Type II Fun: An experience that’s miserable in real time but great once it’s astern. It’s also the kind of fun that Christina and Justin Wolfe, of Orcas Island, Washington, gravitate toward.

Case in point: Christina, the 2023 Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year, was the top female finisher in 12 triathlons inside of 12 months, and Justin has won an Ironman. He also beat Lance Armstrong on paper in a time trial, but that’s a story for another space. Together, sailing doublehanded, they crossed the Atlantic, raced to Hawaii (three times), and finished second overall in the 2023 Rolex Middle Sea Race.

These accomplishments didn’t arrive without time spent dwelling inside personal pain caves. For the Wolfes, the lessons mastered on grueling runs, swims, endless road-bike rides and training sessions have yielded a rock-solid foundation for serious offshore racing.

For example, hours into a rough-and-tumble 2023 Rolex Fastnet Race, Christina cracked multiple ribs but kept racing. “I helped her grind,” Justin says, “but that was it.”

The Wolfes pressed Red Ruby, their co-owned Jeanneau Sunfast 3300, to fourth place overall in IRC 2 (98 boats) and seventh place in the IRC Two Handed class (106 boats).

Better still, Christina was awarded the Fastnet Race’s Maite de Arambalza Trophy for the fastest female skipper in the IRC division.

“We very much treat a lot of the races that we do as endurance events,” Christina says. “This isn’t to say that it’s fun all the time.” She cites cyclist Greg LeMond’s famous quote about how things never get easier, you just go faster. “It’s something we’re more used to—that ­feeling of being uncomfortable.”

The Wolfes met in 1995 when Justin bought a Carl Schumacher-designed Sonoma 30. He was teaching sailing at Seattle Yacht Club, where the University of Washington sailing team practiced. She was an undergrad at UW, earning a degree in business and finance, and gaining ­dinghy-racing expertise on the team. He wanted to race in the local ­two-handed “Jack and Jill” series and, as he says, “She was the best Jill around.”

A deep sailing and life partnership formed. Since then, they’ve sailed 95 percent of their miles together and two-handed.

They’ve also spent years in Stony Brook, New York; Norman, Oklahoma; and Austin, Texas. Justin studied meteorology in grad school at Stony Brook University before working as a weather router for a commercial-­shipping company, and then designing large-scale wind farms. Christina, who holds a Master’s from Stony Brook in biology, worked at the University of Oklahoma and, later, at a large environmental nonprofit. These were career-building years, but the Wolfes filled them with Type II fun. “I ended up becoming a strong cyclist because I was riding around with two dudes, trying to hold their wheels and not get dropped for a 100-mile ride,” Christina says.

Serious sailing reemerged in 2012. The Wolfes were living in Madrid when they bought Shearwater, a J/120, in Annapolis, and doublehanded it to Portugal. They relocated to Austin in 2013 and, in 2014, bought a Schumacher 28, which they raced on nearby Lake Travis. The pair ­doublehanded the 2014 Pacific Cup aboard Shearwater, and they returned in 2016—again doublehanded—with their Schumacher 28. (Note: They raced doublehanded to the Aloha State again in 2022 aboard Raku; see below.)

“Our strength is that we don’t have individual strengths,” says Justin of their respective onboard roles. “So, we’re not reliant on one person to take care of some aspect that will fall apart if that person can’t do it.”

Christina agrees: “We’ve been racing different sports for so long, and one of the approaches—especially with triathlon—that we took was to train the weakness so that, across the board, you don’t have any holes.”

An example of this, she says, was that years ago, the team started giving her a ton more tiller time. “Now, when we race, it’s pretty seamless, where we are both all over the boat, transitioning from one thing to the other,” she says.

Forever on the move, in 2017, the Wolfes relocated to Orcas Island, Washington, purchased a solar-power business, and started winning local races. And when the pandemic hit, they found themselves island-bound with Raku, their new-to-them J/111, and a community of sailors, including Ron Rosenberg, a multitime world champion and Olympic-level coach. Rosenberg was spooling up some local coaching, including with the Pacific Northwest’s now 40-plus-strong “J/Pod” of J/70s, which the Wolfes joined.

“They’re both such humble, sincere, give-it-your-all athletes, they quickly progressed,” Rosenberg says. He describes the two as mentally and physically high-functioning sailors who value careful race preparation. “They consistently prove that by working together, their results are much greater than what they could achieve alone.”

At Rosenberg’s suggestion, the Wolfes applied—and were accepted—to represent the US at the 2021 Mixed OffshoreDoublesWorld Championship. Rosenberg pulled Jonathan McKee, his longtime friend and a double Olympic-medalist and offshore veteran, into the loop. McKee coached the Wolfes for the event, including a ­400-nautical-mile delivery.

“Their hunger for learning is the kind of thing you don’t see, especially in adult athletes,” McKee says. He attributes part of their rapid progression to their triathlon successes. “It sets you up well for offshore sailing, especially when it gets really tough and you have to find the reserves of endurance and mental strength.”

The Wolfes finished the Doubles Worlds in sixth place, and a fuse lit.

The team’s debriefing unfurled on Orcas Island, and the Wolfes told their coaches that they wanted to do more doublehanded racing in Europe. They also mentioned that if they had the right partner, they might purchase a boat.

McKee dispatched an email, and the three purchased Red Ruby (nee Gentoo), their Sunfast 3300, in January 2022. The plan was to share the UK-based boat for European doublehanded events, and to work together to help both teams realize greater performance. 

While it’s easy to point to the awards ceremony as the moment when Type II fun morphed into real-time smiles for the Wolfes at the 2023 Fastnet Race, this doesn’t lay the mark.

“Our previous endurance events taught us how to refuel, taught us how to pace, taught us how to suffer,” Justin says, calling conditions “just fine” despite the three storms that combed their fleet. “We seem to find that the longer and the harder the race is, the better it is for us.”

Enter the 2023 Rolex Middle Sea Race—an event that friends from the UK Sunfast 3300 fleet said that they wouldn’t sail ­doublehanded because it demands too many sail changes.

“When I heard that, I was like—yes, that’s exactly what we want,” Justin says.

And it’s exactly what they got.

Windspeed and angles kept oscillating, putting the sail calls between the A1.5, the A2, the J1, the J2 and the code zero.

“The pacing part of that was that we just kept switching who was doing the hard part,” Justin says. “Rather than letting one of us get completely smoked, we just keep moving around. We keep switching it off before one of us gets very, very tired.”

The irony of their friends’ wisdom wasn’t lost as the two completed nine sail changes in the first 6 miles. This included badly jamming the brand-new J1 in the pre-feeder—a fix that called for a knife in the short term, followed by six hours of belowdecks work wrestling the doubled-over luff tape out of the pre-feeder track.

But, as with all tough jobs, the Wolfes kept swapping the tiller for the pliers.

“It’s a tag-team thing,” Christina says. “That’s just the approach we’ve always taken with everything, with driving, with dealing with a problem.”

This, they say, applies to both mental and physical cruxes.

“The mantra there is, we don’t let ourselves get too deep,” Justin says, adding that they’re careful to rotate jobs before frustrations build.

“It’s a process that we use that seems to work well,” Christina says.

By sunrise, the J1 was fixed and Red Ruby was in the hunt.

Mount Stromboli was ­erupting as they approached, but the tactical fireworks went off as the Wolfes approached Sicily’s west end. Nearby boats hugged the coastline, but Red Ruby jibed away.

This wasn’t accidental.

Justin leveraged his meteorology skills, some ­road-less-traveled weather models, and in-depth weather and course briefs, the latter of which was prepared by McKee and Alyosha Strum-Palerm, McKee’s doublehanded ­partner. (The teams swap this favor.)

“We made that decision 100 percent together,” Justin says, adding that the team makes all navigational calls in tandem. “Everything was open—it was just a joint decision that we were comfortable with.”

Four hours later, Red Ruby had banked 20 miles on the inshore boats.

“We’ve been racing different sports for so long, and one of the approaches—especially with triathlon—that we took is to train the weakness so that, across the board, you don’t have any holes.”

The Wolfes finished the 606-nautical-mile course in 4 days, 9 hours, 41 minutes, 35 seconds, winning their doublehanded class and finishing 24 seconds outside of claiming overall IRC victory. The only faster boat was a fully crewed Wally 93.

“They don’t do things based on emotion—whether it’s routing, sail selection or post-race analysis—they operate on facts, and they make good decisions,” McKee says, adding that they’re also nice people. “They aren’t just head-down; they make friends with other competitors.”

Looking ahead, the Wolfes envision two marquee events in 2024. The first is April’s Cap Martinique, which stretches from Brittany, France, to Martinique, and which they’ll race doublehanded aboard Red Ruby. Then, next winter, they plan to sail the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race two-up, either aboard Red Ruby or a chartered Sunfast 3300.

“As you get a little bit older, you start to realize how precious life is and that we don’t get do-overs,” Christina says. “This is very much an active focus that we have right now to do these sailing events. They’re really hard, but they’re bringing us a lot of satisfaction, amazing relationships, and they’re definitely fun—after they’re over.”

The post America’s Offshore Couple appeared first on Sailing World.

It was just after 0200 on a wild and woolly August morning, just north of Block Island on the rather thrashed waters of Rhode Island Sound. On the 58-foot catamaran Impossible Dream, we were about 12 hours into and a third of the way around our ­129-nautical-­mile racecourse during the annual running of the Ida Lewis Distance Race. We’d come to a crossroads: It was time to make the sort of decision one never wishes to contemplate in any offshore boat race.

Quickly closing in on Rhode Island’s shoreline, in deteriorating conditions with the wind rising and a crew scattered about in various states of blurry awareness or total incapacitation, should we 1) tack for the next mark, dead to weather, off Long Island; or 2) cut our losses, ease sheets, and head home?

Dream’s 15-person squad included owner Deborah Mellen, Capt. Jim Marvin, former America’s Cup racer Sarah Cavanaugh, my old Newport friend Harry Horgan, a four-person film crew making a documentary, and a handful of intrepid disabled sailors negotiating the race from their wheelchairs—an eclectic team if ever there was one.

At the wheel, cocooned in the cozy confines of the central inside steering station, as I watched a gust on the anemometer top 40 knots, I was quite aware that I was enjoying a false sense of security. I knew Impossible Dream well, having raced the boat from Key West to Cuba across a roiled Gulf Stream in the 2017 Conch Republic Cup, and was confident that the big cat could handle just about anything. But I also wondered, Was there even more breeze building? Because I understood that if I slipped up, the worst happened, the cat flipped and we all went swimming, it would be an unmitigated disaster. I had a definite opinion on whether to bail, but it wasn’t my call. 

“Hey, Jim,” I said to the skipper, “I have to turn the boat. Which direction? Montauk or Newport? I reckon you and Deborah need to have a chat.” 

For me, racing aboard Impossible Dream was not only unusual, exciting and challenging, but it also was personal. That’s because, for better and worse, I had more than a passing acquaintance with crewing alongside wheelchair-bound sailors. I was on a camping trip in the early 1980s with one of my best friends, a wild man known as Jack Mack, when he slipped on a steep ridge above a New Hampshire river, instinctively tucked for a dive, broke his neck and became a quadriplegic. In an instant, both our lives were forever changed. 

Not long after, one evening in my Newport apartment, the wail of sirens broke the silence, and the next day I learned that Horgan, another mate, had been in an automobile accident down the street and was paralyzed from the waist down. 

Neither Jack nor Harry took matters sitting down. Jack continued charging through life with his usual dry wit and fierce tenacity. And with a small fleet of specially designed Freedom 20 sloops, Horgan founded Shake-A-Leg, which was dedicated to helping folks overcome devastating injuries and disabilities through firsthand experiences at sea. In one of the very first Shake-A-Leg regattas, Jack and I went sailboat racing, a healing experience for both of us. The saddest thing about spinal-cord injuries, I’d come to learn, is that they’re largely incurred by active young folks, relative “kids” in the prime of their youth. Couch potatoes are immune. I also learned that the greatest things they have going for them are their hearts and resiliency. 

Eventually, Horgan and his wife, Susie, relocated to South Florida and started Shake-A-Leg Miami, which has become a vast watersports entity with world-class sailing facilities on Biscayne Bay that not only annually serves upwards of 10,000 disabled children, military veterans and their families, but also hosts numerous international one-design regattas. It was 2014 when Mellen, a Shake-A-Leg volunteer and local businesswoman who’d also survived a car crash, teamed up with the group to purchase the rugged offshore catamaran that exponentially expanded its breadth and reach. 

Impossible Dream was launched by extreme-sports enthusiast Mike Browne, a Brit who was paralyzed in a skiing accident and commissioned naval architect Nic Baily to design a boat on which he could still pursue adventures. Among its features are a wraparound deck that allows wheelchairs full access forward and aft, internal lifts for wheelchair boarding and access to the below-deck staterooms, and a deckhouse with special seating on tracks and all sailhandling lines led inside within reach of the enclosed helm station. 

In addition to offshore races like the previously mentioned Conch Republic Cup and the 2018 Regata del Sol al Sol from Tampa Bay across the Gulf of Mexico to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, each summer Impossible Dream embarks on an annual voyage up the coast from Florida to Maine (the late President George H.W. Bush once enjoyed a spin off Kennebunkport), introducing literally thousands of inner-city kids, wounded vets, and others to the singular joys of a day on the water.  

This past summer, there was an additional event on the cat’s calendar: the Ida Lewis Distance Race. There was but one hitch: There was no multihull division, but this was a trivial matter to the very persuasive Horgan. The club agreed to a start for an Exhibition Multihull Class, the sole entrant being Impossible Dream. What sealed the deal, Horgan believes, was the documentary. “It’s going to be an inspirational piece that’s going to inspire people to believe in their dreams and pursue them,” he told me. “For me, personally, Ida is where I learned to sail when I was 12 years old. We wanted to demonstrate that people with disabilities can achieve good things with the right team and technology, and be part of the Ida legacy.”

All of which put Impossible Dream on the starting line.

Tall and lean, with a cool demeanor and the striking appearance of a Rastafarian—and a pair of spindly prosthetic legs from the knees down—Bradley Johnson cuts an imposing, impressive figure. Before all was said and done, I was going to be very happy to have made his acquaintance.  

Among others, director Anna Andersen’s film—tentatively titled This Is Not a Dream—will focus on Dianne Vitkus, a former physician’s assistant who was paralyzed relatively recently in a fall, and Johnson, who was returning from the entrance exam to law school at the University of Florida in 1993 when his sports car hydroplaned on a rainy highway straight into a guardrail. “One leg was severed completely,” he told me. “The other was ­lacerated beyond repair.”

Some folks might’ve retreated to their basements. Not Johnson. “It was a choice,” he said. “What are you going to do? I can’t grow my legs back. I also can’t waste the valuable time given to me by being alive. All the efforts by the people who saved me would go for naught if I just shriveled up. I wasn’t going to hold on to something I can’t ever get back.”

Instead, he threw himself into sports, and was competing in volleyball in the 2000 Paralympic Games, when, by chance, he met sailing coach Betsy Allison in a hotel bar, who asked what turned out to be a life-changing question: “Would you consider sailing?”

It led to an international sailing career on Sonars, including a bronze medal in the Athens Paralympic Games in 2004, and eventually on to Impossible Dream. “The sailing’s been incredible,” he told me later. “I’d lose the legs all over again ­without reservation.”

Which is one of the most remarkable things I’d ever heard. Although our fun night on the Ida race might’ve given him some second thoughts. 

It was a scramble from the outset. For the first time ever, engine problems had forced ID to cancel most of the New England stops on its summer tour. Once in Newport, the generator conked out, and without power, there was no way to hoist the mammoth new North Sails in-boom furling main. The diesel mechanics were still working that out just hours before the start, which, thanks to a two-hour postponement for a passing front, we made with ­little time to spare. But the sporty weather was a definite preview of coming attractions. 

Horgan, with many miles behind him and a light touch on the helm, handled the start and the long beat out to the first mark in the rising southwesterly with aplomb. Already, however, the conditions had laid low a few wobbly souls, a handful of whom were experiencing their first ocean race. And an inaugural bout with seasickness. Another sign of things to come. 

I took over the driving on the next leg, thankfully a downwind run to Buzzards Bay Tower. It required sailing hot angles compared with our monohull brethren, which I later learned elicited much confusion with the folks at the yacht club tracking the fleet. But I also knew that the long boards and frequent jibes were stacking miles on an already lengthy boat race.

The conditions had laid low a few wobbly souls, a handful of whom were experiencing their first ocean race. And an inaugural bout with seasickness. Another sign of things to come.

At the tower, with the prospect of a 70-odd-mile overnight beat to Montauk ahead of us but with all bunks already accounted for, I grabbed a pillow and plonked down in the galley to catch some rest, but not before suggesting that we hug the coastline at the outset of the leg for current relief. About two hours later, I roused myself and was stunned to see that we were on an inshore tack directly toward Sakonnet Point, and on the wrong side of a government mark we needed to honor. Capt. Jim was on the cabin top sorting out a traveler issue, but I yelled that we needed to tack—like, now!—and luckily the experienced Johnson was on the helm and quickly spun us out to seaward, away from ­trouble. Close one. 

Shortly thereafter, I took back the steering duties. By this time, there were a few sentient beings among us, one of whom was Horgan’s son, Eli, riding shotgun and keeping me updated on boatspeed and windspeed, buoys and shoals, and so on. His company was welcomed, and though he was more or less a novice at this game, he has a future in it if he wants one. 

Meanwhile, a couple of miles or so to windward, a plethora of blinking lights, including what appeared to be a US Coast Guard cutter, suggested that someone was in major distress of some sort, though there was no VHF traffic to confirm it. The whole thing was starting to feel somewhat apocalyptic. 

That’s when we came to the figurative fork in the road, and I got the order that I was hoping to hear: Bear away to Newport.

I caught up with the crew at the awards ceremony, nobody looking the worse for wear, and explained that it wasn’t the first race I’d abandoned, and it wouldn’t be the last. Sometimes the winning move is exercising discretion over valor. We’d all learned something—about sailing and ourselves. It was all good. And a dozen other boats had retired, including a couple that had dropped their rigs. It was absolutely the right move. We all got a fresh sea story or two out of it.  

I had to laugh later on when Horgan referred to the entire episode as “The Impossible Nightmare.” But I think that they got the title of the film right. It sure as hell was not a dream.

The post One Wild Night At Sea appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s early evening on April 27. The waters are calm off Les Sable d’Olonne, France, and out from the fog emerges the 36-foot cutter Minnehaha. The one soul on board is 40-year-old South African Kirsten Neuschäfer—the Golden Globe Race’s heroine and, at this moment, the first woman to win a solo around-the-world race.

Exactly 235 days earlier, as the lone female in a fleet of 16 seasoned singlehanded sailors, she’d set forth from France with a singular objective, and as she crossed the finish line, she may well have been the person least surprised by the outcome. After all, from the moment she’d entered the unique “retro” high-seas, high-stakes contest, she was in it to win it—never mind that she’d never raced offshore in her entire life.

“When I signed up for the race, I had an interesting chat with a very experienced racing sailor who asked, ‘Why are you doing it? Just to go around? Or are you doing it to win?’” she told me in the afterglow of her victory.

“And I said, ‘Well, isn’t everybody doing it to win?’ And he said, ‘No, people do it for different reasons. If you want to win, your preparation will be different. You’ll choose your boat accordingly. If you need more money, you’ll need to raise more funds. You’re going to spend much more time preparing, but your goal will be different. To win, not just sail around the world.’ And that’s how it was in my mind right from the start.”

The contemporary Golden Globe Race, having completed its second edition after an inaugural running in 2018, is a throwback “adventure race” that pays homage to the 1968 competition of the same name, won by British legend Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the lone finisher after a voyage of 312 days, during which he became the first sailor to circle the globe alone and without stopping.

The race rules stipulate boats and equipment must strictly adhere to what was available to Knox-Johnston at the time: Competing yachts have a length overall limited to 32 to 36 feet, and they must be designed prior to 1988 with full keels and attached rudders. Satnav and related modern technologies aren’t allowed, only celestial navigation. EPIRBs and other safety gear can only be used in emergencies.

Neuschäfer may have been new to ocean racing, but she was no novice when it came to grand adventures and, for that matter, long-distance sailing. Following high school, she spent four years traveling and working in a string of outdoor pursuits: at a ski resort, training Huskies in Lapland, guiding wilderness tours in Norway. That period culminated with a solo north-to-south bike ride the length of Africa, at the conclusion of which she made a life-altering decision: to go to sea as a professional sailor.

“I was about 23,” she says, “and I started seriously clocking up miles and getting my skipper’s ticket, wanting to make a career out of it.”

For more than a dozen years, that meant delivering South African-built Leopard catamarans all over the world. “It was good practice because they were new boats and they had to arrive looking new,” she says.

Her first long solo sail was a rambling voyage with multiple stops from Portugal to South Africa aboard a 32-foot ­ferrocement boat, during which she learned that she enjoyed singlehanded voyaging. But her defining gig, which prepared her well for the GGR, was a five-year stint working for former Whitbread and Volvo skipper Skip Novak’s Pelagic Expeditions outfit, which conducts high-latitude charters in Arctic and Antarctic waters.

“We went to places I’d always dreamed of,” she says. “Antarctica, South Georgia, Patagonia, the Falkland Islands. It was great sailing on his boats because they were built for that sort of thing, and they were well-stocked with spares and tools, as you needed to be totally self-sufficient. We were always involved with refits because Skip wanted us to know what we were doing if we needed to fix anything. So, it was great exposure not only to maintenance and repairs, but to ice and Southern Ocean conditions.”

And it was during a crew swap in South Georgia in 2018 that she first learned of the GGR. “The mate was following the race and kept giving me updates,” she says. “Her interest was a bit contagious. I guess that’s when the seed was sown that maybe I could give it a shot myself.”

First, she needed a boat. The obvious choice was a British-built Rustler 36; six had been entered in the previous race, and they were sailed by the top-three podium finishers, including the French victor, Jean-Luc Van Den Heede. At the time, however, Neuschäfer was in Maine, and there were no Rustlers available on that side of the Atlantic. That’s when someone brought the cutter-rigged Cape George 36 to her attention. 

“The numbers looked good,” she says. “It had a lot of sail area, was long on the waterline and quite heavy, but I thought that would be good for the Southern Ocean. Plus, I kind of liked the idea of doing it with another kind of boat and, you know, choosing my own path.”

She found her ride in Newfoundland and sailed it to Prince Edward Island for a refit. Minnehaha is a fictional character from Longfellow’s poem about a Native American woman entitled “The Song of Hiawatha.” The name translates to “laughing water,” and Neuschäfer came to find it quite fitting.

“It was very appropriate,” she says. “It had a nice meaning. I liked the fact that it comes from the Dakota Sioux language. I bought it in North America. It was built in Washington state. I definitely think there’s been a large stroke of Minnehaha luck through this whole venture.”

The very first stroke was meeting local jack-of-all-trades shipwright Eddie Arsenault, who became her partner and mentor in the yearlong refit to prepare Minnehaha and get the boatrace-ready. (Neuschäfer purchased the yacht for $60,000 but sunk nearly $350,000 into the campaign.) 

The welcoming community of PEI proved to be a perfect place to complete the work. The hardest part, before Christmas in 2021, was leaving for her qualifying sail to South Africa. “All the mooring lines were frozen the morning I left. I had to boil water so I could defrost the lines and shove off. But it was a very good sea trial to take it all the way down to Cape Town because I got to learn the boat and realize where I still had to make repairs or improvements.”

Following more work on Minnehaha, she made a second solo passage to France for the start of the race in early September 2022. On the docks of Les Sable d’Olonne, she also began to size up her competition and identified Brit Simon Curwen and Frenchman Damien Guillou as her primary rivals. “I knew they had good racing backgrounds, and I was sitting there with none at all to speak of,” she says. “So, those were the two I was pretty worried about at first.”

A tactical error at the outset—she hugged the coast of Spain instead of heading directly offshore—left her in a distant 10th place as the fleet exited the Bay of Biscay. However, at the first of three mandatory check-in gates in the Canary Island of Lanzarote, she’d climbed back to sixth. And by taking the longer, southern route to South Africa, she was in second by the time she reached the Cape Town gate, just behind Curwen. Meanwhile, in the war of attrition that ultimately saw more than a dozen racers retire, Guillou dropped out in Cape Town with self-steering issues.

Some 450 miles from Cape Town on the stretch to the gate off Hobart, Australia, she received a message from race headquarters via her onboard tracking device that Finnish sailor Tapio Lehtinen had set off his EPIRB, abandoned his sinking boat, and was adrift in a life raft. She was the closest competitor to his position.

After calling race control with the emergency phone on board, “I opened my grab bag, unsealed my GPS and started my engine, because at first there wasn’t much wind,” she says. “But then it came through, and I put up as much sail as I could and pushed the boat as hard as I could, and helmed through the night. About 24 hours later, I got to him.”

Lehtinen was a brief visitor, and after a quick tot of rum (“Knowing he’s a Finn, I thought he’d probably enjoy that,” she says), he was quickly transferred to a cargo ship that had also arrived at the scene. (For her efforts, Neuschäfer received a 35-hour time allowance, which made her official finishing time 233 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 47 seconds.)

Meanwhile, Curwen was proving to be as formidable an opponent as Neuschäfer surmised, arriving at the Australian gate 29 hours ahead of her and, at one stage, opening up a lead of more than 1,000 nautical miles. But Curwen did not enjoy the Minnehaha luck and also succumbed to a self-steering failure that led to a 1,000-mile detour to Chile to effect repairs.

Meanwhile, in the deep Southern Ocean, Neuschäfer was getting into a groove, as was Minnehaha, the yacht with the fleet’s longest waterline. With her twin-rigged Yankee headsail poled out wing on wing, she was hauling the mail. “Once I got back into good winds, I had some of the best sailing I’ve ever done,” she says. “A 6-meter swell, 40 to 50 knots of wind, and the boat shooting a rooster tail off the stern, something I never thought possible for a 12-ton, 36-foot boat. So that was pretty cool.”

During this stretch, Neuschäfer set 2022 GGR records for the best four-hour average speed (9.8 knots), best 24-hour run (218.9 nautical miles) and best seven-day distance (1,216 nautical miles). The reward for her efforts? A memorable rounding of Cape Horn.

“It was maybe gusting into 35 knots, there were rain squalls, but it was all good fun,” she says. “And it was really fun speaking to the lighthouse keeper on the Horn on the VHF. He told me I was the first to pass, so that was a good boost for morale.”

From that point on, it was a two-boat race, with GGR veteran Abhilash Tomy of India hot on Neuschäfer’s heels. She endured a painfully slow crossing through the doldrums, and then sailed into a deep fog bank on her final approach through the European shipping lanes. “It was hairy but exhilarating,” she says. “Like a horse running back to the stable, the final push to the end.” With that, Minnehaha emerged from the fog, Tomy 100 miles in arrears.

“The first people arrived and told me I was first,” she says. “But it was a very slow, gentle arrival; the last 7 miles took several hours to basically just drift across the finish line. But it was such a fantastic vibe, with a lot of joy and happiness and excitement seeing all these enthusiastic people. I wasn’t expecting it—the crowds, the media attention, nothing like that. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Neuschäfer was an immediate social media sensation, something she’s still processing. “I wouldn’t have achieved it if I hadn’t received a lot of help and random kindness from complete strangers, people I’d never met who rocked up in the perfect moment,” she says. “I feel really privileged.”

She’s anonymous no longer. “All these opportunities have opened up,” she says, with offers of sponsorship for future adventures. “I do think about what it means and hope I’m going to channel this success in a positive way. It’s quite overwhelming. I’m still trying to figure out how to channel it in the best possible way.”

Which brings us back to that triumphant night off Les Sable d’Olonne. In one way, it was a tidy conclusion to the latest excellent adventure in Neuschäfer’s eventful life. But with her race now run and her track record established, it was likely only the prelude to the next one.

The post A Globe of Her Own appeared first on Sailing World.

My current project is a ­partnership in a Sunfast 3300, a 33-foot doublehanded offshore boat. Our intention is to sail the best races in Europe over the next few years, and while there are clusters of similar doublehanded boats in England, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia, the cream of the crop is racing in France. 

The French have been playing this game for a long time, so we decided to enter the springtime Spi Ouest Regatta in La Trinite sur Mer. This is one of the biggest regattas in the world, with over 460 boats. The format is short coastal races in the Bay of Quiberon, a perfect opportunity for my doubles partner, Alyosha Strum-Palerm, and I to test our skills. Using this regatta, we figured we can see where we need to improve in advance of our big test this summer, the IRC Doublehanded European Championship in July.

Our goals for the regatta were to work on boatspeed, refine our sail crossovers, work on communication and division of responsibility, solidify our boathandling, and enjoy racing in an incredible event in France.

Starting

We did not practice starting, and during the event, that was our weakest area. We had three mediocre starts, one of which we were barely OCS, and one decent start. In retrospect, we should’ve practiced more, and started more in the center of the line. In tight inshore racing, with 58 ­similar-speed boats, the start is critical. With better starts, we could have won the regatta.

Upwind tactics

Our play calling was below average, especially early in each of the beats. The correct side was not obvious, and we would typically go the wrong way, then figure it out and gain some back at the top of each beat. But this is an area for improvement. In some instances, a little more current research could have informed us; in other cases, we should have taken a smaller early loss to stay in touch with the leaders. It was another good lesson.

Upwind speed

Our pace was decent in over 10 knots, but not so good in lighter air. We made some small changes to the rig tune before the event, which I think were positive. We learned to use the J1.5 jib higher into the range than we thought we could, say 14 knots true windspeed, with more halyard and lead pushed outboard for the upper range. We also had good success with the J2 in 15 to 20 TWS and learned the boat likes a pretty powerful jib. A heel angle of 18 to 20 degrees seemed to be a good target upwind and reaching. In light air, it’s hard to induce enough heel in this boat, so I learned to trim the main tighter in less than 10 TWS, which resulted in more heel and power.

Boathandling

Our ­handling was good, among the best in the fleet, which means our training back home in Seattle paid off. It was also an advantage at times to have an asymmetric spinnaker, while many boats had a symmetric. Alyosha also did a good job of predicting the correct sail for the next leg, which is not always easy with the random legs and strong current.

One area we need to improve is tacking. In stronger wind, we lost a lot versus the ­single-backstay boats because it took us a long time to get to full backstay tension. I started to dump the main fine-tune out of the tack instead of the traveler only, and I think that was an improvement. The challenge for us is that the jib sheet and the runner use the same winch, so now we want to try a slightly different jib-tacking technique: Cast off all wraps as the boat is turning, tail to hand tight through the self-tailer, then immediately go runner-up, then jib final trim.

Reaching and downwind tactics

This was a real strength for us. We picked the right side on the runs and played the shifts well, and we got clear air and stuck to the rhumbline on the reaches. It’s important for the helm to know the leg compass angle because you often could not see the next mark.

Reaching and downwind speed

We always passed boats reaching and running. It’s partly because our kites are bigger and our hull form is good for downwind sailing, but I think we have fast downwind sails, and we have a good feel for the right angles and trim.

Sail crossovers

We used the masthead code zero exclusively, using no tweaker most of the time. The A1.5 is good for 3 to 12 knots, and the A2 for 8 to 25 knots. The A2 was surprisingly good for tight reaching in moderate air, up to 105 TWA. We used the spinnaker staysail in 10-plus knots when running and 8-plus knots when reaching.

Weight placement

We went max forward with the sails and gear in less than 10 knots, then centered until about 15 knots, and put more in the stern above 15, especially reaching. In light air, if one tack is favored, it might be worth putting the weight to leeward rather than max forward to try to induce heel.

We ended up 14th of 58 with an OCS, 3, 4, 3. We would have been fourth in the first race, which would have been 4, 3, 4, 3, or 14 points. The winner had 12 points, so we are definitely in the game. The main areas to improve from this event are starting, early leg tactics and light air upwind. The areas we don’t know about yet are big-picture tactics and endurance and energy management.

It’s rewarding to look back on how many goals we were able to focus on with measured success. We raced bow to bow with good teams in a large competitive fleet of boats, made French friends, and soaked up the atmosphere of the largest multi­class regatta in France. We had a lot of fun, and we are excited about our future. It was definitely worth it, and we hope to return next year. Voila!

The post Prepping For the Big Regatta appeared first on Sailing World.

Collegiate keelboat ­sailing does not get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. While offshore teams were long seen as a secondary option for sailors either too big or not experienced enough to compete in dinghy fleets, several teams are shifting away from traditional collegiate dinghy sailing to focus on the growing number of competitive collegiate offshore regattas held across the country. In the 2022 college offshore season, a new squad made its mark on the world of collegiate keelboat sailing: the University of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is an unlikely candidate to win in offshore sailing; as a club team that practices on an inland lake, the university is hard-pressed to match the resources of government-­funded teams, such as the US Naval Academy, or teams located near coastal sailing hotspots, like the College of Charleston or the University of Rhode Island. However, Wisconsin’s record speaks for itself: Having won the 2022 Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta in Larchmont, New York, and the 2022 Great Lakes Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta in Chicago, it is clear the big-boat Badgers are a force to be reckoned with.

“It’s been really cool to see the Midwest be represented in college offshore sailing,” University of Wisconsin team captain Kate Thickens says. “When I was a freshman, offshore sailing wasn’t cool. Now there are a lot more people on our team interested in sailing big boats, so we are going to as many offshore regattas as we can.”

Wisco’s development of its keelboat program represents a national effort to increase big-boat access to younger sailors. The Larchmont and Great Lakes Intercollegiate Offshore Regattas, hosted by the Storm Trysail Club, are one prong of a sport-wide approach to increasing youth keelboat participation. Over the past decade, regattas such as the Harbor Cup in Los Angeles, the South Carolina Offshore Regatta and the Lake Erie Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta have sprung up to support decades-old regattas such as the IOR series and the US Naval Academy’s Kennedy and McMillan cups in creating a year-round, competitive collegiate offshore racing circuit. The Intercollegiate Sailing Association, College Sailing’s governing body, is also taking steps to bring offshore sailing into collegiate sailing’s fold, now recognizing key offshore events such as the Los Angeles Harbor Cup and Southern Collegiate Offshore Regatta as ICSA events despite them not being hosted by universities.

The addition of collegiate big-boat sailing has allowed swaths of youth sailors who outgrew or lost interest in dinghy sailing to continue to compete at a high level. “Offshore is the land of the misfits,” Thickens says. “It’s a great option for people who are told that they are just too big for college sailing. Obviously, with dinghy sailing, people are very weight-conscious, so they don’t always want somebody that is 6-foot-4 in their boat. I think people like that have definitely found more of a home on the offshore team, where they aren’t being told that they [are] too big. In fact, people will say, ‘Wow, we want you as our mast guy or gal or trimmer because you’re taller and stronger.’”

Competing in a variety of boats during offshore regattas provides the opportunity for new keelboat sailors to learn the skills necessary to continue on after graduation. “A lot of the time, we’ve never even practiced with the exact group that is competing in the event because we’re still building our offshore team,” Thickens says. “I’d say the majority of our effort is toward bringing new sailors into keelboats and teaching people how a winch works or how to fly a spinnaker.”

Access to keelboats remains a challenge for most teams, while the traditional powerhouses of offshore sailing enjoy waterfront facilities with a variety of donated keelboats to train on. The Badgers practice once a week using the Hoofer Sailing Club’s Tartan 10s on inland Lake Mendota. Competing in boats ranging from J/70 sportboats to J/109s and Dehler Optima 101s, the team often does not have the opportunity to train in its class of boat until the day before the regatta. “One thing that helps us do well at events is having a full day of practice on the day before the regatta,” team helmsman Jack Schweda says. “A lot of the time, most or all of the crew hasn’t sailed that specific type of boat before, so the practice day is a huge help.”

What the Badgers lack in facilities, however, they make up for through community support, relying on alumni and friends of the team for coaching. “We’ve had a lot of good chalk talks in the past year or two from alumni and guest speakers,” Schweda says. “Everybody on the keelboat team comes to these chalk talks and learns about how each position works—even positions that they might not be doing. I think that helps because each sailor hears it all; when a sailor gets put on the roster doing a position they have never done before, at least they have been to those chalk talks where they’ve heard the information and can try to work toward doing a good job.”

Located hundreds of miles from the venues where they compete, team members drive through the night in their personal vehicles to sail against top teams. Managing logistical challenges that other teams take for granted brings the team together, Thickens says. “Our drive to regattas is normally anywhere between 15 to 17 hours in the car, but I honestly think that it’s a positive thing. Yes, we are tired, but the drive creates chemistry with the group. This sailing team is one big family—there is no other group of people that I’d rather be packed into a minivan with and be stuck in the back seat. As a freshman, it was really cool to be thrown into these vans with older people on the team and get to know them; there’s really no better way to get to know people.”

While Wisco has been unique in its success in the past year, it represents a growing number of club teams that are taking up offshore sailing and placing on the podium at the highest levels.

While Wisco has been unique in its success in the past year, it represents a growing number of club teams that are taking up offshore sailing and placing on the podium at the highest levels. The similarly club-funded and freshwater University of Toledo placed second in the 2022 Larchmont Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta’s J/105 fleet and won the PHRF A division of the 2022 Lake Erie Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta.

The rise of such teams affirms that collegiate offshore sailing now allows many new or club-status teams an opportunity to take their sailing programs to the next level. While the Navy-hosted McMillan and Kennedy cups still featured the same decadeslong champion keelboat teams, events such as the Larchmont and Great Lakes Intercollegiate Offshore Regattas saw a plethora of club and developing teams the likes of Virginia Tech, Ohio State and Syracuse.

Offshore sailing may also be the way forward for new teams looking to establish themselves in the realm of competitive collegiate sailing and provide opportunities for sailors to thrive in the sport as experienced keelboat crews. Connecting collegiate sailors with race-boat owners provides a viable and sustainable solution to supporting local racing scenes with a deeper and younger pool of available crews.

The post Wisconsin Sailing Goes Big appeared first on Sailing World.

Three hours after the start of the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race, Cole Brauer decides to switch up the game plan. “We can’t race the same way as everyone else because we don’t have a full crew,” she vents. “I have to remind myself of that.”

For the past 20 miles, Brauer and her teammate, Cat Chimney, have been short-tacking the Class40 First Light down the Miami coast to avoid the Gulf Stream, which travels north at 4 knots. With a southeasterly breeze building offshore, they must balance current relief with stronger wind offshore, choosing when to tack toward the beach and when to head out for fresh breeze. But with every tack, the competition increases their lead. Class40s aren’t known for stellar upwind speed, and the fact that Brauer and Chimney are doublehanding only makes the maneuvers slower.

“The conditions aren’t the same for everyone all the time,” Chimney responds. “I’m happy for a split here if that’s what you want to do.”

This is the duo’s first race together, and they are still getting a feel for their roles on the boat. Before today, the two had cultivated a strong professional friendship racing against each other in Class40s, often helping each other fix things before the starts of big races. A few weeks before the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race, the Magenta Project sent them to a training session on the Canadian Ocean Racing Team’s IMOCA 60, and they instantly hit it off as teammates, deciding then and there to do more doublehanded racing together.

“All right, let’s go for a tack,” Brauer says. “We’re not going to gain by following.”

They set up at the back of the boat, with Brauer breaking the jib from her seat at the helm and Chimney trimming the new sheet on the other side.

“OK, autopilot is off,” Brauer says, ­clicking the remote-control puck strung around her neck.

“Copy.”

“Three, two, one, tacking.”

The boat’s bow swings through the breeze, and soon enough they’re headed out to sea. “Nice tack, Cat,” Brauer says, settling the boat onto its new heading.

For Brauer, this race is the latest development in a relatively short career in pro sailing. At 100 pounds and 5-foot-nothing, Brauer is a small person with big aspirations, yet what she lacks in size she makes up for in grit. Beginning as a boat captain, the 28-year-old has become a fixture on various sailing circuits, from distance racing to Etchells, J/70s and Melges 24s. In some ways, she’s a ­typical sailing bum, living in a built-out van so she can go where the wind and the gigs take her. Her career has already had many twists and turns, and she has big plans.

Brauer came late to the sport as a walk-on crew at the University of Hawaii. “I remember when I got to that first practice, people were surprised I was a girl because of my first name,” she says. “By then I was used to it, though. People still think I’m a boy if they haven’t met me in person. It’s common in this business.”

After graduating as a three-time scholar athlete with a degree in food science with a focus in medicine, medical school seemed like a logical next step. But the 2018 Pacific Cup sent her down a different path. “It was my first big offshore race,” Brauer says, “and when we got within 25 miles of shore, I got a blip of cell service, called my mom, and told her I wasn’t going to med school. I was going to go sailing instead.”

Her parents were less than stoked about their daughter abandoning a medical career to bum around on boats, but Brauer stuck to her decision, spending the year after graduation as a detailer, scrubbing teak with toothbrushes and making little money for it. “I was kind of on the struggle bus,” she says. “I could barely pay rent.”

She moved back to her home port in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, to search for sailing jobs. She was coaching to get by when she met a boat captain named Tim Fetsch, who initially wanted nothing to do with her when she asked for an apprenticeship.

“I convinced him by telling him I was small. I fit into tiny spaces, and I’d do absolutely anything to get a job,” she says. After a few weeks of steady badgering, Fetsch relented and gave her a job working on a Swan 42, her first bit of real nipper work. She took up every task thrown her way, cleaning bilges so well you could eat off them, whatever she had to do to make sure she was going to have a job the next day.

Fetsch worked for the US Merchant Marine Academy Sailing Foundation, where he managed about a dozen boats for charters and racing. Brauer started going up and down the East Coast doing deliveries on random boats, from Melges 32s to 80-foot racer-cruisers. “Usually when you’re a nipper, you’re only working on one boat under one captain,” Brauer says. “And now I was working under one boat captain, but we had a bunch of boats that we were working on.”

Fetsch taught her everything she knows, from engines to electrical. He made her install her first 110-volt outlet on a Swan 66. He taught her to see every day as a tryout and to never get too comfortable in her position. “He was brutal,” Brauer says. “But he made sure I stayed honest, made sure I worked hard and never got cocky. Looking back, Tim is the best thing that’s happened to my career. I still use those lessons today.”

Brauer worked for Fetsch for a year and a half. One day, they were walking through New England Boatworks in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, when Brauer spotted a sorry-­looking Classe Mini 6.50 sitting on a trailer beneath a tarp in the boatyard. By then she’d been itching to get into singlehanded racing. She’d done some doublehanded offshore sailing in Hawaii, and she’d been doing doublehanded deliveries with Fetsch, but she wanted to take things to the next level. The Mini turned out to be a Foundation-owned boat, so she asked Fetsch if she could fix it up and campaign it.

Once again, he brushed her off, but Brauer remained persistent. Eventually, she finagled a deal with Warrior Sailing, also run through the USMMA Sailing Foundation, to refit the boat to take veterans out to learn the ropes of offshore sailing. “I don’t know if [the people at the foundation] completely believed I could do it,” Brauer says. “But they were like, ‘We’ll give her this boat and see how she does. She’ll probably give up eventually.’”

But Brauer didn’t give up. By then she’d started to have this insane idea. No American woman has ever raced singlehanded around the world, and she began to think she could be the first. “I get into a rhythm when I’m singlehanding,” Brauer says. “Everything just flows, and it works. I feel the boat, and the boat feels me. We kind of work as one, so I’m never really alone because I have the boat there.”

Eventually, she got the Mini completely refit and ready to do some serious offshore racing. But two weeks before the 2019 Bermuda 1-2, the foundation pulled its support, even though Brauer had paid the registration. “That absolutely crushed me,” she says. “I ended up stepping away from the boat after that.”

As fate would have it, she’d met Mike Hennessey on the dock earlier that season. Hennessey owned a Class40, Dragon, and Brauer started doing deliveries for him when his boat captain quit. Straight away, she badgered him for the job. “I could tell that Mike didn’t want me to take the job at first. I was 24, and I was a girl, and I was small. All these boat captains were big, 250-pound dudes in their 30s.”

Like others before him, Hennessy relented, and the two have been working together ever since. That isn’t to say it’s been an easy ride, however.

There’s a special kind of romance attached to shorthanded ocean racers, often viewed as brawny lone-wolf cowboy types who, for whatever reason, choose to battle their demons alone on the ocean rather than face them on land like the rest of us. Brauer doesn’t fit this mold. She’s good with people, even though she’s better with boats. She isn’t brawny by any means, and in cases where some men might force a repair or rigging job with brute strength, Brauer makes better use of her brain.

“You’re always going to have a tool, even if it’s the wrong tool,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll use a winch handle instead of a screwdriver if I have to.”

She plans her day to the minute, not the hour, and every task she does has a procedure, usually sketched out in long and detailed lists. Her life is not about gazing at sunsets or counting shooting stars, but about engines and electrical, and hauling sails around with halyards because she isn’t physically strong enough to do it by hand. It’s about climbing into the rudder compartment when the autopilot jams and pressing her back against the bulkhead to wriggle loose the ram from the tiller bar while the boat lays over with the kite still up, then having to go back on deck and wrangle in the pieces of a freshly broken tack clutch without getting her teeth knocked in. It’s about sitting in a harness with her legs falling asleep because she has a job to do up the mast, fighting the urge to let herself off the hook and go back down because there’s no shot she’s climbing back up to do it later, not when it’s blowing 20 knots with zero-degree temperatures. It’s about knowing that whatever comes her way, no one is there to save her if she fails.

All these lessons came into use when Brauer and Hennessy lost their rig in the 2022 Caribbean 600. They’d installed brand-new rigging before completing the eight-day delivery to Antigua, but “the ­problem with brand-new equipment is you’re going to have teething pains,” Brauer says. “It’s the same with a brand-new engine. You have to stop every few miles and make sure everything is working properly. You trust but verify, and in this case, I didn’t verify.”

After rounding St. Barts during the race, Brauer went below to rest before she planned to hoist the Code 5. She thought they’d hit a weird wave when Hennessy began yelling, “Rig down, rig down!” Before going below, the sun was behind the mainsail, but when she glanced topside, the shade had completely vanished. When she came up, the rig had toppled over to one side. They lashed the boom to the boat and tried to get the main down, but Class40 mains have luff cars and full-length ­battens. The only way they could have taken it off would have been to get in the water and unwind the battens. Jumping into the ocean was not an option, and the sound of carbon and fiberglass crunching became debilitating. Brauer had never heard anything like it, and to this day, it is the worst sound she’s ever heard. When one of the winches they were using to keep the mast in the boat started pulling off the deck, they knew they were running low on options.

“Mike and I made the quick decision that we were going to lose the rig,” Brauer says.

The two began cutting halyards and unpinning side stays, trying to save anything they could salvage. “I had gone over my safety procedures for so long,” Brauer says, “so I knew where the bolt cutters were. I knew where the knives were.”

Brauer had to hit the last turnbuckle with a hammer when it got to the final thread, and after cutting more lines, they picked everything up and threw it overboard.

They’ve rebounded in a big way, however. Hennessy ended up replacing everything and getting Dragon race-ready before deciding to build a brand-new Class40 to race in France this summer. He sold Dragon to Frederick K.W. Day, owner of the Class40 Longbow, who renamed the boat First Light. Day still allows Brauer to race it as their sparring partner, with the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race serving as their first outing together.

By the time Brauer and Chimney reach the finish, the sun has been up for two hours. The two didn’t end up finishing as strong as they’d hoped, but the main goal for this race was to arrive in one piece and see how they vibe as a team. In that sense, the test was successful, and morale is high as they tie First Light to the dock.

“What Cole is doing is really unique for her age,” says Chimney, who is eight years her senior. “She’s come into this at a really important time for women in sailing, and she deserves a lot of respect for leveraging it the way she has. These opportunities weren’t available or the culture wasn’t right when I was her age doing similar things.

“Everybody navigates pro sailing in ­different ways,” Chimney continues. “There’s no science behind it. It’s not like you go to college for four years and come out with a career-track job. It’s all about putting yourself in the right place with the right people and doing the best you can, and I think Cole is crushing it in that sense.”

Although she’s got some sweet gigs for the time being, Brauer has her mind set on a solo circumnavigation. She has a designer in mind to one day build an IMOCA 60 to fit her size, and in the meantime, she’ll use the Class40to rack up miles. She will continue to ignore those who doubt her because deep down, only she knows what she’s capable of. She could have taken a different path, could have gone to medical school and worked a nine-to-five, could have lived in a house instead of a van. But there’s a moment she is constantly pursuing, a moment she relishes. It’s those first few seconds after making the correct decision to do a sail change, when the wind does what it’s supposed to and the boat picks up speed, when the sail fills and the autopilot catches and the hull surfs down a wave. This is the feeling she’s chasing. This is the place she calls home, and home is wherever the wind and determination will take her.

The post Onboard With Cole Brauer appeared first on Sailing World.

At 05:20:28 UTC on April 2, in Itajaí, Brazil, Team Malizia—Boris Herrmann, Will Harris, Nico Lunven, Rosalin Kuiper and onboard reporter Antoine Auriol—glided across the finish line off Ocean Live Park to win Leg 3 of The Ocean Race, collecting 5 points in the process. The win comes on the 35th day of racing and after 14,714 nautical miles of intense, close-quarters racing. 

Early in the leg, it didn’t appear likely that we would see Team Malizia at the front of the fleet for the finish. Within days of the start in Cape Town the team discovered serious damage to the top of their mast and needed to devote nearly two full days to effecting difficult repairs at sea, with an uncertain result.

Meanwhile, Team Holcim-PRB had escaped from the rest of the fleet and was a full weather system and nearly 600 miles ahead. On board Malizia, the makeshift reinforcement of the top of the spar was successful and the chase was on. 

By the time the teams reached the Leg 3 scoring gate, Malizia had closed to less than 200 miles from Holcim-PRB, moving up into second place and collecting 4 points.

As the fleet raced south of New Zealand and into the southern depths of the Pacific Ocean, the game closed up significantly within 10 miles and exchanging the lead one to the other as they raced along the ice exclusion zone.

During one of the worst periods of the leg, with the boat lurching a violent sea state, Rosalin Kuiper was tossed from her bunk and suffered a head injury. With a focus on getting Rosie stabilized and recovering, the crew was taxed even more, down to a three-person watch rotation for the rest of the leg.

A day out from Cape Horn and Team Malizia had a narrow advantage of less than 30 miles, leading the fleet around the iconic passage and winning the Roaring Forties trophy in the process. 

The final push north was hard-fought. Team Holcim-PRB and Team Malizia were racing within in sight of each other – exchanging body blows all the way up the South American coast. 

The penultimate night – Friday night – was a battle through yet another fierce storm, with gusts of 50 knots screaming off the coast and whipping up the sea. Boris Herrmann and his crew on Team Malizia handled the conditions with aplomb, and emerged into the daybreak with a 60-mile lead after Holcim-PRB did a crash jibe overnight and suffered damage. This was the largest lead any team had enjoyed since New Zealand.

On the last day of the leg and into the final night at sea Team Malizia sailed fast and confident towards the finishing line, extending its lead to more than 80 miles and taking an historic win.

“Dreaming of doing The Ocean Race, and this amazing leg through the Southern Ocean, finishing it after all the trouble we had early on, and winning is amazing,” Herrmann said. “Four weeks ago, if I had been told ‘Repair your mast because you might win this leg’ I would have not believed it and said that’s not possible, we are too far behind and can’t push the boat anymore. But it worked out beyond our expectations.”

In fact, on the first days of Leg 3, it appeared as if the early race dominance of Kevin Escoffier’s Team Holcim-PRB was going to be repeated over the longest Leg in the history of The Ocean Race. 

Escoffier and his team were aggressive from the start gun for Leg 3 and eased away in tricky conditions to build a lead that would put them a full weather system and nearly 600 miles ahead.

But in doing so, they bumped up against a ridge of high pressure and very light winds that wouldn’t let them pass. The trailing boats made back nearly all the miles. 

“We saw quite early this was likely to happen,” Escoffier said dockside after securing second place. “But we kept pushing and pushing because we knew that getting out early could be important, especially for the scoring gate.”

As it turned out Team Holcim-PRB would score the maximum points at the gate, to remain perfect. But the rest of the fleet was back in touch and the lead would change often on the race to Cape Horn, where Malizia led, and again up into the south Atlantic. 

For Escoffier, the points gained on this Leg solidify his position at the top of the leaderboard. 

“We always said at the start of this leg that the first job is to get to Itajaí with the crew and the boat in good shape and we have done this,” he said. “To also get 9 out of 10 points for the leg is very good of course and sets us up well for the rest of the race.”

The post Team Malizia Secures Epic Leg 3 Win appeared first on Sailing World.

Through six editions, the 750-mile Race to Alaska has become one of the premier adventure races in the world. It attracts paddlers, rowers, sailors and adventure-seekers with this simple mandate: Get from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska, using human power only. There are few other rules. The traditional route through the inside passage of Vancouver Island and north through the wilds of northern British Columbia has been plied by an incredible variety of watercraft, from high-performance racing sailboats to humble rowboats, paddleboards, kayaks and ­combinations of all.

The competitors are equally varied: Some come for the adventure, the opportunity to prove their endurance and skills over many days of extended exertion. Some think sails are the answer, although you still have to propel your sailboat through portions of the course. So, even the sailors are paddlers at some point. There are professional adventure athletes in the race, as well as high-level sailors and Olympic rowers, but the vast majority of these trekkers are normal people yearning to test themselves in one the most rugged and beautiful ­environments on the planet.

The 2022 edition had one significant change: Organizers allowed racers to go outside Vancouver Island on the way to the checkpoint at Bella Bella. This open-water option adds more miles, has less favorable current, and normally requires upwind sailing across more than 300 miles of North Pacific Ocean—one of the roughest stretches of ocean anywhere on the planet.

This new route caught my attention, so I entered my Bieker 44 Dark Star into the race. I have always wanted to test my boat in the open ocean, and the course had an instinctive appeal to me, with the mix of offshore and inshore, and the pure challenge of just getting there. Could we sail our boat quickly and safely to Alaska? I really love the spirit of this race, with few rules and a unique blending of cultures, so ambitious yet witty and humble at the same time. I also wanted this challenge to have a larger purpose, so we partnered with SeaShare (seashare.org), a nonprofit that stocks food banks across the country with high-quality seafood, much of it from Alaska. In its honor, for the race, we renamed the boat Pure and Wild.

As for any distance race, our preparations were extensive, from sails and sailing systems, to removing the diesel engine, to creating a human propulsion system, a power-generation system, etc. My original thought was to sail doublehanded, but after further consideration, I decided to race with three crew: Matt Pistay, a Race to Alaska winner, and rising star Alyosha Strum-Palerm. Together, with technical director Erik Kristen, they set about preparing for the race.

The pre-race plan fell into place one milestone at a time, and we won the Proving Ground qualifier from Port Townsend to Victoria, British Columbia, in rough conditions as many of our competitors, mostly fast trimarans, struggled. That was easy relative to what was to come. For the real race, we had to choose whether to take the more ambitious route outside Vancouver Island, which I strongly preferred, or play it safe in the confined (but still rough) waters of the Inside Passage.

As we paddled out of Victoria Harbor to start the race, there was no doubt in my mind that Pure and Wild would be turning right, to the open Pacific. Only three other larger monohull sailboats made a go of it. All the fast multihulls set off for the inside track. The decision proved decisive, but not for the obvious reasons. After 48 hours of racing, three of the trimarans, including pre-race favorite Malolo, had catastrophic collisions with floating logs and withdrew. So, the yellow brick road was opened to Pure and Wild, but we had our own ­challenges to overcome. Halfway up the west coast of Vancouver Island, I logged the following passages.

Friday, 6/17/22, 10:52 p.m. So far to go. It is dark and getting darker. And it is getting windier, slowly but surely. Our day on board Pure and Wild has been reasonably pleasant off the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, with a northwester of 14 to 18 knots. But the sea state has been building, the wind is up over 20, and now the waves on ­starboard are getting pretty steep. Between Alyosha, Matt and I, we had been taking one-hour shifts at the helm, with the second person on standby and the third resting. But as it was getting rougher, everything is getting harder. Suddenly, we had a bit on, moving up the course in worsening conditions. This might be the toughest part of the whole R2AK right here tonight.

Saturday, 6/18/22, 12:04 a.m. Storm is worsening. Trying to keep my s— together. Now it is really dark. I tell myself to just keep concentrating on steering the bucking bronco through the waves, keeping some kind of even heel angle. Try as I might to keep going, I admit I am pretty tired, and my focus is waning. I can’t get at the watch on my wrist because I have too many layers of clothes on. Need ’em all because big waves sometimes break over the bow, despite our freeboard. North Pacific water is a sobering 50 degrees F. I try to focus my fuzzy head for another few minutes, then decide it is Alyosha’s turn. A soft cry is all that is needed for his head to appear in the companionway. Soon he is beside me in the back of the cockpit. “Maybe think about the second reef?” The logic is suddenly obvious.

Of course, tucking in the second reef makes sense right now. Except that I am super tired, it is pitch black, and the waves are crashing pretty hard. But other than that…

I give Alyosha the wheel and ease the jib a little. Talking to myself again: “OK, focus on doing this reef right. Lazy jacks on. Slack out of reef line. Halyard on the winch. Drop the halyard past the mark. Now the hard part.”

I trudge up to the mast to haul the luff down and secure the tack. I give it all my weight, and the flapping sail slowly succumbs. Now the fiddly part. I need to feed the reef strop through the webbing on the luff. My hands are not working well, and the motion of the boat doesn’t help. Finally, I clip the snap shackle directly to the sail. Screw it; it will be strong enough, maybe. Back to the cockpit to tension the luff and grind on the leech reef line. I am getting really winded now! I still have to trim on both mainsheet and jib sheet. Afterward, I stand in a puddle of sweat and mental haziness. Time to lie down.

Saturday, 3:56 a.m. We survived. When I wake up three hours later, I feel surprisingly OK. Dawn has arrived, and the wind is down to 12 knots. All is good with the world! And best of all, the dreaded Brooks Peninsula has been transited. I can see its looming mass in dark clouds 8 miles astern. Next stop, Cape Scott, the north tip of Vancouver Island. The elation I feel is such a contrast to my despair last night, such a short time ago. What a crazy activity we do, racing sailboats in the open ocean. My boat is well-founded, and I worked hard on the preparations for this trip. But even with a seasoned crew and a strong boat, there is a lot that can go wrong out here, especially sailing with a small crew like we are. But right now, everything seems great!

Saturday, 5:12 a.m. Battery trouble. Matt checks the battery level. Oh crap—22 percent. That is really bad news. Without an engine, we will have to charge the batteries with our EFOY fuel cell and our SunPower solar panels. But the fuel cell does not seem to be working, and it is too cloudy for the solar. Without power, this little adventure will get a lot harder. Matt decides to take it on, and he finds a way to rewire the fuel cell so it goes straight to the start battery. After an hour of fiddling, it is working, with 2 amps of positive charge. We are back in business.

Saturday, 10:34 a.m. Sailing again. The wind dies for a couple of hours, and we sort of regroup, have lunch and dry things out. Then a little breeze fills, and we hoist the A1.5 kite for the first time in the 250 miles sailed so far. Only 500 to go. After noon, the wind shifts to the right, and we swap the kite for the J1.5 jib, now heading straight for Cape Scott, the fabled graveyard of ships on the north tip of Vancouver Island, 30 miles away.

Saturday, 7:42 p.m. Cape Scott. As we approach the cape, things are getting kind of spooky. The wind dies, the current starts ripping against us, and the fog sets in. I can clearly hear the crashing waves as the North Pacific swell collides with the rocky and wild coast. We have no engine, so getting becalmed would probably not be good. Alyosha suggests we tack offshore, and Matt and I instantly agree.

This place emanates a feeling of danger and dread, like humans are not supposed to be here. The wind gradually fills and backs as we sail on starboard. After 20 minutes, we tack back in a perfect 12-knot nor’westerly, reaching straight for Bella Bella, our next landfall. By 10:30, darkness is complete and some fog persists. Plus, there is a lot of kelp and logs in the water, so night sailing in this part of the world is kind of fraught with peril. For now, all is good again on P&W. Soon we get around Cape Scott, the first big milestone in this crazy adventure. In any case, I am off watch for the next three hours, so down I go.

Sunday, 6/19/22, 3:16 a.m. Another world. The wind lifts enough to set the kite. As I go forward to rig it, I glance up at gaps in the clouds to see stars emerging. It is pleasant sailing as the eastern sky starts to lighten. The breeze keeps lifting, so we jibe to starboard to stay off the approaching shore, some of British Columbia’s wildest and most remote islands.

There are quite a few options for navigating to the Bella Bella checkpoint, which is nestled deep in the central British Columbian coastal islands. Since we will be arriving in daylight, and we expect light wind, we choose the shortest passage from offshore to Lama Pass to save distance and keep us in the ocean breeze longer. The only catch is that it is quite a narrow rock-strewn stretch of water, essentially short tacking between reefs in a dying breeze and adverse current.

We have been warned about this part of the race, and all of us have full focus as we drop the kite, round up through the first set of reefs, and head for the more open Lama Pass, which will take us to Bella Bella.

The breeze dies, but so does the swell. Suddenly, it is completely quiet. We are surrounded by small rocky islands and coves, with ancient fir, hemlock and spruce growing over the water’s edge. We hear the repeated blows of humpback whales spouting just to leeward. It is like a dream, a sort of maritime utopia.

Nobody says anything; we are in a trance. We are racing, but we are also doing something else right now. I don’t know what to call it, but it feels like we have been transported to an ethereal world of mist and kelp. Nobody says it, but we don’t really want to leave this nirvana; it feels magical and otherworldly.

Sunday, 8:43 p.m. Getting hairy again. After negotiating the Bella Bella checkpoint, we head back out to sea into the mighty Hecate Strait, the shallow but open stretch between the Queen Charlotte islands and British Columbia coast. It was nice downwind sailing all afternoon, but now the rain has arrived, and the southeast wind is rising. From a pleasant 12 knots, we now have 18 knots, a rising sea state and constant rain. Welcome to the gates of Alaska. With the forecast of increasing winds, all three of us know this could be a challenging night, but also our last one if we can get through it successfully.

Sunday, 11:21 p.m. Jibe time. Matt and Alyosha have been crushing it, surfing and planing in the 22 knots, confused sea and total darkness. But now it is time to jibe. I put on my foulies and harness, and climb on deck for the jibe. First, we move the stack of sails and other gear that we use to help our trim and stability (legal in this race with few rules). 

That is a lot of exertion, so we take a couple of minutes to cool down before executing the jibe. We get through it. Not pretty but adequate. Now we are heading straight for the finish at Ketchikan, only 100 miles away. Matt goes down to rest, and Alyosha and I take short spells at the helm to try to stay fresh.

Monday, 6/20/22, 1:08 a.m. Bump in the night. Bam! The boat shudders, and the sound of splintering wood tells us we have hit a large log head-on. Matt is on deck in a flash. I rush below to check the bow and the bilges. All seem OK. We are not sinking. But it seems like a warning. Caution to all ye who ply these waters; you are mere humans, and there are larger forces at work out here.

With the wind continuing to climb and fatigue becoming a factor, we drop the kite and sail the main only for a while. The letterbox drop is not as clean as some we’ve done in the past. The kite gets around the leach of the main and catches on the lazy jacks going over the boom. Matt puts his hand right through the sail in his enthusiasm to get the spinnaker under control, and we can see the sail has ripped in several places. Finally, we get it into the companionway. We switch to one person on deck to preserve energy until dawn arrives or the wind lightens.

Monday, 4:56 p.m. The finish (but not the end). After a light and sloppy transit of Dixon Entrance, then a beautiful downwind run into Ketchikan (shirts off), we finish the R2AK after four days and four hours of intense sailing. Yes, we’ve won the race, which was incredible. But as the three of us reflect in the rare Alaska sunshine, we agree we’ve all been changed by the experience.

I’ve found a renewed love of the ocean and the land that bounds it, the creatures within it, and the winds and currents that stir it so relentlessly. We have trusted each other completely and worked together in the way only shipmates can. And each of us found something within ourselves, a sense of peace and gratitude that only the sea can provide.

The post Race To Alaska The Hard Way appeared first on Sailing World.

In Sydney, Australia, it’s called a southerly change, and it does what it says on the tin. It’s a shift from a northeasterly summer sea breeze to a southerly wind, often driven by the arrival of a cold front and an ­associated low-­pressure ­system sweeping up from the Southern Ocean. The waves meet the shallowing floor of the Bass Strait, and the southerly wind meets the East Australian Current, flowing south at around 2 knots along Australia’s east coast. The combination can make the ocean off the southeastern tip of Australia one of the roughest pieces of water in the world. And as it’s about halfway between Sydney and Hobart, the words “southerly change” can have an ominous ring for sailors preparing for the start of the annual Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.

“When we saw the race [weather] briefing, it was a little bit fuzzy,” Hobart veteran John Quinn says. He had been speaking to me earlier this year but recalling events almost three decades ago, back in 1993. “It could have been tough; they were a bit uncertain.” The crew’s biggest concern the morning of the start was the new mainsail. “We were tossing up whether to use it or not, and we came to the decision to use it. As it turned out, the [southerly change and accompanying low-pressure system] was a lot worse than what we thought it was going to be.”

With winds reaching over 70 knots, it was equivalent to a low‑grade hurricane, and Quinn and the crew aboard his J/35, MEM, hit the full force of the storm in the Bass Strait on Monday night, December 27, 1993. Before midnight, a wave came out of nowhere. “It came from an odd direction. It was a big wave. Picked us up, threw us straight over on her side. We had three down below, fortunately. All of us on deck, I think bar one, went over the side. I got washed straight out of the cockpit. And when my weight hit the harness, it busted. It was a harness inside the jacket that had been well cared for; it must’ve split the webbing or whatever happened. But anyway, I ended up in the water,” Quinn says.

The crew hit the man-­overboard button and recorded the yacht’s position, which was transmitted with the mayday call, and the search started. The water temperature was about 18 degrees C. The predicted time to exhaustion and unconsciousness is between two and seven hours at that temperature, with the outside survival time at 40 hours. It was the only thing he had going for him. “We’re talking about seas of on average 8 meters, and they’re breaking,” Quinn says. “So, the chances of seeing one individual off a yacht in that sort of condition in the middle of the night—and it was in the middle of the night—are sweet f— all.”

It was around 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning when the oil tanker Ampol Sarel arrived at the search zone. The captain, Bernie Holmes, started at the original point where Quinn had gone overboard, then shut down the engines and let the ship drift downwind. He turned on all the lights so she would coast silently through the search area lit up like a Christmas tree.

Brent Shaw, a seaman aboard the tanker, heard Quinn’s cries. “I was on the wing of the bridge, portside lookout, wearing my raincoat and rain hat when I thought I heard a scream,” he told reporters. “With all the wind and rain, I wasn’t sure, so I took off my hat, and then I positively heard the scream. I directed my searchlight toward the area—and there he was, waving and screaming.”

Quinn was about 20 meters away from the 100,000-ton tanker. “The scary part was we spotted him, and then he drifted out of the searchlight, and then he was in the dark again,” Shaw said.

The Ampol Sarel crew radioed to other search boats that they had seen Quinn, and one that heard the message was the 40-footer Atara. Its crew had already had their own share of adventure that night. One of the crew was 21-year-old Tom Braidwood, who would go on to a career with America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race teams. “It got to that stage where you couldn’t see the waves in the troughs. The white foam was filling all the troughs up. And the only way we knew—you’d hear the wave coming like a train and you’d be like, ‘Here we go.’” 

Eventually, one of those waves had rumbled in and hit the sails of Atara with such force that it snapped the rig. They cut it away, but not before it smashed a hole in the hull. Atara was now in serious trouble. They started pulling the bunks off the side of the boat and using them to try to shore up the structure because it was caving in under the wave motion. It was at this moment that they heard about Quinn and diverted to the search area—even as they struggled to keep their own boat afloat.

“We got to the area, and we’re all on deck with torches down each side of the boat. And we’re motoring around and next thing you know, we saw him and it was like… Talk about the luckiest guy on Earth. Well, unlucky falling in, but…”

They struggled to get him out of the water, lost him once, and had to do a couple of passes to get back to him. “He was drifting on and off the boat, and it’s hard to keep him there,” Braidwood says. “I had a harness on, so I turned around to the guys and said, ‘I’m going to go get him.’ I had my harness tied to a rope as well. I dove in and swam out to him. And as soon as I got him, it was like, uuuuhhhh, you know, like ­complete collapse.”

Braidwood got him back to the boat, and after an immense struggle, they got him on board. “We dragged him down below, and he was hypothermic because all he had on was thermals and a dinghy vest, like a little life jacket, a bit padded. That’s the thing that saved his life, you know, because he didn’t have a jacket, a wet-weather jacket, or anything.”

I first heard this story in Sydney, not long after that Hobart, which I had raced aboard Syd Fischer’s 50-foot Ragamuffin. It took me nearly 30 years to get around to tracking down Quinn and asking him what he was doing in the water in hurricane conditions with no life jacket on.

The flotation vest Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves—so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support.

Quinn was no naive newbie to sailing, neither the Hobart nor the risks. He was brought up in Sydney and spent his childhood in and around the water. “I did my first Hobart race at the age of 21, so I started ocean racing probably about the age of 18,” he told me. By the time he was in his late 20s, he was part owner of a 33-footer, his first ocean racing boat, and over the next two decades he upgraded a couple of times, did a lot more Hobarts, and then bought MEM.

“I had on a Musto flotation vest. They were more for warmth, but they gave you a little bit of flotation. I also had on a normal jacket, but it was weighing me down, so I got rid of it. And I had sea boots on, which I got rid of.”

But what about the life jacket? “We had normal life jackets. You remember how bulky those things were. You can’t get around the boat on them. They’re terrible things.”

The life jackets on board MEM were of the type that relies on closed-cell ­polyethylene foam for buoyancy. They were big and could be awkward to wear, and made it difficult to move around the boat. So, Quinn decided not to wear it—despite the fact that if ever there was a time to be wearing a life jacket, this was it.

“We were relying on our safety harnesses really. You don’t expect to end up in the water if you’re using a safety harness, not when you’re clipped on,” he says.

He chose the harness as his personal safety gear, and now the harness had failed him.

He tried a couple of ­survival techniques he had picked up, including sealing the foul-weather jacket and filling it with air to provide buoyancy. “There’s no way that that will work in real life,” he says.

He also tried pulling into a fetal position to protect himself as the waves hit him. “That was one of the worst ideas they ever came up with because you get one of these waves that picks you up and it chucks you around—you get a roller coming up, and it just picks you up and it just throws you. I mean, it’ll throw a 4-ton yacht. I tried that first, decided that was a really bad idea.”

The problem was the breaking waves, the dangerous part being the white water. “What I ended up doing was […] what we always used to do when the waves came at us when we were surfing: I just dived under it. The flotation vest wasn’t so buoyant that it stopped me [from] doing that, so I was able to get through them. I was looking around for lights all the time, of course. Doing a fair bit of praying, remembering all the fine things at home, and wondering what the hell I’m doing there, that sort of stuff.”

This technique would have been impossible in one of the life jackets aboard MEM. “[They’re] very buoyant—I would’ve hated to have been out there with one of those things on,” he says.

Crew Overboard: Four Recovery Methods

The ­flotation vest Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves—so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support. “I was getting toward the end of it. I’d been through the shakes. I started to shiver and shake pretty badly, and the shakes were just going, and then all of a sudden, I saw all these lights, and I swam toward the lights. As it turned out, it was a great big oil tanker, and she was coming down at me. And I yelled, and then I realized this thing’s going to run over the top of me, so I ended up swimming away.”

There was another bad moment when the Ampol Sarel’s searchlight lost him. “No sooner had the light gone off me and I remember going, ‘Oh, s—,’ and looking around, and then I saw the port and ­starboard lights of Atara.”

It was 5:09 a.m. when Quinn was pulled out of the water, five hours and 27 minutes after he went overboard.

“How could anyone do that?” Braidwood asks, reflecting on Quinn’s feat of endurance. Exhausted and hypothermic, the crew of Atara got him into a bunk with one of the only crew who was still dry. “We had the space blankets around him, jamming cups of tea into him,” as they resumed the passage home, Braidwood says. They were ready for this—they had the equipment and knew what to do.

Quinn was lucky—lucky the flotation vest had allowed him to handle the waves, lucky to be found before he ran out of the strength needed to help its limited buoyancy keep him afloat, and lucky to be found by a well-crewed and prepared boat. But again, only just… “Atara was in a total mess,” Quinn says. “I don’t know what they were doing there. The mast had come down. She was totally delaminated. I mean, she was a total wreck.”

Braidwood was just as aware of the frailty of their position. “I remember he came to, and he just turns around and he goes, ‘Oh, thanks guys. Thanks fellas.’ You know, and I turned around and I said, ‘Well, don’t thank us yet mate because your ambulance is about to sink.’”

The indomitable streak that had got Quinn to that point came out in his reply. “When they told me that the ambulance wasn’t in too good a shape, I think I said something rude. Like, ‘Can I wait for the next one?’

“The first thing I did when I came back was I threw out all the life jackets,” he says. “And I put inflatable life jackets on board the boat for everybody. Because inflatable life jackets allow you to control your buoyancy in the same way as a diver can control their buoyancy. And that I regard as absolutely critical because I think with a full life jacket [and] those waves picking you up, I don’t think you’d last very long.

“I made a number of fundamental mistakes,” he continues. “The first thing is that I shouldn’t have been racing a boat that night in the Sydney to Hobart Race. [It’s] a beautiful little coastal racing boat, the J/35, magnificent little boat, but [it’s] not designed to go into that sort of weather. The second mistake I made was when I realized we were going into that sort of weather, I should have pulled the plug and just simply peacefully sailed into Twofold Bay. Shouldn’t have allowed myself to get out of control, I know better than that. They were the two fundamental mistakes.”

These mistakes all had a theme. We could call it ­overconfidence—a deep belief that things were going to be all right, that nothing really bad was going to happen. It allows us to do things that, in hindsight, particularly after our luck has run out, seem reckless. At one point in the worst of the weather during that Hobart, I had unclipped my harness on the weather rail and slid down across the aft deck to get to the leeward runner. My luck held and I got away with it, but not everyone does.

There is an innate bias to overconfidence in all of us, and it’s so hard to overcome because it’s instinctive—we don’t stop to think things through properly.

It would only have taken a moment’s pause to realize how foolish it was to be sliding around the open aft deck of a 50-footer without being clipped. I did not pause. I just acted because I had this inner innate confidence that it would be all right. This instinctive overconfidence is a cognitive bias. These biases (and there are many of them) are hard-wired ­predispositions to types of behavior. The head of the TED organization, Chris Anderson, interviewed Daniel Kahneman (the Nobel Prize winner who, along with Amos Tversky, was responsible for the original work on cognitive bias) and asked if Kahneman could inject one idea into the minds of millions of people, what would that idea be? Kahneman replied, “Overconfidence is really the enemy of good thinking, and I wish that humility about our beliefs could spread.”

There is an innate bias to overconfidence in all of us, and it’s so hard to overcome because it’s instinctive—we don’t stop to think things through properly. In the conclusion to his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman says: “Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely. And I have made much more progress in recognizing the error of others than my own.”

Despite Daniel Kahneman’s pessimism—and speaking as someone who has made some bad choices—I’m going to keep trying to do better. It’s surprising how often we can mitigate risks with little more than a moment’s thought. It can be as simple as putting a strobe light in the pocket of your foul-weather gear. Or as simple as throwing a shovel and a couple of blankets in the back of the car at the start of the winter.

There are a few strategies we can employ to help us overcome the pernicious bias of overconfidence, ways to learn to slow down and pay better attention. One of them is to build habits to review risk whenever there’s time to do so. I sailed in the 1993 Hobart Race with Neal McDonald, who went on to sail with six Volvo Ocean Race teams, twice as skipper, leading Assa Abloy to a second-place finish. He developed the habit of playing a “what if” game during any pause in the action. At any moment, he could start a pop quiz: “What do we do if that sail breaks?” or “What’s the repair if the ­steering gear fails?”

McDonald was constantly looking for solutions to ­problems he did not yet have, and it’s a powerful tool in raising everyone’s awareness of risk. A more formal mechanism that does much the same job is the pre-­mortem, an idea that came from research psychologist Gary Klein. The principle is straightforward: Before any major decision goes forward, all the people involved in it gather for a pre-mortem in which they project forward a year after the decision was enacted. The basis for the meeting is that the decision was a disaster, and everyone must explain why. Klein thinks that it works because it frees people to speak up about the weaknesses of a project or plan.

While McDonald’s “what if” game and the pre-mortem are good at revealing what might otherwise be hidden risks—like the bulky life jackets—there is another strategy that can force a rethink on what’s an acceptable risk and what’s not. This one was prevalent within the OneWorld America’s Cup team in the early 2000s, where almost any assertion could be met with the riposte, “You wanna put some money on that?” And I can tell you, the prospect of losing cold, hard cash forces one to reconsider any misguided ­optimism very quickly.

Annie Duke, a former professional poker player, goes into this strategy in some detail in her book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. Along with Don Moore’s Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely, it’s an excellent book to help understand our disposition for risk-taking—no bad thing when you consider the consequences of hauling up an anchor or untying the dock lines. For all its wonder and immense beauty, the sea is fundamentally hostile to human life; without the support of a ship or boat, our survival has a limited time horizon. If you’re not ­convinced, just ask John Quinn.

The post How John Quinn Didn’t Drown appeared first on Sailing World.

An excerpt from By Roger Vaughan’s novel “Coming About.”

The video re-ran several times a year in Andy’s dreams. It was always the same, down to the last detail, and it never failed to leave him with a hollow, perplexed feeling. If the conditions were right it could play in broad daylight, as it did this particular July afternoon, induced by the monotony of riding the rail of his father’s boat. Worthy, a competitive fifty-footer, was sailing upwind in a vacillating but strong flow of warm breeze, the hull rising and falling with a slow, roller-coaster rhythm through the big ground swells off Newport, Rhode Island. Such conditions provoked either seasickness or ennui. Andy and the rest of the crew were facing westward into a late-afternoon sun that had dropped out of the high overcast and was turning the water’s surface into a million sparkling, hypnotic diamonds. The soft, white-noise wash of water against the hull as the boat slid down the backsides of the broad swells helped bring on Andy’s reverie. His head drooped against the lifelines. His eyes closed.

It was ten years ago. Andy and his friend Robby were fourteen, goofing on their mountain bikes at the 57th Street entrance to Manhattan’s Central Park, waiting for Mitchell Thomas, Andy’s father. And there came the great man, on cue, promptly at six thirty p.m., dapper as hell on his spotless, dark-green Raleigh three-speed he’d special-ordered from England, the one with the enclosed metal chain guard, chromed brake rods, narrow fenders pinstriped in gold, and natty wicker basket. His Mark Cross briefcase with his Brooks Brothers suit jacket neatly folded on top were strapped to the rear carrier. His necktie bearing the burgee of the New York Yacht Club had been flipped over his shoulder by the headwind.

Every time he saw Mitchell this way Andy felt as if he were watching one of those TV commercials where a period person was presented in black and white against a contemporary scene in color. Not a hair on Mitchell’s head as much as fluttered in the breeze. Mitchell may as well have been a paid actor for all the paternal connection he inspired in Andy at these times.

Mitchell didn’t stop, didn’t speak, just nodded to the boys with his habitual, all-purpose executive grin, and rode into the park. The boys fell in behind him like dogs at heel. Robby peeled off at 72nd Street, heading for his family’s apartment on the East Side. Andy got distracted by irresistible, off-path opportunities, skidding through some soft new landscaping, jumping off a wall, and crashing through a hedge and nearly running over a couple entwined behind it until he heard Mitchell’s angry shout. He turned his bike sharply and quickly caught up to his father.

Mitchell seemed more upset than usual about Andy fooling around on his daily ride home. Something had to be bugging him. What a jerk, his father. How could this man even be his father? “Keep up,” Mitchell warned in that terse way of his. Keep up. Yeah, right. Hey Mr. Movie Guy on your stupid three-speed, you keep up! Andy pulled a wheelie and took off, leaving his father shouting after him. There would be hell to pay, but his mother would intervene, as usual. Even at fourteen, Andy understood that Mitchell didn’t dare mess with his mom. It was her company, her money. Andy would speed around the pedestrian tunnel up ahead and lie in wait for his father, give him a scare. The predator in the park.

Tucked behind a big tree, Andy waited. But Mitchell didn’t come out of the tunnel. Maybe he’d taken a different route? Not Mitchell. Andy thought he heard voices; it sounded like an argument but it was hard to be sure against the dull jungle roar of the city that invaded the park. Then he did hear someone yell. Twice. It was Mitchell’s voice, for sure, only he couldn’t make out the word. It did sound like one word, repeated. But the gunshot, amplified by the tunnel, was unmistakable. It sent a chill up Andy’s spine, momentarily freezing him to the big oak tree. Two guys emerged from the tunnel on the run, split up, and disappeared into the gathering dusk. Andy waited, fear constricting his chest. He jumped when a squirrel scampered away above him. It took all his will to leave the protection of the old oak, and not to pedal full speed toward the West Side and home. He coasted cautiously down the slight incline and into the tunnel.

Mitchell was on his knees in the semi-darkness, the precious Raleigh down at a bad angle beside him. He was clutching his right forearm. When he looked up, his face was drawn with pain and shock. When he saw Andy, the pain mixed with rage. Andy was fixed on the blood seeping between Mitchell’s fingers, slick and dark. Andy’s throat was dry. He felt sick.

Mitchell struggled to his feet, sputtering incoherently. Andy’s rising nausea combined with his fear to freeze him in place. His feet felt glued to the damp concrete of the tunnel floor. He watched his father struggle to regain his feet and stagger toward him, maniacal in his disarray, howling with force that spewed saliva. Andy felt it on his face. “You . . . bastard!” Mitchell screamed at him, the veins in his neck like ropes. The word was expelled with such power that it blew past Mitchell’s vocal chords as part screech. “You BASTARD!” Mitchell half turned away only to snap back, his left hand releasing the fresh wound just long enough to smack Andy on the side of his head with a savage growl and all the strength he could muster.

Still astride his bike, Andy went down, little points of light twinkling behind his eyes. He hadn’t seen the hand that felled him, he had been so intently focused on the blood-soaked shirtsleeve covering where the bullet had entered. Luckily for Andy, Mitchell’s wild swing had only partially connected, but it had left blood on his face. His father’s blood.

Even as he went down and before normal vision returned Andy was reflexively scrabbling away on hands and knees, dragging his bike, somehow getting it upright, running, jumping on one pedal and pushing hard, swinging into the saddle, bouncing once off the rough stone wall of the tunnel, pedaling with all he had along the familiar paths, his breath choked by sobs; hearing the crash, but never seeing the taxi that swerved into a parked car to miss him as he sprinted blindly out of the park onto Central Park West.

“Tacking.”

Mitchell’s voice brought Andy back with a start. The crewmen on either side of him chuckled. “Hey, jus’ grabbin’ a siesta,” one of them cracked as they jackknifed their legs in and scampered across the deck to the new high side as the boat changed tacks.

Andy had become a scruffy twenty-four-year-old. He was twenty pounds overweight with a habitually unkempt shock of thick dark hair. His clothes looked slept-in. He looked like a person with a habitual hangover. That was often the case. Mitchell’s crew was a spit-and-polish lot. They made the midshipmen aboard the Naval Academy boats look slightly tarnished. Andy would have stood out in any crowd. On this boat, he was a sore thumb.

Worthy was on the new tack for twenty minutes. But they were closing the layline, that imaginary path that would take them to the finish line on the other tack. Close also was Fetching, their main rival in this regatta. The two boats had been practically match racing all weekend. They’d split tacks as they’d entered the passage marked by Brenton Light. Fetching had chosen the east side, a move that would put it on starboard tack with right-of-way when they came together before the finish line. Whoever won that cross would take the race and the regatta. As Worthy tacked again, Andy heard the bowman announce that Fetching was also tacking.

Andy was the jib trimmer on the new tack. He took a third turn on the big winch drum and hauled hard and fast on the sheet. Given his slack look, his proficiency was surprising. “Trim,” he said quietly to the man on the coffee-grinder handles. “Stop.” Andy watched the jib, watched the speedo on the mast climbing quickly toward the optimum. “Three clicks, one more, stop.”

“Get it right,” Mitchell said from the wheel.

“It is.”

“It better be.”

Crewmen on the rail exchanged looks while Andy quietly simmered. Michell never stopped ragging Andy. The great Mitchell Thomas, hail fellow, captain of industry, excellent sailor. As the twentieth century drew to a close, he was one of the few amateurs who still steered his own boat and held his own in a fleet full of professionals. Good old Mitch. Good old son of a bitch was Andy’s version. Those who fawned over him should have to live just one day with him. They crewed for him for only one reason: he frequently won.

“Have we got them?”

Mitchell was addressing Andy, the only one on the lee side, the one with the best view of Fetching. The big genoa effectively blocked the view for the rest. For a moment, Mitchell silently cursed Rummans, his sailmaker and deck boss, for having assigned Andy to trim on the burdened port tack. Then he remembered. Jonesy, the regular port trimmer, had taken ill. Couldn’t make it. Better to have Andy there than some untested new guy. That was the theory anyway.

“No problem.”

“Get that weight outboard.” Mitchell addressed the crew in terse tones. “Let’s have it quiet.”

Intensity permeated the deck like heavy oil. There was no chatter from the railbirds. The mains’l trimmer’s eyes flicked from sail to instruments to sail. He took one click on the traveler, pulling the boom to windward maybe an inch. In the lulls, Andy eased the jib sheet an inch, called for a click or two of trim in the puffs.

“How we doing?” Mitchell stood erect, his face locked in concentration.

Andy said, “No problem.”

Sitting furthest forward on the rail, the bowman stretched himself forward to grab a quick look through the clear plastic window sewn into the genoa. “Close,” he muttered to no one in particular.

Andy heard him. “No problem.”

“By how much?” Mitchell demanded.
“Enough.”

Conley, the tactician, interrupted the edgy father–son exchange. “Are we good? If not we’ll tack early, lee-bow them, hope to give them some bad air, maybe pick up a header we can tack on. Better to cross them and then tack, pin them outside until we can lay the finish line.”

“We’re good.” Andy sounded confident.

Head down, the bowman stared into the bow wave under his feet, shook his head, started to speak, then decided to stay out of it. But he could feel it coming. It wouldn’t be the first time Andy and the old man had gotten it on.
“Starboard!”

The warning hail came from Fetching. The right-of-way boat always made a fuss trying to rattle the confidence of the crew hoping to cross. Making a close cross from the burdened position took a lot of cool, a lot of guts, and a keen eye. It was like running a stop sign when you knew a car was coming. The helmsman had to steer perfectly under pressure, maintaining the optimum combination of boat speed and heading. Large sailboats didn’t travel very fast, but they carried great momentum. Boats the size of Worthy and Fetching, with a combined weight of around 80,000 pounds, would be coming together at a closing speed of roughly twenty knots (twenty-three miles per hour). That was like two lightly loaded eighteen-wheelers colliding head-on when each was moving faster than ten miles an hour. Boats had no brakes. And the water they were moving through was an unstable platform. Misjudge a close cross, and the havoc of a collision was a good possibility. Damage could be extensive. The mast could come down. There could be serious injuries. The person making the call had to be very good, very confident in himself and in his helmsman. And vice versa.

A few moments passed. The only sounds were the slice of the cutwater and the eddies of water separating from the polished hull with a steady fizz.

“Starboard!” The hail was closer. This time there was more than a touch of frenzy in the call. And there were other voices chiming in, a sure sign that anxiety was becoming a factor aboard Fetching.

“Better tack!” Worthy’s bowman found his voice.

“Starboard! Hey! Starboardgoddammit! . . . STARBOARD . . . HEY!!”

Andy: “Tack, Mitchell. Tack! Tack now!”

“Don’t you tell me . . . Christ! . . . Tacking!” Cursing a blue streak, Mitchell Thomas drove the wheel down hard as he caught sight of Fetching coming into his path like a train, spinning Worthy on a dime to avoid the impending collision. The violent turn drastically reduced the boat’s forward motion. The crew sensed the crisis coming, and still used up valuable seconds getting off the rail and scrambling up the deck that was now tilted against them. Andy had to let the jib sheet run before the new trimmer was ready. It took precious seconds to overhaul the loose sheet and get the big jib in on the new tack. Worthy had avoided a collision, but it was a racing disaster.

Fetching passed by very close at full tilt, the wash of the hull frighteningly loud. Fetching’s skipper, Alistair Koonce, took a certain amount of pleasure cutting it as close as he dared, but he smartly eased his helm toward the wind five degrees to make sure he avoided Worthy, and so his mast would straighten up a bit and avoid slamming into Worthy’s now nearly upright rig. The sailors on both boats avoided one another’s eyes. No one on either boat said a word, except the outraged Mitchell Thomas, who kept up a vicious string of abuse directed at Andy, whose face remained impassive.

Koonce, a savvy New Zealand professional at the top of his game, let the hint of a smile cross his lips at the stream of invective coming from Worthy.

“Sounds like someone’s upset,” he said quietly. His crew, wound tight from the near miss, convulsed with laughter.

Koonce tacked for the finish line. With Worthy now tucked four boat-lengths behind them, and the finish less than a mile ahead, the race was over. Koonce and crew were winners, but they tended to business, watched the trim, tidied up lines and got ready to cross the line in style. Koonce gave the wheel to Rufus Samuels, the owner. Judd, Fetching’s tactician, a regular with Koonce, shook his head as Koonce sat down beside him.

“Why’s he do it? Why’s he take the kid? Why’s the kid go?”

Koonce shrugged. The race was history. He was already thinking about a beer, and other business.

“I know Deedee, Mrs. Thomas, Deedee Moss,” Rufus Samuels offered from behind the wheel. “She likes it that Andy sails on the boat. She insists, in fact. And since she is the majority stockholder in the company, well, let’s just say Mitchell has always been a realist.” Samuels paused. He chuckled, happily patted the wheel. “Our good luck. I thought they might have crossed us back there.”

The post Bad Call appeared first on Sailing World.