in this same space, one year ago, I shared an epiphany that I’d had after tanking my frostbite season on the final day of racing, on account of a few avoidable mistakes. “Dumb is as dumb does,” I posited. I would not let that happen again, I promised. 

The offseason is long, however, and it’s during this time and space that we forget the commitments we make to ourselves and our teammates as we debrief over a beer, sky the halyards, wash the sheets, and put away the boat until next time. There’s always a ­better season next year. So, in my offseason, I thought long and hard about why I’d been prone to high-risk, low-reward ­tactics and aggressive starts. I was always trying too hard to win races without regard to the length of the season, which starts on New Year’s Day and rolls through mid-April. There are a lot of races, and a lot of points to be saved between A and B, so stop trying to win races. See how it goes.

With this mantra in mind, I arrive early on opening day, eager to get the new season underway. My arch rival and the perennial fleet champ, FJ Ritt, is already at the club. He’s busy getting the club’s fleet of N10s (aka Turnabouts) ready. There’s a special vibe on opening day, and I’m sure he sensed it too: a rebirth, a new beginning, uncertainty and anticipation. Corny, I know. But it’s true.

I step to the water’s edge, look across the slate-gray ­harbor littered with winter sticks and mooring balls. There’s a light northeasterly—the one direction I dread. I have flashbacks of that one dumb season-crushing race that ended my last season.

Race 1 then goes something like this: I get a good start, and I’m in a close second place on the downwind leg. And what do I do? Immediately split at the leeward mark and sail into a hole. It’s my knee-jerk reaction to go the other way and go for the pass. I don’t even bother looking over my shoulder before tacking into a tar pit. I deserve the 11 I get as the first score on my card. Thankfully, there’s only one drifter raced that day, and with that 11th, I’m sent packing to the B fleet for the following weekend.

I’ve learned my lesson, again, however, and over the following race days, I focus on ­climbing into the top five. I win a few races along the way, but more importantly, I’m getting ­better at not doing dumb things. Whenever I’m immediately behind, next to or near the lead boat, I am patient. If the opportunity to make a pass comes my way, I take it. I stop forcing the win. I’m good with second (or third or fourth), I say to myself when following FJ, or speedy Missy Hudspeth across the ­finish. I accept this.

On the Sunday of Week 6, I finally find myself at the top of the standings with a 1-2 on my birthday. What a gift. The season is no longer mine to win; it is indeed mine to lose. From then on, Ritt and I battle with an unspoken vigor—two old men going at it in tubby little white boats. It’s our Sunday afternoon raison d’être, and for the remainder of the season, I’m true to my rule: Keep it cool; keep the points. Nothing crazy. Nothing fancy.

It’s working for me, and on the 23rd and final race of the season, I somehow nail a dream start; full speed, on the line, giant hole to leeward, and launched to a season-ending high. Hallelujah. 

That’s my win to report, but I also have a loss worth sharing with longtime, and the most astute, readers of this magazine. Those of you in this group might recall a series of stories back in the day written by Sailing World’s previous staffers about a 26-foot fractional sloop named AO.

This particular pocket yacht is an Albin Express 26 One-Design, drawn by Peter Norlin and built in the mid-1980s. It’s kind of like a J/24 but different. Past senior editor and de facto historian Herb McCormick was around when the magazine’s owners procured the boat and added it to the employee ­benefits package.

The Another Opinion origin story goes back to the early 1980s, when Murray Davis, the publisher of Cruising World, acquired it as a perk for the magazine’s staff to sail and enjoy, McCormick says. “It was actually a bit of a spiteful ­gesture. Davis had wanted to trade out advertising pages with J/Boats to score the hot new J/24. When he was rebuffed by the Johnstones, he ­pivoted to Swedish builder Albin, and ­suddenly Cruising World was the steward of a new Albin Express, a popular one-design on lakes in Sweden. The idea was to crush the J/24 whenever the opportunity arose.”

But there were problems with Murray’s plan, McCormick says. “First, of course, the J/24 was also a one-design that rarely sailed in PHRF fleets. But more importantly, as we discovered at Block Island Race Week, the Albin’s blade jib was a serious liability upwind versus a J/24’s overlapping genoa. Someone got crushed all right. It was us.”

For more than three decades, AO served its purpose as the ultimate perk: Corporate paid the yard bills and gave great joy to employees—harbor cruises, first dates, music festivals, race weeks, and PHRF beer canning. It was an editorial project boat to test out new gear and DIY stories, a Frankenstein’s monster of half-finished projects.

The Cruising World staff would lay claim to it and pile their crap on board: piles of anchors and useless boating gadgets. Rolling sails wasn’t their thing. Sailing World editors Dan Dickison and Tim Robinson once whipped AO into proper Wednesday-night shape. It was stripped to bare bones and lost its luster at the hands of neglect. With company X, Y or Z’s name on the registration, no one was ever willing to put their own money into it. Sweat equity, sure, because there was bottom sanding and seasonal cleaning, but that’s about it. Simple boats don’t need much, and this was the beauty of AO. Ugly in her old age but a fine sailing yacht in all conditions.

As Cruising World and Sailing World’s editorial staff dwindled over the years and corporate eventually closed the Newport office, I became the sole and final caretaker of the company yacht. And over the past few years, I’ve taught a lot of newbies and friends the finer points of sailing through the harbor. I’ve cruised the lower bay with the family and sailed its stretches solo. My wife eventually started her own ladies’ night, a cockpit full of school teachers on summer break, lapping the harbor while they lapped up cocktails. It served its purpose and we did right by AO, but like other ­staffers before me, I never sank an extra dime into it.

By last summer, AO was ­certainly showing its age: its gray topsides faded and scuffed, the white deck stained and chalky. I’m ashamed to admit that I used an entire roll of double-wide Dacron sticky back to hold the jib together. The interior was no better—salty and dank. No bilge pump, no battery or working lights, and a Home Depot bucket for the ladies. My 13-year-old refused my every sleep-aboard offer because the interior was “gross.”

Last fall, while preparing the boat for a looming hurricane, I tugged on the jib halyard and it wouldn’t budge. The top swivel was jammed. I pulled hard at the luff again, and it came down, all right—the entire rig along with it. The forestay had parted at the tang swage. Dismasted at the mooring. Now that was a new low for AO, which we towed north a few weeks later and hauled out for the season at the Safe Harbor New England Boatworks.

The yard guys must have sensed AO’s fate, backing its transom into the scrub bushes in the dumpiest corner of the yard, where it now sits, likely home to Safe Harbor’s resident raccoons. At the time, I had intentions of ordering new standing rigging and buying a jib. But the Frostbite racing ­season came, along with winter regatta travel, and the wellness visits stopped. 

The magazines were sold to our current owners this past fall, and in the due diligence, it became known that “we” own a company yacht, and that it too must be divested. I offered $1. They declined, so I figured that was the end of it until another email came much later, from our previous company’s legal department. They’d read the storage contract, and it was their intent to default on the late fees and allow Safe Harbor to auction it off.

The thought of losing AO weighed on me as I considered buying it off the block. It’s a piece of my Newport identity, a ship of memories and comic adventures, a vessel good of times. My daughter half-pleaded for me not to give AO away, and I hemmed and hawed for days, but I’d already decided: time to move on. I can’t afford to maintain it properly, and Safe Harbor has outpriced my paycheck.

Which brings us back the boat’s original name and to our historian, Mr. McCormick, who informs us that Another Opinion was the title of a Cruising World column where boat owners would share info with interested parties about their boat. “Most casual observers who hailed us always asked if we were ­doctors,” McCormick says. “Hence, the handle (and eventually the two giant letters on its topsides) was soon shortened to just AO. It was easier for everyone that way.”

While we’re disappointed about losing the company yacht, we’ll take this loss as a win. It’s an opportunity to find an AO-worthy replacement for new adventures.

The post Won One, Lost One appeared first on Sailing World.

Real change takes time, that much we know. Yet the rate at which the sport of competitive sailing has advanced over the past two decades is truly mind-blowing. In a blink, we’ve gone from displacement sailing to sportboat planing and now foiling crafts of all types and sizes. While our equipment evolves rapidly, however, our social initiatives seem to crawl at an agonizingly slow pace. What I’m referring to here is diversity, equity and inclusion in sailboat racing, and this is especially true in professional sailing.

Yes, there are more and greater opportunities for women at the Olympic level as new disciplines like kiting and coed classes continue to shift the gender balance. Never before have there been so many inspirational and talented female skippers and crew in the shorthanded and around-the-world racing scenes, and with certain one-design classes like the IC37 forcing change by requiring female crewmembers, we are indeed inching closer to being a better reflection of the real world. But we’re not there yet—not even close.

I’m regularly reminded of this when I see photos from awards ceremonies of the big-boat grand-prix events. Take the superyachts and maxis, for example, where there are big budgets, big crews and even bigger opportunities for women, but it’s still a big party of day-rate dudes. Gray-bearded grizzlies too, the lot of them. And what of other higher-­profile ­professional sailing circuits that claim to be progressive? Top of mind, the foiling GC32 class? More bros. The 44Cup? Same. The 52 Super Series? Yep.

SailGP? Well, sort of, but full credit to that circuit for committing to the effort. For the entirety of season two, all SailGP teams had females on their rosters as mandated by the league’s Women’s Pathway Program, but they barely sailed in actual races. Thankfully, for the one windy penultimate event of the season in Spain, the female sailor athletes got their debut in the main event; some were more active than others in the jump seat of the F50 foiling catamarans, chipping into the tactical comms. Others seemed, for the most part, along for the rip and ride.

“With the addition of a new crewmember as a new standard and light-wind configuration, WPP athletes are now able to gain the valuable experience needed to race the high-flying, high-speed F50s,” SailGP said ahead of the Spanish event, but in previous back-to-back light-wind regattas, teams raced with three crew instead of the regular five.

I never could get a straight answer as to why, but for 2022’s season three, we’re told the default light-wind crew configuration will now be four-up, including one female. I suppose that’s better, but really? Why only the light-air races? I don’t buy the experience cop-out because plenty of the “developing” teams over the first two seasons plugged male sailors into roles with now equal or less experience, and I’m pretty sure turning knobs on the foil controller does not require a whole lot of muscle mass. It takes experience. And experience in big breeze. Hopefully, by the time we get to season four, there will be a female or two on every boat, in every race, regardless of wind strength. [Editor’s Note: According to SailGP, for Season 3, all teams will now race with a four-person crew in light winds and a six-person crew in stronger winds, including one female.]

Access to the starting lineups of such big-league teams will be reserved for the boys for a while, and that’s especially true for the America’s Cup. The revised AC75 class rule defines eight sailors on board, and I’d bet that each afterguard trio (helmsman, main trimmer and flight controller) will be exclusively male in 2024. The other five crew will either be male champion cyclists with watermelon quads or world-caliber rowers with apelike arms. (No disrespect to any of these athletes; they put in the hard work too.)

So, to include females in sailing’s pinnacle event, they’ve instead put a Women’s America’s Cup regatta into the protocol (as well as one for youth), which will be sailed in the new AC40 class. This is great news, but even this event has a giant asterisk: It’s a requirement of entry for each challenger to sail in the women’s AC “if it is held.” That’s a big if, and as we saw with AC36, the highly anticipated Youth America’s Cup never happened, no thanks to COVID-19.

So, again, there is progress at the top of the sport—baby steps as they may be—but what is truly heartening is the changing landscape at the wider base of sailing, where the rest of us play. But here too there is much work to be done on the pro-sailing gender front, and even more so with the slow-moving diversity shift.

RELATED: Women’s Invitational Shines in San Diego

It’s impossible to say or to quantify how many more young adult women are sailing keelboats professionally after college. At every regatta I sailed in 2021 there were more women, but I’m quite sure none, if any, were getting paid. Professional sailor and multiple world champion Willem Van Waay came to the same conclusion after the most recent J/70 World Championship in California. Not only were there few women among hundreds of men, he says, but there were practically no paid females in a class chock full of pros. The reality, he says, is that only guys like him have the opportunity to learn all the tricks of the boat through experience and paychecks, while perfectly good female sailors are recruited not for their skills but because of their weight. Owners and fellow pros, Van Waay says, need to step up to get more women more paid gigs in the class.

“In the J/70 class especially, the main trimmer/tactician spot is taken by the guy pros, and those guys have always been given the opportunities that women haven’t been given,” Van Waay says. “Because of this, they’re now the stars and making great money.”

The best way to force change, he says, is for there to be a class where there are unlimited pros, but “you have to have two men and two women, and the owner has to drive. Then, all of a sudden, an owner who buys a boat has to find two women—not the lightest women, but the best women.”

Van Waay pitched us on trying his idea at the Helly Hansen NOOD St. Petersburg next February, and we happily accepted. To be eligible for the J/70 class’s Mixed-Plus trophy, the crew composition can only have two adult males (over 21), and only one adult male can be a pro. The Mixed-Plus division will be scored as a subdivision of the fleet.

“I’ve had so many women come up to me that want to do it, and I think it will be popular,” Van Waay adds. “Those [owners] who do this will get the top women, the right pros and be ready. They will beat the all-dude teams that just want to sail that way, and that’s what we want to happen. We want the women to do well and win. I think with that there will be some obvious results for potential change for women to get more opportunities.”

I’m with Willem and SailGP. Let’s stop talking about it and make it ­happen.

The post Top Females Limited Access Top Pro Gigs appeared first on Sailing World.

The ol’ J/24 Crack of Noon doesn’t leave home often. Its longtime caretaker, Ian Scott, is a busy guy in the summertime, bottling and delivering crisp, clean natural spring water to thirsty and demanding customers. Come June, the rest of his aging crew are busy too, yours truly included, with all the usual excuses. But we show up to race on Thursday nights, as we have for decades, because by 5 o’clock our skipper has the rig tuned, the beer on ice, and the sails on deck. You could say we’re Pavlovian to the sound of ice cubes tumbling onto cans in a cooler.

While the competition and fleet size here in Newport, Rhode Island, is a shadow of its former glory, 10 boats regularly show up, so it’s still plenty fun and challenging for us weekend-warrior types. It’s all good right here at home, so why leave town when good is good enough?

I suppose that is why we don’t leave often, but when we do, we don’t go far. This summer, it’s the J/24 North Americans—our first road trip in nine years. Our destination is Blue Point, New York, home to the unpretentious Sayville YC, a hidden gem on Long Island’s south coast. The clubhouse is stilted on a strip of beach on Great South Bay, a 151-square protected skinny water that averages only 4 feet (and 20 at its deepest).

For hotshot pros and traveling teams, hooking up a trailer and wandering about the country to regattas is no big deal, but for the Crack of Noon boys, leaving town is a complex affair. Planning is not our specialty, and while we always start the conversation enthusiastically and early while standing over a pile of empty beer cans in the cockpit (“Let’s do the North Americans!”), we tend to leave things to the last minute, kicking our proverbial Heineken down the road (“The regatta is next week, right?”).

Procrastination is how we end up needing only two hotel rooms and four beds in a rundown Clarion Conference Center hotel in Ronkonkoma, New York, which looks like it hasn’t been occupied since the pandemic hit. Procrastination, in other words, is how we fail to line up a fifth crew to get us to maximum weight. We’ve raced four-up plenty of times on Thursday nights, however, so we figure we will manage. Plus, weigh‑in will be a piece of cake. In fact, we can eat all the cake we want before ­stepping on the scale.

When we do finally step into the registration room at Sayville, there are at least eight friendly club volunteers to greet us. They efficiently escort us through our registration and onto the scale behind the privacy divider. There we are, a bunch of old dudes, still stripping down to our skivvies and sucking in our guts, even though we don’t have to. There’s no need to pretend—we have a good 140 pounds to spare, and come to find out, we sure could use it.

For four glorious days, Sayville delivers spectacular summer sailing conditions, with gusty sea breezes whipping the bay into a steep-lump racetrack that requires full-crew hiking and hyperactive trimming on the sails. Our starts are good, but without those extra pounds, we don’t stand a chance of hanging in skinny lanes, especially when we’re alongside the top boats.

Race after race, we’re having fun mixing it up in the middle of the fleet, which is a blessing because it helps us forget about one nagging bummer that we will eventually have to deal with when the regatta’s over: Our tow vehicle died upon arrival in Sayville.

True story: We were a few hundred feet from the yacht club’s driveway entrance when our trimmer Herb McCormick’s 2005 Ford F-150 croaked. We nursed it and the boat through the gate, parked alongside the gin pole, and that’s where the old beast would remain until a AAA tow hauled it away to the local Ford dealer.

To our good fortune, however, our regatta hosts, the good Samaritans of Sayville, are standing under the gin pole ready to lend a hand in our time of need. “Don’t worry about it,” rear commodore Steven Thomas assures us. He’s got a skid steer to get the trailer to its parking spot after we finish measurement, and then he offers his personal truck to get our boat off the island and back to Newport.

I mean, we’ve only just met the guy, and yet he’s giving us his wheels?

Throughout the regatta, Thomas, who commands the bow on the navy-blue J/24 named Shake and Bake, checks in with us twice daily to see how we’re managing and if we need his truck. And every time I see him at the club, he’s either hustling to or from his boat while putting out tinder fires, or making sure all of us racers are having the best time possible. He’s manning the skid steer, he’s directing trailer traffic, he’s pushing boats around with a Jeep, he’s slinging drinks at the bar when the tenders are backed up, and he’s hustling buffet trays of meatloaf from the kitchen to the food tent so the sailors don’t have to wait in line.

He’s always busy, but never too busy to ask, “You guys having a good time? You need anything?”

Word eventually gets around that the poor lads from Newport are stranded in Sayville. The dealer’s diagnosis is that we’ve blown a crankshaft bolt and the engine is kaput. But that’s when another Sayville Samaritan, Jim “Seamus” Keeley, who’s on race-committee duty, steps out of the blue and hooks us up with a local mechanic, who eventually saves poor Herb from having to go into debt on a new truck. Keeley not only helps line up the mechanic, but also later drives to the opposite side of the island to pick up Herb at the ferry terminal so he can retrieve his ride.

None of us on Crack of Noon had ever been to—or knew anything about—Sayville, but when we gather again for our normal Thursday-night affair afterward, we all agreed, and Herb especially, that Sayville is one of coolest places we’ve raced, with some of the kindest and most helpful people we’ve ever met.

In hindsight, while we were underweight and potentially stranded, we are all the better for getting off our little island. From the moment we coasted into Sayville to the moment we rolled out with the boat hitched to a U-Haul box truck, we thoroughly enjoyed the regatta, our outstanding hosts, the welcoming club and its amazing sailing conditions. It’s a reminder that it’s good for the Crack of Noon crew to travel once in a while because good enough should never be good enough.

Next time, we’ll have our fifth, but I’m not sure about Herb’s truck.

The post Samaritans of Sayville appeared first on Sailing World.