Table of contents for Winter 2020 in Sailing World

My first introduction to the Martin 242 was the Sailing Life ARK Regatta in Vancouver in the earlier 1980s where the now-defunct local magazine held a sail-off regatta among the region’s top one-design keelboats. There were J/24s, M242s, Dragons, Thunderbirds and a few others I can’t recall. Competitors chosen to race the boats were local hotshots—including yours truly, a 22-year-old Laser prodigy about to get into a Star Class campaign in a big way. Let’s just say I wasn’t much of a hotshot keelboat sailor at the time, and eventually a series of photos emerged, with me steering a 242 for the first time. In one picture I’m looking back at the camera with a big grin. The next photo shows the boat carving into a wind-ward death roll because…

With plenty of options for racecourses on New Zealand’s Waitemata Harbour and the Hauraki Gulf, Emirates Team New Zealand announced likely locations for its defense of the 36th America’s Cup, which it says will provide “a plethora of options, with a full range of wind directions and conditions.” The intent is to conduct 35-minute races later in the afternoon, when the March sea breeze is strongest, on courses extending from 1.3 to 2.2 nautical miles. “We have posted five example course areas within the designated race area, and race management will have the option daily to choose which area we go to,” says ETNZ’s Ray Davies. “We are very lucky in Auckland because within this race area, we are really well-covered for most conditions.” Course A, he says, is good…

The moon has set, and now it’s really dark. My partner and I have been racing for 46 hours straight. We’re beating against the fabled Mistral wind, toward the coast of France and the final turning mark off Camargue. I’m incredibly tired after two days of relentless ocean racing, with only two of us on board our cramped craft. Competitors from six other countries are in sight. We’ve been dueling with the Australians right next to us for the past six hours. I’m trying to determine how much the current is going to set us and keep thinking, “We really have to nail the layline to the turning mark. Two more tacks would be devastating. Overstanding would open the door to the Brits and Japanese to our west.” But I…

PRICE AS SAILED $9 million DESIGN PURPOSE High‑performance multihull CREW LIST Experienced crew of two to three; unlimited guest list Please, someone get Tommy Gonzalez a ribbon. The Boat of the Year innovation award is all Eagle Class 53. The Bristol-based boat boatbuilder rolled into Annapolis with the sexiest, most technical and most mind-bending craft our Boat of the Year competition has seen in a long time. The Eagle’s story is a long one, so I’ll spare you with an abbreviated version of how the radical 53-footer came to be, and more importantly, where it’s headed. As Gonzalez tells it, one Donald Sussman, the wealthy former owner of a Gunboat 90, which Gonzalez captained for many years, was awestruck by the foiling AC75s of the San Francisco edition of the…

At the prize-giving of San Diego YC’s International Masters Championship in October, Malin Burnham, the 91-year-old sailor and business executive, spoke about the virtues of teamwork; how everything he has achieved in his storied career was a result of being part of a team. As he did so, I scanned the room and observed the faces of sailors from all 11 teams invited to the annual regatta. Many of them were nodding with agreement, because each of us who had skippered in the event, myself included, deeply appreciated the collective efforts of our crews during the intense, round-robin series of 11 races. As masters-age sailors—defined as 45 years or older (the helmsman had to be 60)—many of us listening to Burnham that evening were long in our years and wisdom,…

Point Loma High School sailing team, the all-time leader of national championships in high-school sailing, practices near San Diego YC in La Playa basin, a small, shifty, flat-water venue where windshifts range from 10 to 30 degrees. Two to three shifts per leg or more are the norm. It’s difficult sailing and the perfect venue to reinforce the importance of steering your boat to the correct angle to the wind. When you get it all right—heel angle, sail trim, angle to the wind—something changes: The crew that steers most accurately and trims its sails best, given the constantly changing wind angles, wins. Those who tend not to steer well—for example, bearing away 10 degrees in a 20-degree header, slow down too much. Those who head up 5 degrees in a…

Harvey Jones raced wooden boats in and around New England for more than two decades, but the enthusiast of classic yachts had never conceived, designed or built his own boat from scratch. Doing so had long been on his bucket list, however, so in 2018 the 65-year-old tech-industry pioneer finally decided to make it happen. After reading an article about a wood-and-composite cruising boat grand-prix designer Marcelino Botin commissioned for himself and his wife, Jones was inspired. “I recognized that he was as able to design beautiful classic cruising boats as he is fast boats, so I thought that’s a great combination.” An email to the designer in Spain and a “yes” from Botin resulted in Outlier, an aggressive yet elegant design that immediately drew the admiration and ire of…

The breeze increases to 15 knots on the final upwind leg, and we’re leading the fleet at the 2019 ILYA A Scow Championship on Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin. After winning the previous race, another windy one, my teammates aboard Jud Dayton’s Instigator are feeling the pain. The mainsheet in my hands bears the load of a 350-square-foot sail attached to a 38-foot carbon mast. When the gusts hit, I watch the spar thrash as we depower as much as possible. The cut on my finger leaves a blood trail from my clothes to the top deck of the boat. I can feel every inch of sail cloth in my lower back as I strain to get the last few inches of trim. My feet are locked into the hiking straps, and…

“Windsurfing has been Cancelled.” If you recall those brazen, arrogant bumper stickers from the early 2000s that sparked an outrage at the dawn of kitesurfing, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. That time Matt Nuzzo and Trip Forman took an Outside magazine writer out for a session, threw windsurfing under the bus and brainwashed the nation. Kiting is the future! Their timing of that subsequent article in 2006, using the sticker’s moniker as a title, was perfect. Windsurfing’s participation took a nosedive thanks to the equipment-heavy lust for big-wind shortboarding. Nuzzo and Forman, former windsurfers, were young, hip and with their fledgling REAL Kiteboarding operation in Cape Hatteras, were ready to receive a new generation of thrill seekers. Kiteboarding has been the fastest-growing wind-driven watersport ever since. I was…

Let’s face it, knowing the rules cold can reduce the stress of racing, making it more enjoyable. We all have our reasons for not being as sharp on the rules as we should be. My sister Mary Ellen Brown’s excuse was that she had taken a long hiatus from sailing, so her knowledge of the rules was not only stale, but there’d been significant changes while she was away from the sport. Unfortunately, a few of her competitors in the local fleet had picked up on this, and she felt a bit bullied. When she finally committed to learn the rules by herself, she found it difficult to read them without any context. To add some urgency, she and her buddies from the Rochester Canoe Club had their eyes on…

PRICE AS SAILED $24,750 DESIGN PURPOSE Learn to foil, advance skills CREW LIST One or two Rob Andrews and his business partner Alan Hillman have been teaching foiling for a few years now, and one thing they’ve learned is we get better by sailing, not by swimming. Thus was the genesis of the F101, a craft with which they could teach the fundamentals of foiling—without the crash and burn. But it’s not just a learn-to-foil boat, either. It’s a platform with which new and experienced converts alike can take their foiling skill set to a higher level. The key to mastering the F101, Andrews explains, is grasping righting moment. With the trimaran platform, you get plenty of it, as well as a stable boat that’s more forgiving than any other…

WORD has it that if you bottled the secret sauce of the Knarr, every class would buy some. But there are things that can’t be bottled, can’t be bought. Sailors always tell you, “It’s about the people.” Knarr sailors say it too—except, there’s more: all of it against the odds, much of it unique, with a kernel of anti-Nazi intrigue in the origin story. It’s a pretty boat, and it’s all about the people. Knarr sailors have their own cheer, their own regalia, their own “circuit” that is unlike any other. The design is seven decades old. The bragging-rights regatta is the International Knarr Championship, born on San Francisco Bay in 1969—and, did we mention, against the odds? Name another class with a 52-year tradition of a championship regatta that…

The “Members Only” syndicate, formed by Jay Cross, Hannah Swett and Brian Kinney, won the first major regatta for the new one-design IC37 keelboat class. While they began the season as the team to beat, poor results in subsequent events bumped them to dark-horse status going into the National Championship in late September. After three days and eight close races, however, the syndicate and their teammates put themselves back atop the class, winning the championship in the final race of the regatta. “At the beginning of the season, none of the teams had sailed the boats before,” Kinney says. “We were fortunate that we won the first event, but had some mis-steps; so it was a bit of a redemption to come back and win the big event. It was…

It’s a noisy August night in a tent full of jackets and ties at Great Harbor YC. Fourteen champion tacticians flank the podium, waiting to learn which skipper bid for them in the silent auction. As the checks are counted for the benefit of Nantucket Community Sailing, Dawn Riley introduces us with some friendly heckling and one by one we’re paired and dispatched to dinner with the team we’ll spend the next two days with aboard an International One-Design keelboat. I join Team ’71, anchored by Cornell sailing team classmates of that year, Ted Moore and regatta co-chair Chris Gould. They’ve brought along two relative youngsters, Skip Beck and Phil Cox, but looking around the tent, our average age is up there. There’s plenty of race experience around the table—Olympic…

Today, the only American to have completed three solo-circumnavigation races is rarely seen in anything resembling a sailboat. To find him, you have to look skyward. Maybe he’s the guy buzzing the Low Country in a Beechcraft Premiere—because 51-year-old Brad Van Liew now prefers the open skies to the open ocean. It was back in 2010-11 when he last raced his Eco 60 Le Pingouin, taking victory in the Velux 5 Oceans race. Before that he won Class II of the Around Alone in 2002-03 with the Open 50 Tommy Hilfiger Freedom America. Those two victories came after a debut third place in the Open 50 class in the Around Alone in 1998-99. The Around Alone started out as the BOC Challenge and was the premier solo ocean race until…

The launching of a new boat is always a special moment, especially for an America’s Cup team, because it’s a defining and major milestone in the campaign. Until the sequential revelations from Emirates Team New Zealand, American Magic, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli Team and finally Ineos Team UK, development and design had happened behind tightly closed doors or through small-boat testing; we are now in a period of reckoning for the four challengers on a number of fronts. Internally for each team, the next phase is about validating design tools and debugging many of the new detailed design features found everywhere on the boat. Externally, it’s checking in with the solutions of the other teams and understanding why they chose certain directions. Moving forward from the launches of these first-generation…

The way Stan Honey tells it, the 2024 doublehanded offshore race for Olympic medals, five years in the future, rocked our world a generation ago. Say what? For those now tuning in, the governing bodies have decided that sailing at the 2024 Olympic Games in France will include a new event, a mixed-gender doublehanded race for keelboats, probably three days and two nights in one-design boats of about 30 feet. But the notion of an Olympic offshore event was floated circa 1965. Offshore racing was then split between the RORC Rule of the Royal Ocean Racing Club and the CCA Rule of the Cruising Club of America. As Honey relates the story: “For the sake of developing an Olympic event, the international governing body asked the RORC and CCA to…