Table of contents for Fall 2022 in Sailing World

“Pull up a chair and get yourself a Mount Gay and whatever—actually, make that two because it’s going be a long one,” I advise the crowd that’s lingering outside the party tent at the Boston YC on a balmy afternoon in July. The sun is setting on the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series at Marblehead Race Week, and like the name itself, this traditional awards presentation runs longer than your average grip-and-grin. We would expect nothing less of a regatta that’s been running since 1889 and is the most important gathering on the local sailing calendar. Aside from the individual top three of the 10 classes at this year’s regatta, we’ve got a few new trophies, and the Marblehead Racing Association peeps have theirs as well—the perpetuals that locals…

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…

IT’S hard to believe that Stan Honey, the Hall of Famer and navigational wizard of globe-girdling race boats big and fast, had never sailed the Newport Bermuda Race on his vessel. He’d completed the course plenty of times on boats built for line honors and setting records (check and check). But there he was on a late June morning backing the family Cal 40 Illusion into a slip at the Royal Bermuda YC not long after the big boats had arrived. In a few days, Stan and his teammates would be confirmed as Class 10 winners and the next engraving on the St. David’s Lighthouse Trophy. It would be the last time Stan and his Hall of Fame bride, Sally, would race their Illusion as its caretakers. Fittingly, it was, in Stan’s own words,…

Considering the winds and waves at the 2022 J/24 World Championship in July, one could say everything is indeed bigger in Texas. Corpus Christi, in particular, delivered a week of big breeze in July that put 38 teams to the ultimate test of endurance over 10 races, most of them in blade conditions. Olympic medalist, Hall of Famer and Texan Paul Foerster came out blazing, winning three straight races on the first day, and appeared to be running away with the championship. But skipper Mike Marshall, trimmer David Hughes, tactician Allan Terhune, pit Jeff Hayden and bowman Rod Favela stayed true to their own path, “getting faster every day and letting the regatta come to us,” Marshall says. His team on American Garage continued to adapt and change to the…

Paige Railey has survived failure. She’s even survived success. But she might not accept those words. Defeats? Oh yeah. Wins? Big wins. The latest chapter in her sailing career strikes a different note, a new direction (almost). And she has a message that resonates. To appreciate it, however, means taking a deeper dive into her life since she joined the US Sailing Team 17 years ago, hitting the highest highs and lowest lows, and achieving everything there is to achieve in a Laser Radial except an Olympic medal. Think about it: She was a young world champion, World Sailor of the Year, Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year, twice she went to the Games, twice she came away empty-handed. And then… Setting her hopes for a third medal shot at the…

Back in the day, when I captained my college football team (cue up Springsteen’s “Glory Days”), I always felt a little nervous during the ritual of pulling on the pads, when the adrenaline and butterflies started to simultaneously stir. Last July, I’m having a deja-vu moment of that particularly unpleasant sensation as I’m handed a helmet, wetsuit, rash guard and life jacket moments before heading out for my first-ever attempt at helming a foiling craft, the Persico 69F. The name is derived from the boat’s 6.9-meter length (which translates to 22 feet, 7 inches). The fledgling one-design class’s welcoming motto is “foiling for everyone,” a notion I am definitely about to put to the test. After a pair of previous winter events in Miami for a half-dozen international “youth teams”…

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in July, and Paula Novotná has just finished another training session, refining her skills in the “super-strong wind and nice waves” off the south coast of Rhodes, Greece. She’s on “holiday,” having just finished second in the women’s division of the Wingfoil World Tour’s European Racing Championship. For this 29-year-old professional kiteboarder-turned-wingfoiler from the Czech Republic, there’s precious little time to rest and recover, but she must. Over a hectic summer, she’s won two of three World Tour Surf-Freestyle Championships—one in Switzerland and one in the Canary Islands—and now has her heart and mind set on winning the next regatta to become the first Women’s Wingfoil Surf-Freestyle World Champion. Let that sink in for a moment. The first-ever in a sport growing faster than any other…

Spying is a long-standing tradition of the America’s Cup, but institutionalized espionage? Never before has this been attempted, but this is the essence of the “joint reconnaissance program” being rolled out ahead of the 37th America’s Cup in Barcelona, whereas each team will have its assigned Recon Unit watching and recording every move and every sail, and those findings reported back to everyone—teams, media outlets, keen observers and armchair experts alike. “We came up with the idea through the last Cup,” says Dan Bernasconi, Team New Zealand’s head of design and architect of the recon program. “We saw there was so much hunger for information from our fans, and very little coming out [from within the teams] except during the event itself. The big driver for me was to find…

The return of Switzerland’s two-time winning syndicate, Alinghi, to the America’s Cup has significantly upped the ante for the 37th edition of yacht racing’s oldest and most revered international competition scheduled to take place in Barcelona in the winter of 2024. The Swiss outfit led by billionaire businessman and sailing fanatic Ernesto Bertarelli famously won the 31st edition in 2003 in Auckland against Team New Zealand. It went on to defend it successfully against the Kiwis in Valencia in 2007 before losing against the American BMW Oracle Racing in the notorious monster multihull Deed of Gift match in Valencia in 2010. That loss saw Bertarelli step away from the America’s Cup for the next three editions—San Francisco, Bermuda and Auckland—but it was well-known in his circles that he had not…

In sailing, we talk a lot about “feel.” But what is that anyway? Is it something natural, a sixth sense we are born with? Or is it more about nurture, something we can define and learn? Lately, it’s been one of my favorite regatta-dinner discussions. I’m learning that most of us use the term too generically to describe what we can’t define. We apply it to others: “Sue was so fast today in the waves; she has such a good feel for it.” We describe our own experiences, like, “The boat felt sluggish today; we did not do very well.” But both uses are cop-outs. Can’t we be more specific about why Sue is so fast in waves? What exactly makes the boat sluggish, and what can we do about…

THIS IS FACT: Righting moment is speed. Righting moment straight out of a foiling tack is primo speed—whiplash and G-force kind of action. But how do you get “it”? You get creative. And own it, which is why the commitment of this hard-charging Canuck is to be commended. While the fellas are tiptoeing their jolly way across the tramp, you’re hanging on tight and giving it your max. If they tell you to hike a little harder, tell ’em to foil off and move a little quicker.…

This is a story about a lake and a boy who loved the lake and how, when the lake disappeared, the boy made do. And how that leads to something big. The boy was Glenn Ashby, growing up in the interior of Australia. Lake Eppalock, built as a reservoir, was his playground each year until it was annually drained to satisfy thirsty crops. What’s a sailor boy to do? Build a landsailer, of course. Quietly, Ashby grew up improving his rides, year by year, and harboring a dream, never daring to really count on a day when he would, no fooling, convince his teammates in the America’s Cup defenders camp, Emirates Team New Zealand, to focus their might, main, expertise and dollars on something not the America’s Cup. While he…

New boats in the IMOCA class are coming out of the sheds thick and fast on the Atlantic coast of France, many of them at the old German World War II U-boat base at Lorient in Brittany. These days, in the fleet made famous by the solo nonstop Vendée Globe round-the-world race, there’s a lot of pizzazz on these occasions. Boats no longer appear and then get quietly lowered into the water. In a class in which millions of euros are being spent on new designs, promotions and messaging, first launches are now previewed by the release of sophisticated video treatments, and the reveals take place with theatrical precision. It is an astonishing fact in a world teetering on the edge of recession that no less than 14 new IMOCA…

Winning the America’s Cup requires excellence in a number of areas, including management, financial resources, a leading design team, a fast boat, a top skipper and a smooth-operating crew. If any one of these vital areas is lacking, an America’s Cup effort is doomed. A successful campaign is managed by someone with cunning and integrity, who is pragmatic and calm during the heat of battle. Over the long history of the Cup, few individuals have excelled in this manner, and among them is Charles Oliver Iselin, who sailed in six winning defenses. Every one of his campaigns had unique and strange quirks that challenged one of the most dynamic managers in America’s Cup history. Iselin’s final campaign was managing Reliance, the massive Herreshoff masterwork that easily defeated two potential defenders…

LAKE Garda is sailing’s amphitheater, a place with a sailing culture unlike any other. Centrally located in Europe and with clinical conditions, it is also the heartbeat of international wind sports. In the cradle of the Italian Alps, it is completely normal to run across boats from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and everywhere else. With a whistling northerly Pelér in the morning and a warm Ora southerly in the afternoon, Garda is blessed with two distinct world-class sailing conditions for much of the year. And the scenery is the most stunning of any sailing venue. All of this is to say there really is no finer place for one-design sailors, wingers, kiters and foilers to play, which is why Waszp sailors gather once a year for Foiling Week, and this year…

Maybe it’s an advantage to start a new sport—say sailboat racing—from scratch. No bad habits, no muscle memory to unlearn. I’m used to coaching sailors at the top level, men and women who are trying to win something big, like an Olympic or Paralympic medal, or a world championship. Arguably, these top-end teams have far more good habits than bad, but helping them reverse their few bad habits has always been the most challenging part of my job. With that said, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to start fresh. So, when Erich Estes, an athletic coachable beginner, wanted to learn to race, I was intrigued. He was my clean slate. Estes is a 40-something professional with a demanding job and a family. He was working at home…