Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2021 en Sailing World

On any given winter weekend, there are nearly 30 diehard sailors eager to race in Newport YC’s Turnabout Frostbite fleet, which continues to be my winter sailing outlet. Problem is, there are only 12 boats. The fleet is divided into A and B divisions, and sometimes there are more sailors than boats when we draw for boat assignments. If you draw an X from the bag of numbered wooden cubes, you sit out one race. Drawing the X is an absolute buzzkill. Nowadays especially, once Sunday morning rolls around, I’m amped to go sailing. For me, being on the water, no matter how cold or brief, is an escape from the cooped-up anxiety of my house. The simple pleasure of breathing fresh ocean air, socializing with new faces (albeit, behind…

Ben Corson and his partner, Marta Hansen, have for many years enjoyed sailing and racing a variety of boat types, from a Flying Scot they keep on Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland to a series of larger and faster boats they sail on Chesapeake Bay. This latter group includes a J/125, an Open 6.50 and a Dragonfly 25 Sport trimaran. All have their particular strengths within each genre of sailing—an offshore-capable keelboat, a lively sportboat and a fast multihull, respectively—with the common element for all being high speed under sail. “I do like going fast,” Corson confesses, while also admitting to having taken fast cars around a racetrack a time or two. So his latest boat, named Narrow Escape, had to be fast, and yet he was looking for…

As American Magic towed its AC75 Patriot to the racecourse on the afternoon of January 29, everyone with a hand and heart in the New York YC’s 36th America’s Cup campaign knew the situation was dire. They were already down two races to Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli in the best-of-seven Prada Cup semifinal eliminations, their beloved Patriot had been to hell and back, and the Italians were on a roll. Cue the sporting cliches: chins high, game faces on, business as usual, one race at time. Win one and live to fight another day. But no amount of positive spin from within the organization could change the fact that the boat was not the finely tuned racing machine it was before it capsized and sank on January 17. Gremlins were…

It was a sobering moment this past spring as my wife, Janice, and I put away our boat after a pleasant afternoon of sailing off Annapolis, Maryland. We’d just learned that Gov. Larry Hogan had declared that recreational boating was prohibited, starting the following day. The growing restrictions of the early COVID-19 pandemic felt confining already. There was so much confusion with restrictions being imposed on travel, school attendance, sports and workplaces, along with a new concept called “social distancing.” It was all combined to change our fortunate way of life, but if anything, we thought, sailing would be safe, right? Nope. “Stay ashore” was the new commandment. What a bummer. Regattas across the United States were canceled, sailing charters fell off the cliff, and boat shows were either postponed…

EVEN IF YOU’RE a hotshot dinghy sailor like Joey Bagodonuts on his fancy new foiler, you gotta keep it cool, bro. There are slicker ways to impress than plunging your pointy ends into that liquid goodness. If you want to do it right, kick back, relax and let the boat fly, homeslice. And if you’re seriously looking to impress the crew or the ladies, a smooth flyby or a foiling tack is guaranteed to get you on the ’gram. Leave the stuff-and-swim action to the Doc. That’s my jam.…

I was anxious the first time I took my handcrafted McKenzie-style drift boat to The Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, Washington. Realizing that boat builders and woodworkers with discerning eyes would be inspecting the construction details of my boat over the course of four days was almost reason enough for me to create a “change of plans” and not go. Almost. After completing the construction of my mahogany drift boat with WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy several years ago, I placed a call to the director of the Port Townsend Festival, Kaci Cronkite, to see if there was a spot to display a 16' riverboat at the festival. The Wooden Boat Festival is one of the biggest festivals of this type in the United States. I hoped there would be a…

Buster Welch of Clandeboye, Manitoba, Canada has had extensive experience with epoxy. He began with building a cedar strip canoe in 1973 after seeing one of Ted Moores's (Bear Mountain Boatworks) on display at the Toronto Boat Show. Since then, he has built or supervised the construction of another two dozen strip canoes. In the beginning, he fiberglassed with polyester but switched to WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy because it is much better at adhering to cedar. Welch has also built a 22' Bartender using stitch and glue construction with 24' long, scarfed plywood sheets. Early on, Welch was taken with the idea of laminating to create unique and functional furniture. He’s especially proud of his chair design that has proven surprisingly strong. At least eighteen of his chairs have been used…

The nifty keelboat Saltash—an eight-time winner of Australia’s Brisbane to Gladstone Race—is getting a new lease on life from the craftspeople at Norman R. Wright & Sons using WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy and carbon fiber. Currently upturned in the yard at Norman R. Wright & Sons (and dwarfed by the carbon fiber bulk of the supermaxi Comanche) at the Rivergate complex, the hull and skeletal superstructure of Saltash belie her glorious past and pedigree. Built in 1966, Saltash is a 30' Yachting World Diamond keelboat by designer Jack Holt. The editors of Yachting World commissioned Holt to create a one-design, affordable open keelboat to dispel the perceived elitism around the sport in those optimistic post-war years. He conceived the Diamond as a simple, stitch-and-glue “build-her-yourself”sailboat. The Wright family bought Saltash in…

My alarm goes off. I roll over to grab my phone. The bright light pierces my eyes. It’s 5:00 a.m. Half asleep, I silence it and continue to drool all over my pillow. Next, a knock on my bedroom door. “Erika, are you up?” It’s my teammate, Lucy. I want to reply with a yes, but only gibberish spews from my mouth. I know it’s time to get up. We’re launching in two hours. Having arrived home from racing the previous night 10 hours earlier, we’re both dazed and confused as we organize our belongings. It’s my job to get the coffee going, to whip up a breakfast, pack the cooler, and fill our water jugs. On this particular morning, however, we have a bit of a role reversal. I…

Nicolas Henard, president of the French Sailing Federation, was charged by the Paris 2024 committee to be bold and brave in his promotion of new Olympic sailing events. Like the dramatic gold-medal design of Marianne—the female symbol of the French Republic blended into the Olympic flame—the slate of events Henard and his colleagues at World Sailing voted in for 2024 is bold indeed. Nearly half of the sailing events will showcase hydrofoils. I witnessed that 2018 vote, and there were many arguments for and against moving so swiftly toward the future of foiling in the Olympics, but the door was thrust wide open, accelerating the inevitable evolution in high-performance sailing we are experiencing today. Predictions that “everything will have foils” in the future, however, have yet to materialize. What’s missing?…

Entering the penultimate day of the 2019 International 505 World Championship in Fremantle, Australia, Mike Martin and Adam Lowry were leading the regatta comfortably, but while warming up for the first race, the hole that holds the centerboard pivot pin ripped open, leaving the centerboard free-floating inside its trunk. With some quick thinking, Lowry says, they wedged a paddle—required equipment on a 505—into the trunk to minimize the board’s movement. Not ideal, but good enough to continue racing. “It moved all the way back in the trunk, and then it tilted backward, so the center of lateral resistance was all over the place,” Lowry recalls. “That was challenging, and we were trying to do a lot with our trim to compensate.” With Lowry steering from the trapeze, Martin was able to…

Events in 2020 laid bare a host of societal shortcomings. Inspiration says we must take action. In the next minute, the cynic in me shouts out that suddenly every institution from Harvard to your local YC to Gus’ Gas and Bait Shop now has a DE&I committee. Some, but I hope not all, will fritter away to mere talk. But in case you missed it, DE&I stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity means that everybody gets invited to the dance. Equity means that everybody gets to dance. Inclusion means that everybody has a good time. There has never been a better time to talk about this. Ordinarily, it would be outside the view of a racing-sailing magazine to broach these topics, but the fact is, the country we live…

I designed and, with the help of others, built my barn many years ago. While we didn’t use epoxy in the construction, I’ve used WEST SYSTEM® many times to make repairs and modifications. Much of this was needed because the construction crew didn’t follow the design instructions. The fourth floor of the building is a 24' wide by 60' long clear-span room. The weight of the roof, cupola, and sometimes a lot of snow, are held up by six trusses. I strengthened the trusses by adding the missing gussets, adding additional lumber to some parts, and strengthening weak spots in the grade F lumber I’d used. Unfortunately, the top beams and the bottom beams of the trusses running all the way across the room were assembled by just nailing the…

River tables? Love them! Think they’re cool… know I’d never have the patience to make one… too cheap to buy one. Lately, I’ve been on a refurbish/re-do jag and am obsessed with Facebook Marketplace. Things I never even knew I needed I can find everywhere! It really is a curse (for my family) and a blessing (to me!). After weeks of searching I found and bought a sweet sectional. I started visualizing the new living room layout and quickly was in search of a cool looking, round coffee table. It didn’t take me long to score an outdated, glass-topped baby for $25! I figured, at that price I could not go wrong—but then something did. As I was coming down from my bargain score high, it dawned on me….I cannot…

Most of the projects featured in Epoxyworks are neat and have a high level of finish. For a creation that will be put in the ocean and beat on with sticks, that seemed too high of a standard. When building the Unlimited Canoe, we instead opted for durability and fast construction, not to mention cheap. The bulk of the canoe is made from cedar strips, resawn from siding boards taken from my house during a remodeling project about 20 years ago. The plywood for the stations was from a crate that had contained two surf skis from Italy (almost a full 3/4" thick and very flat). We built it on a strongback that was also used in the construction of four previous canoes, although none was a full 45' like…

My wife, Sarah, is my secret weapon for a lot of things, especially when it comes to mark roundings on Barnegat Bay, where she learned to sail. About 60 years later, she and I are racing our brand new Melges 15, and we’re in the hunt. We’re nearing the top mark somewhere between Marjorie’s Bar and Barrel Island, where locals know tide will be a factor. “You’re going to want to overstand,” she says in a tone that means business. The port tackers coming into the mark from the left are facing an adverse 2-knot current, and there’s a notable cluster developing where we don’t want to be. Summoning her years of local knowledge—learned in the pressure cooker of the Sneakbox fleet and passed down like the tablets from her…

I had been speaking with Sailing World’s Dave Powlison about a potential series of articles highlighting the major generic controls on most keelboats to control the rig and sails, when it suddenly occurred to both of us that we could do this series in parallel to my involvement in the creation of two 5.5 Metre class yacht builds taking place in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in England. Why the 5.5 as a platform for this discussion? For starters, there are no fewer than 46 control points. This is where a control line is directed to a crewmember. Believe me, I have “simplicity” going through my mind at every moment—we are doing all we can to minimize complication. At every step of the way, we debate what we do…

GONE is the idea of skippers disappearing over the horizon and then finishing hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart, having surfed entirely separate weather systems in the Southern Ocean. From now on, we can expect sailors to prepare for the Vendée Globe as a sort of giant fleet race when the great capes—Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn—function as little more than buoys on the course. This pandemic-era Vendée Globe featured not only remarkably close racing all the way around the world, with a front grouping of 10 boats each in contention for the podium for three months, but it also set a new precedent with a finale that was easily the most dramatic in the event’s 32-year history. Those closing stages, on a breezy and cold Bay of Biscay,…

It’s natural to get a pit in your stomach before the start of a big race. Even more so when the fleet is large and the line is crowded. This is partly because the boats are very close together, the closest together they will be in the race. Also, there is a perception among most of us that the start is the most important part of the race. Get a good start, and a good result will surely follow. While there’s truth in that, there is a second part of the race that is at least as important and should come with serious butterflies, if it doesn’t already. That’s the last third of the first upwind leg. Here, at the pointy apex of the traditional racecourse, boats funnel back together…

Pre-finishing parts with WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy before installation is a technique that was popularized by guess who? The Gougeon brothers. It can save time and increase the quality of the finish. Coating small parts can also be a challenge, but it’s much easier if the parts are held in a way that provides good access for roller and brush coating. Our Port Townsend Watercraft dinghy kits have a lot of small parts; foot braces, oarlock riser blocks, alignment clips, daggerboard trunk cap, etc. Some of these parts must be pre-finished before installation, but I find that even parts that could be done later are often easier to finish before installing. When fixturing (holding) the parts for coating, allow good access to the surfaces that need coating and provide a base…

Denman Marine in Kettering, Tasmania built and recently launched Stormy Weather, an East Coast 32. Renowned naval architect Andy Dovell designed the boat primarily as a day boat but included accommodations for overnights at harbor or short coastal cruising in good weather. She features traditional styling including a plumb stem and curved, raked transom. The Western Red Cedar strip hull is constructed with modern materials including multiaxial E-glass and WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy, resulting in a strong, lightweight, and easily handled boat. The cabin has an open flow and uncluttered interior, especially between the cockpit and forward cabin area. The low-maintenance exterior finish incorporates Awlcraft® 2000, a two-part premium acrylic urethane finish, and Awlwood Primer/Clear Finish for beautiful, highgloss brightwork. A 150 hp six-cylinder Steyr turbo diesel coupled with a 5-blade…

You’ve just finished your epoxy project and it looks great! But you don’t want the sun’s UV rays to start degrading the epoxy. So, like the smart individual you are, you look into applying a UV stable topcoat over the epoxy so your project will last for years to come. You look at your options, go down a few rabbit holes, and come out much later asking why is it so difficult to select a UV stable topcoat for my epoxy project? The answer: because so many options are compatible with WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy. We’ve had success in applying everything from latex paint and oil-based varnish to two-part polyurethanes and polyester gelcoats. But some key points need to be addressed before you start applying a UV stable topcoat over WEST…