the oil is always there. That’s the first scent that hits me when I come into the base. After that, I check my gear in the container with the drying room and make sure my personal kit is ready for the day. As you can imagine, there’s a pretty foul smell in there with 20 guys’ gear and wetsuits hanging in here. We have long days on the water, and you just rinse it and hang it up; it’s close to the smell of a hockey locker room.

Then, it’s breakfast. We’re lucky to have good teammates sort out our food, always making sure we have nutritious food, and that we get our bacon. I love the smell of warm breakfast, especially when I don’t have to make it myself.

On the water, once you get out and away from the city, the air is definitely fresh and clean, especially when the breeze is coming off the ocean—that’s always a treat.

The Sense of Space

As high-tech and wired as the boat is, there is a definite seat-of-your-pants element to it as well. We’re not sitting, per se, but I definitely feel all the subtle motions of the boat. I have the performance numbers in front of me all the time, but they’re more of a report card of how we did in the last second or two; they don’t tell us how we’re doing in that instant. Feel is different for everyone, so it’s a hard one to describe. When you take off enough times, you get a feel for ­anticipating what the boat will do next and what it needs in order to do that.

Like any boat, flat is fast, and whatever the perfect heel angle might be, we have to stick to it. Heel angle is huge, and that’s one we can get from sight, especially for the guys looking aft; they’ll be looking at the horizon across the transom. But I also get that heel sensation through my feet; I can instantly feel changes to heel angle before I see it.

When the windward foil gets dropped, that’s essentially the start of the turn, and everything is focused on how that foil responds to the water. If it connects well and everything goes right, it’s very fluid. That’s all on (flight controller) Andrew Campbell. I don’t envy his job at all and don’t want anything to do with it—ever. He has to get it right. If just one little thing goes wrong when the foil goes into the water, it has a huge effect for a bit after the maneuver. If it enters well, the attitude and feel of the boat don’t change at all. It feels seamless. The heel angle is consistent, and we exit not much slower than when we started the turn. It’s magical when it happens. If it doesn’t go in perfectly, it throws off the way the boat feels and the way it reacts to everything else. In that case, everything needs to get readjusted; everything on the boat is moving, the rate of turn is changing, and you’re slower out of the maneuver. It’s a huge effort to get back up to speed. We’re still foiling and going fast, but everything is unsettled, and it’s a big job to lock it all in again.

I’m also feeling the pitch of the boat; the bow up-down trim is huge. The foils have a big effect on that, but so do the sails. As much as I’m feeling the heel angle and using that to judge how to balance the power in the sails, I’m also thinking about how my sail trim affects the pitch. The 75s being so big, the boat is quite steady when we dial in the pitch.

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