SAIL WEST

All the Way

2009-01-02T16:52:00.004-05:00

There's a saying in aviation, a code of honor:
Fly it all the way to the scene of the crash.

Nick Scandone was no pilot, but surely no one ever lived out such a creed more fully.

Nick died in the early hours Friday, an event entirely foreseen and unavoidable. He had ALS, which cripples and then kills. What Nick did with his ALS, however, was set an example of how to live. First he set a goal, to win a Paralympic gold medal. Then he succeeded.

Around him, his friends fretted that maybe he could hold on long enough to win the US Trials but not long enough to actually race in the Games at Qingdao. Or that he might make it to China but never make it back. And so on. The one who never fretted, at least so's you could see it, was Nick Scandone. But truly, it was a race to the race.

Nick was diagnosed in 2002. Typically, people survive about three years after a diagnosis of ALS, which meant that Nick's averages ran out in 2005. But of course he wasn't aiming at anything average. 2005 was also the year that the former 470 North American champion won the open-division 2.4mR worlds and was voted Rolex Sailor of the Year in the USA. The gold medal race in China was another three years out. So you see how chancy this thing was, all along.

ALS progressively attacks the spine and brain. Come time for the 2008 Trials, Nick could no longer manage the singlehanded 2.4mR, and he teamed up in a SKUD 18 with paraplegic Maureen McKinnon-Tucker, combining "her physical ability and my mental ability."

That phrase, "could no longer manage" conceals a nightmare-welter of developments that, frankly, you just don't want to know about. The man was dying. The disease was gnawing at his every vital. Still, these two had gold medal written all over them, if.

So I held my breath, and I was not alone.

That "if" was resolved conclusively in Qingdao. The final score, by cut-and-paste:
SKUD-18: 11 boats
1. Nick Scandone (Newport Beach, Calif., USA) and Maureen McKinnon-Tucker (Marblehead, Mass., USA), 2, 1, 1, 1, (3), 2; 7

The last time I saw Nick Scandone, the US Paralympic Team was passing through SFO en route to China for the Games. I drove to the airport to meet and greet and wish them well. I wrote at the time that Nick's handshake was weak, but the eyes were bright. Those who were with him to the end say that he never stopped being a giver.

As for this shot of Nick and Maureen, I blew the focus, but the spirit is clear. And I was a bit misty anyway, so this is kinda sorta how it really looked . . .

Blind Card Bluff

2008-10-31T10:26:00.009-05:00

I’ve been doing some hard traveling (well, nothin’ on Woodie Guthrie), and it’s not over, so nowsabout I stick my head up for a breath of air down by the tracks and low and behold the whistle tells of Alinghi and a passle of the other AC players confabbing in Geneva and petitioning Larry Ellison to join the table.

I turn my back for one minute and this happens.

And before I disappear again . . .

It’s been a fascinating play on the part of Alinghi/Ernesto Bertarelli to leverage off the Down Under plans for a Louis Vuitton Pacific Cup, turn around, and say come one, come all, come race. Let’s get the next America’s Cup in gear regardless of what happens (or not) in court. And oh, by the way, Kiwi dears, if you’ll drop your suit we’ll enter the Louis Vuitton Pacific and face-savingly embrace you warmly etc etc and bless the event with the presence of the Defender of the America’s Cup. And oh, by the way, BMW Oracle Racing, drop that 600-pound gorilla lawsuit against CNEV, join the party (should I say, join the Party), and all is forgiven.

By December 15.

Or all is not forgiven.

And then, baby, if you win in court you get to take your chances on a Deed of Gift match for the Cup. And if you lose that one, you’re not tapped out, you’re o-u-t.

Imagine a poker game where you put your money down—on cards that are face-down, unseen. Those cards would be equivalent to the New York Supreme Court Ruling, still probably months away, as to CNEV’s status or un- as a legitimate Challenger of Record. It’s a blind bet. Card counters, your talents are useless.

The best minds I know say, “no way” should CNEV be declared legit, but the last court ruling declared the equivalent of “sure, whatever” and blessed CNEV’s status to most everyone’s surprise including the few then-still-operating elements of CNEV. Me, I was merely flabbergasted to read what seemed like at best a flabby ruling.

So, how does Larry bet? How would you bet?

PRESENT in Geneva
- Alinghi, Société Nautique de Genève, Switzerland – Defender of the 33rd America’s Cup
- Desafío Español, Club Náutico Español de Vela, Spain – Challenger of Record
- Shosholoza, Royal Cape Yacht Club, South Africa
- TeamOrigin, Royal Thames Yacht Club, United Kingdom
- Emirates Team New Zealand, Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, New Zealand
- United Internet Team Germany, Deutscher Challenger Yacht Club, Germany
- Green Comm, Challenge Circolo di Vela Gargano, Italy
- Ayre, Real Club Náutico de Dénia, Spain
- Victory Challenge, Gamla Stans Yacht Sällskap, Sweden
- Argo Challenge, Club Náutico di Gaeta, Italy
- French Spirit, Yacht Club de St Tropez, France
- Carbon Challenge, Royal Belgian Sailing Club, Belgium

ABSENT in Geneva
-BMW Oracle Racing
-Mascalzone Latino
-Areva

The response from Tom Ehman, speaking for BMW Oracle and the Golden Gate Yacht Club::

“We have offered repeatedly to drop our lawsuit if Alinghi commits to fair rules, and our offer still stands. We would like nothing better than to have a fully competitive multi-challenger America’s Cup on the water by 2010. We stand ready and willing to meet with Alinghi and all of the other competitors to discuss the future of the Cup, but without unreasonable pre-conditions.”

In case you missed it there’s this: Alinghi's announcement

And this: The release from the meeting

Me, I'm hopping a freight train to wherever. I’ll be quiet for a while, back with you some time before mid-November—Kimball

Changed My Mind

2008-10-23T17:52:00.011-05:00

So I was going to write about the current state or nonstate of the America's Cup—playing chicken, something like that—but I just can't get the words out.

Is it possible that what I hear coming back at me is a collective, "Oh thank gawd!"

Far more rewarding to note that the Challenger of Record du Jour's former team had a breakthrough in the long race of the TP52 Worlds at Lanzarote. That would be Desafío under Paul Cayard winning a 53-mile race in under five hours. Add twelve seconds, and over the line comes Terry Hutchinson and Quantum.

Quantum had been in front until a spinnaker blew.

We'll call that close.

What they talked about all night, however, was this clusterment at the first mark that included a hit (Russian boat's bow into stern of Platoon) with Bribón disqualified for not giving room to Synergy. Worth a click to enlarge.

Nobody has more fun, eh?

Thanks to Nico Martinez for the pics.

That's Desafío above, which gives you some insight into the conditions and helps in turn to explain why . . .

After Platoon completed the course, the boat's ex-Commie helmsman Jochen Schümann (he won a Finn gold medal for East Germany in 1976) made the beach and declared, "My whole body aches."

Me, I can't look at Paul driving with the tiller extension and not think of him as a kid in a Laser, surfing the break at the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Pushing the envelope.

And I'm impressed, frankly, that the Mediterranean TP52 fleet, famously built for light going, held together except for some blown sails. With four buoy races to go for the world title, Quantum has the points advantage in a fleet of 14:

1. Quantum (USA), Terry Hutchinson, 2-6-1-4-6-2.50-2.50, 24.00 points
2. Mutua Madrileña (CHI), Vasco Vascotto, 3-1-6-1-1-8.75-10, 32.00 points
3. Artemis (SWE), Torbjorn Tornqvist, 1-2-2-11-13-1.25-10, 40.25 points
4. Desafío (ESP), Paul Cayard, 5-7-11-12-2-5-1.25, 43.25 points
5. Platoon (GER), Jochen Schuemann, 8-9-12-3-3-6.25-3.75, 45.00 points

MIDWEST SPEED QUEST

OK, it's nothing to match the world records set in Namibia this fall, but the Midwest Speed Quest continues to be one of the coolest boutique operations going. I wrote about it on October 18, 2007 (Make Something Happen) and described how Craig Bergh took it on himself to just . . . make . . . this . . . thing . . . happen.

That is, to invite people to come to the center of his world, Worthington, Minnesota, and partake of the big breeze that blows across the plain. And partake of his hospitality. And get out on Lake Okabena and sail fast. As Craig describes the deal, looking back over 2008:

"I really want to thank the Sailors. Our home remains open to all visiting Windsurfers. We invite you all back again in 2009!

"The Midwest Speed Quest was designed to be different. This event is free to all participants, and yet pays the highest Prize Money in North America. The purpose is to promote the new Sport of Speed Sailing and the City of Worthington. Our goal was to bring Sailors of all skill levels together and introduce them to the new Sport of Speed Sailing. The schedule was open 7 days a week for a 6 month period. Any visiting sailor was assured of the chance to participate anytime he/she was in the area. We provide free or discounted motel rooms at the AmericInn, free refreshments on the Beach, and free hot meals at the end of the day.

"And we had the best Speed Sailing gear available for visiting sailors to try out.

"We also provided free on-site Child Care and Pet Care. We even provided Spousal Care (care of the Windsurfing Widow)!

"All the work associated with this event was done on a volunteer basis. Meals and refreshments were served beachside all season long free of charge. A special thanks to my wide Pamela Bergh for the many fine meals cooked and served over the last 6 months to the visiting Sailors.

"We were delighted with the demo gear provided by the Sponsors. Each year we seek out the finest Speed Sailing Gear available anywhere in the world."

Much of that gear is loaned out, and some of it goes as prizes.

You gotta love this guy. The '08 results:

Men:
1st Place: David Knight, Fridley MN 31.57 knots (36.31 mph)
2nd Place: Guy Miller, Austin Texas 31.46 knots (36.18 mph)

Women:
1st Place Allison Shreeve, Sydney Australia 26.24 knots (31.18 mph)
2nd Place Karen Marriott, Lakewood CO 22.78 knots (26.20 mph)

Dig that? Here's David Knight doing his Lake Okabena thing, as photographed by Todd Spence . . .

Now, in the spirit of the Midwest Speed Quest, go make something happen.

SIGH . . .

And I guess I need to put SAIL on record as acknowledging that Alinghi . . . oops, how could I be so silly as to write that? I mean of course La Société Nautique de Genève, as Defender, has announced an event upcoming in a matter of weeks for a few Cup players—apologies to those of you on some other side of the world—which is apparently intended to comply with the Annual Regatta obligation of the Challenger of Record du Jour, CNEV, an entity-of-sorts that nearly blew away in the dust of all court rulings to date except one. The most-recent one.

And they have announced a resumption-of-sorts of planning for the 33rd America's Cup, with an entry deadline that puts antagonists BMW Oracle Racing and Team New Zealand in a place-your-bets position by demanding entry from all challengers before December 15.

Almost certainly before the pending appeal is decided in the New York courts, re. the status of CNEV as a qualified Challenger of Record.

An interesting play, actually. Much better than some of Alinghi's moves.

And you gotta love this official announcement: "Alinghi, Defender of the 33rd America’s Cup, accepts the Challenger of Record, Club Náutico Español de Vela’s invitation to race in the America’s Cup Class series during their Annual Regatta in Valencia on the 8 and 9 November."

It was so good of CNEV to think of them.

Now, if there's anything bugging you about the America's Cup, do let us know . . .

Let There Be Light

2008-10-17T12:06:00.009-05:00

It's release day for Morning Light, time to gather up friends and neighbors and kids—and nonsailors—and take Roy Disney's Transpac movie for a test tide.

I saw the premiere last week, at the El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard, where Roy and Leslie Disney introduced the film with a waving Mickey Mouse ("the family crest") beside them onstage. People see the start of an ocean race, Roy said, and they see the finish: "We wanted to fill in the gap in between."

Try it. You'll like it. So will your friends who don't sail. It's a well-told tale of young people on a great adventure, racing from Los Angeles to Honolulu, and it is filmed as no sailing movie was filmed before. Will the movie draw a crossover audience? Those who see it will like it, and sailors will be coming back to Morning Light for years to come.

A confident prediction, and it's mine. Even curmudgeonly officers of Transpac Anonymous were caught up.

And what do I mean when I say that it was filmed as no sailing movie was filmed before? Heed this outtake from the October issue of SAIL Magazine:

Naturally the young crew of a 52-foot boat needed training to sail a Transpacific Race as the stars of a Disney movie. Less obvious is the prep needed for the film crew. Midway through listing the methods tested ("fixed cameras, high-wide views, infrared") producer Morgan Sackett interrupts himself to say, "Without 10 weeks of training and 10 months to plan, we'd never have been ready."

Plan A envisioned "a bulletproof system" of remote cameras on the raceboat, but a few [cough] thousand dollars into watersoaked electronics, Sackett saw, "It wasn't going to work. We had to put a cameraman on board."

Good call. Enter the uniquely-qualified Rick Deppe, a Transpac and Volvo veteran who also has filmed for The Deadliest Catch. It's a digital world. Sackett says, "We could never have shot with film cameras." Even so, Morning Light sailed hundreds of pounds heavy, including extra battery power and supporting fuel.

The key to the movie, however, was a cameraboat pacing for 2,500 miles. Forced to replace that chase boat two weeks before race time, executive producer Roy Disney hired Steve Fossett's round-the-world maxi catamaran. Cheyenne's mast was already removed in anticipation of new uses, and a tripod was mounted, but suddenly Cheyenne's crew was racing to go to sea in 2 weeks, not 6.

And there's Mark Monroe, the director, chosen in part because he is not a sailor: "They didn't want an insider point of view." In his race to the race, however, Monroe "was so caught up in devising how to film that I never gave a thought to crossing an ocean for the first time in my life. The day we left, I threw a couple of t-shirts in a bag and the next thing I knew I was getting a safety briefing. I can tell you, it was an adventure, but no pleasure cruise.

"Two days out I realized we could have brought along a supermarket. Instead, we had ourselves a former race boat stocked with oatmeal and freeze-drieds. One of our guys freaked and raided the galley, and he was coming up with all these numbered packets and that's when we realized the packets were numbered for days at sea. Leftovers from the boat's circumnavigation record in 2004."

Welcome to the life, Mark. The director's highlight? "No question," he says: "When Samba Pa Ti popped up, and we filmed a match race in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It galvanized the film crew; it galvanized the sailors."

BIG IS IN
The European multihull scene has changed. The 60-foot tris that served as sex symbols for so many years are has-beens, and 2010 Route du Rhum organizer Pierre Bojic (his organization, Pen Duick, also handles Transat Jacques Vabre, and Transat AG2R) says it's time to move to bigger boats.

"Over the last two years, nothing has happened within ORMA", Bojic says. "There are no new projects, no architects doing research, and no sailors trying to raise funds."

So bring on the maxis. Orange, Kingfisher, etcetera, and expect a circumnavigation race in 2011.

Volvo: Good, but no longer boxy
I hope you're following leg one of the Volvo Ocean Race, Alicante to Cape Town. The competition is keen, and I'm fully invested as editor to Matt Gregory, who is blogging from the nav station of Delta Lloyd.

Delta Lloyd is an older-generation 70 (modified; the winner of the last race). It came into this race at the last minute, and it was running last getting out of the Med so I suppose it's only natural that the Volvo promotions people sort-of ignored it for a while. That changed when Delta Lloyd started making smart moves and passing boats, working down the Saharan coast of Africa. Now the fleet is setting up for transiting the doldrums, which is the subject of the newest of Matt's missives to land in my email. About 12 hours after the last one. The man's a worker.

Volvo Race rules seal the crews off from the internet, so I have to post for Matt. What he hasn't mentioned yet at Volvo Hotseat is that Saturday the 18th is his 32nd birthday. Sister Caroline writes:

The big question for Matthew Gregory on October 18th is: What flavor birthday cake will you have on board? Can they make that in freeze dried form? If not, will anything else take the place of your favorite Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream cake??

Inquiring minds want to know....and wish you a very
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Caroline, Mom and Dad

Ditto—Kimball

One Sofa, One TV

2008-10-09T14:58:00.023-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I was banging around the yacht club and my homie Matt Gregory grabbed me and I could see he was excited. The conversation went like this:

"Hey Kimball. I just signed on to navigate Delta Lloyd in the Volvo Ocean Race."

(!)

"Do you, maybe, have room to store a sofa and a TV?

(!)

"Wait, there goes my phone."

(reaching for a pocket)

"Just a sec.

"It's my dad.

"He probably wants to take out more insurance on me . . . "

[Update. I'm leaving what I originally wrote below, claiming that Delta Lloyd navigator Matt Gregory's blog would be launching soon. But you should know that it's already launched and running updates at Volvo Hotseat.]

Thus it begins. Matt is planning a blog that will run on sailmagazine.com beginning very soon. Soon as in, as soon as we convince the robots at blogspot.com that it's not spam.
Beep. Beep.

In the meantime Matt spills a bit about his unpeace of mind right here in Counting the Hours to the Volvo.

There's one piece of very good news. It's been blowing dogs off chains along the Spanish coast today and raining to wash away the evidence. Better to get that out of the way before eight Volvo 70s leave Alicante on Saturday.

Before the rain hit, Matt (left, bottom row) lined up along with the boys for the lens of David Branigan/Oceansport.

Meanwhile

Interesting to see that around the corner from the Med, at Portimão, Portugal, we have Portimão Global Ocean Race organizer Brian Hancock commenting thus on the six entries in his circumnavigating regatta that leaves on Sunday:

"We have an eclectic fleet for the inaugural event, small to be sure, but of the highest quality and with numbers on a par with the Velux and Volvo. We aspire to a fleet the size of the Vendée Globe but it has taken almost three decades for them to get to that level. There is deep interest in our race but with the economy in free fall and the fact that we are a brand new event, there is a certain and understandable reticence among some sailors, the French in particular, to throw their hand in with us. They will be there for race two, I am sure of it."

The PGOR is open to Class 40s and Open 40s, sailed either solo or doublehanded. It is intended as a cost-conscious entry point for the next generation of top dog circumnavigators.

Fast Moving and ROB You Were So Close

Over in Namibia at the Lüderitz Speed Challenge, kite sailor Rob Douglas has achieved 50.54 knots over the 500-meter course to up his record as the fastest American speedsailor and claim the number two spot worldwide behind Alex Caizergues at 50.57.

I believe that's a gap of three one-hundredths of a knot.

Douglas, who held the world record for fourteen days at 49.84 knots, now edges out Sebastien Cattelan for the number two spot, but we should not forget that Sebastien was the first to break 50.

One point worth making is that these kiters are using equipment that is pretty-much stock, perhaps with a bit of jiggering to the control lines. Douglas' kit retails for about $2,500: Amundsen boards with Curtis fins, Cabrinha kites, Dakine equipment.

Thursday was expected to be the last day of the big breeze at Lüderitz, so unless they spring a surprise on me this is it. l'Hydroptere got excited last week, over in the Med, and grabbed a headline by reporting a burst to 52 knots. s'Okay. They're not the first with a burst, and they're not the first at the headline game.

And I Didn't Even Know There Was Gonna Be A Meeting

This from BMW Oracle Racing:

Statement:
MEETING BETWEEN ELLISON AND BERTARELLI DOES NOT TAKE PLACE
October 8, 2008

GGYC spokesperson Tom Ehman said, "Unfortunately, the meeting between Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli in Trieste did not take place. We remain eager to resolve this issue and return the 33rd America's Cup to the water as a multi-challenger regatta under fair rules. We hope and expect the meeting will be rescheduled to take place in the near future."
- Ends -

No it doesn't—Kimball

Ordinary Not Applicable

2008-10-06T15:10:00.038-05:00

Tom Perkins took me for a ride last weekend, on that boat of his. He stood at the control station, played with his touchscreen options, and sailed us around San Francisco Bay. He said, "You can learn to sail this boat in five minutes." Maybe. It would take little old me longer than that to get over being surprised by it, even though I've known the details for a couple of years . . .

Photo by Dick Enersen, Staff Commodore, SINS

If I understood correctly, Maltese Falcon had a wheel when it was launched, but the wheel proved pointless. Or maybe the wheel was merely part of the original design. Everything is high-tech mechanical and computer-controlled, so why not go the extra step? Now there's only a tiny nob to control the left-right function. Port-starboard as my nautical friends say . . .

Sails are deployed from one touchscreen panel. Stress on the free-standing carbon spars is monitored from another. Etcetera.

What's amazing is to stand on deck as the masts rotate. It's as shocking as watching a redwood forest move around. As always, if you click the pic, you get a much larger, more profound, view . . .

There's been a lot written about the technology of the boat; no point repeating it here. There's a web site at symaltesefalcon.com. On a beam reach in a modest breeze we looked at 16 knots through the water, not quite that at the moment I squeezed the shutter . . .

I call it a boat, but you could just as well call it a ship. We're talking 289 feet and 1,240 tons, well over the threshold of 300 tons that requires the presence of a Bar Pilot to operate inside San Francisco Bay.

Someone asked me later, does the boat heel? Yep, it's a sailboat. Here's the XOJET crowd hanging out . . .

Perkins likes passagemaking. That's his favorite thing. The boat has covered 50,000 miles in two and a half years, he says, 65 percent of it under sail, "and on our last Atlantic crossing, once we were under way, we didn't motor for one minute."

We were not exactly crowded . . .

Here's a point of order. Click on the image above, to enlarge it, then look at the boats in the background. They're standing almost straight up in almost no wind. Then look at the attitude of the Falcon, generating apparent out the wazoo, and we're trucking.

Below we see San Francisco Yacht Club rear commodore Ray Lynch and commodore John Swain in conference. At this point the XOJET Leukemia Cup Regatta was known to have netted over $600,000. The total would exceed $662,000, 32 percent of that raised by even chair Ian Charles after this cancer thing got personal . . .

Mr. Latitude 38, Richard Spindler, was in fine form . . .

Tom owns classic boats too, but this is a different aesthetic . . .

Sails were furled off Richmond at the end of the day, and we motored upwind through Raccoon Strait, not because the boat couldn't have sailed but because there simply was too much traffic, and many of the boats were on their final leg of the Leukemia Cup. Perkins and all hands were on full alert. Falcon brought up the rear, but cruising boats were drawn like a moth to flame. Everybody wants a close look. Here are Captain Chris Gartner and San Francisco Bar Pilot Peter Fuller at the motoring console, which is forward of the sailing console . . .

And speaking of moths to flame, we're still agog, here in our little patch of water, that a forty footer managed to t-bone the Falcon while it was carrying guests on Saturday. Peter Lyons caught the sequence and generously supplied same, but then I realized I just don't want to see those pictures here. Everyone I've talked to, from passengers aboard to observers nearby, describe a "didn't have to happen" event in which the 40-footer suddenly, inexplicably altered course and nosedived into the side of the big black boat with the helmsman of the "little" boat apparently frozen in place. Too bad for all. Scratches on the side of the big boat, a busted rail, and a torn sail that had the crew sewing on Saturday night. I'm glad my ride was less eventful. I like to remember my time aboard as an arty conversation with Telegraph Hill slipping by in the background . . .

Next, Tom picks up his new "flying sub" and heads south. The sub will nestle forward, between the tenders, and the wings can be removed in case of breaking seas. Tom was proud to note that his tenders are launched in the traditional way, from the yards . . .

Come time for Leukemia Cup 2009, this will be hard to equal. Say, are those topsides shiny or what? I bet the owners of the yawl in the reflection (either a Rhodes Reliant or a Cheoy Lee 40; I couldn't tell) never expected to see it this way, in a picture with Tom Perkins . . .

Story

2008-10-01T11:46:00.016-05:00

I interviewed Tom Perkins while Maltese Falcon was still in build, and it was like talking to a 13-year-old boy who had just seen
—really seen—a girl for the first time.

We're talking enthusiasm. Perkins had owned big sailing yachts and found them addictive but difficult and here was this concept, the Dynarig, that promised to go them one better. The concept had been around for decades but no one had paid it off. That would require someone who thinks big, lives large, and has a sense of adventure about it.

Later, being an inventor type who developed into a creative capitalist, it was only natural for Perkins to catch the fever when he came across Graham Hawkes and his concept for "flying" submersibles (buoyant, descending on the power of inverted wings). That was a couple of years ago at the Monaco Boat Show. Perkins wrote a check for hull number one, for practical purposes funding the development. Part of the program in having Maltese Falcon on San Francisco Bay right now is to pick up Tom's new sub.

Photo by Erik Simonson

So finally I get to see a 289-foot sailing boat with three free-standing spars bearing 15 "square" sails that function as three unitary airfoils. Which is my pivot point to ask: What would get "the entire yacht club to rally around" a charity regatta?

Let's make a list:
Story.
Glamour.
A do-good feel-good cause that will get you all choked up if you think about it.

Since 1993 the Leukemia Cup Regatta has grown from an idea to a nationwide engine that has raised more than $23 million. The soon-to-be XOJET Leukemia Cup Regatta, October 4-5 at The San Francisco Yacht Club, has already topped half a million bucks and the event is yet to come. It's the biggest ever, and yes, what that's all about is:

1. Story: This story is already on the street, how Ian Charles pitched in to help his buddy, Bill Nolan, when Bill's young son was diagnosed. "For the 2007 regatta I committed to raising $25,000. I got a call-back asking if I had put down too many zeroes, but I hit $30,000 and it was the most satisfying thing I have ever done—my first time doing something purely for other people." Charles later agreed to chair the 2008 regatta. He says, "I was honored, but I felt awkward because I had not been touched by cancer; it wasn't in my family." Then came his own diagnosis of myeloma, last spring, at age 39. Six rounds of chemo ago.

Fast-forwarding to Charles' next quote about his fellow yacht club members: "I couldn't believe that many people cared."

2. Glamour: I mean Falcon, of course.

3. A cause: Lots of people are doing cancer this year. If you don't know somebody, just wait.

Tom Perkins doesn't have to wait. He lost his wife, Gerd, to cancer in 1994.

XOJET Leukemia Cup Regatta

What a deal. The San Francisco Yacht Club goes into its third year of running a Leukemia Cup Regatta, and a longtime member lends support, and the timing just happens to work out (well, with a little fiddling) to bring in his superstar boat as a lead attraction. The arrival last Saturday of Maltese Falcon (I missed it; I had cruised up the San Joaquin with a few hundred of my closest friends) was huge. Ian Charles says there were "more boats on the bay than I've ever seen, whether it was Opening Day in the spring or a Blue Angels performance in the fall."

Ian's form of blood cancer affects the plasma cells. He's had the best of treatment ("I was diagnosed on a Friday and started chemo on Tuesday") and has achieved something in the way of 95 percent remission. Next Tuesday, he gets a stem cell transplant, or the beginnings of one, and along the way he's had the pleasure of mystifying his caregivers by showing no side effects to treatment, he says: "No nausea, no fatigue, no skin irritations; I've been able to go on with my life." Which in his case has included three triathlons, a lot of sailing, and a lot of fund raising. He is poised to double his $100,000 goal.

"The stem cell transplant in a case like mine usually results in complete remission," Charles says. "Then the question becomes, how long does remission last?

"They can't keep going after the same cancer with the same treatments. That's why research is important. You're buying time."

Photo by Erik Simonson

More Falcon

She was built on an existing steel hull. It's the rig and the audacity that make Maltese Falcon unique. Having her on the scene, Charles says, "Raises the regatta to a different level. Tom let us auction off lunches and sailing time on the boat, and those tickets went in a hurry. He brought Rupert Murdoch to be the keynote speaker. He's letting the race committee use his motoryacht, Atlantide, on the finish line. Somehow, when the time comes for me to say 'thank you,' it's not going to be enough."

Actually, Ian, I think it just might be. You're talking about a guy whose first boat on San Francisco Bay was Pequod, a sistership to the Teak Lady pictured here. Tom Perkins has moved along from his 17-footer, but he's kept his sailing friends.

Let's close on some good news. Regatta cochair Bill Nolan's ten-year-old son, Campbell, is in remission after two years of treatment for the rare T-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia that started the yacht club down this road in the first place.

And the "flying sub" is nothing but cool. Drop into deepflight.com and submerse yourself in the facts—Kimball

More Speed

2008-09-24T11:51:00.004-05:00

It's quite a show we've seeing over in Namibia where Rob Douglas kite-sailed to his new world speed record of 49.84 knots.

This just in from all-time American windsurfer, Mike "Gebi" Gebhardt, who is also Douglas's coach:

Rob Douglas's world record run was done on Lüderitz's second lagoon, a small bay that is effectively a tidal lagoon. The cool thing about the record was that it was done with an average wind of 30 knots and "only" gusting to 39 knots. The efficiency of the kitesurfing speed package is allowing super-fast runs in less wind than the windsurfers need.

The windurfers look to need at least a steady 45 with gusts over 50 to post world record speeds. Björn Dunkerbeck was at Lüderitz the day Rob broke the American record and it was gusting to 50 that day and he was only able to post a 45-knot run...keep in mind the run was not flat as the chop was big on that day, 6-inch in the rough spots-Gebi

Douglas and Gebhardt have a web site for their North American Speed Sailing Project at nassp.net. Sheesh. Talk about success. They started in April, set the American record in July, and broke the world record in September.

You will find more links and more info in my previous post, Going Like Fifty. Gebhardt's remarks here arrived as a comment to that post. Much appreciated—Kimball

Going Like Fifty

2008-09-22T16:48:00.019-05:00

"It may well turn out that the timing of the last failure was perfect." Paul Larsen, pilot, Sailrocket

Wow. Summer is officially gone and nobody has broken 50 knots and the inching closer has been all in the muscle category. Remember when everybody thought big ole l'Hydroptere would have done the deed by now?

Instead Rob Douglas shows up in Namibia with a kite and gets the breeze and ever-so slightly ratchets up the speedsailing record to 49.84 knots. It's the first time since 1987 (Erik Beale, windsurfing, in the Trench) that an American has held the record.

Though I imagine that, while it was happening, it didn't feel anything like ever-so-slightly to Rob. If you fall at that speed it hurts plenty. And 50 knots? Close. Ridiculously close. And what of the glory teams with their complicated machines?

L'Hydroptere? Sitting in the south of France, still in commission. The latest update at hydroptere.com reads:

"Thursday 11th September The technical team took advantage of a few days in dry dock to check the sails."

Wotrocket? The last update at wotrocket.com reads:

"12 August Spectacular cartwheel ends Wot Rocket’s first official world speed record attempt."

Sailrocket? Hope springs eternal. I quote Paul Larsen:
"It may well turn out that the timing of the last failure was perfect. With a destroyed steering system and without the distraction of going sailing, Malcolm, George and I sat down with a clean sheet of paper to completely redesign Vestas Sailrocket's control systems."

Sailrocket is also in Namibia, the new capital of speedsailing and also the site of the Lüderitz Speed Challenge, which is where those windsurfers and kites are threatening to make hash of the 50-knot "barrier." According to the Lüderitz web site there will be no more sailing until Thursday (waiting for wind), so I guess it's safe to write as long as I'm quick about it. In a different entry, Larsen goes philosophical, "I was braced for the news that they had done 50 knots. In fact I was resigned to it. 50 knots will be just another number that comes and goes. This is one of the reasons we settled on the design of Vestal Sailrocket. It has the potential to go much faster. The MkII will be designed for a whole new era of speedsailing."

oookay

Right now it's game-on for the boards and especially for the kites. It didn't take all that long for kites to take over, now, did it?

What a comparison. L'Hydroptere still looks totally convincing. Capable. I almost want to say inevitable . . .

But here is the new man to beat, Rob Douglas . . .

Paul's Sailrocket is really very cool . . .

And so is the fastest woman on water, Sjoukje Bredenkamp. Here she is upping her own women's speedsailing record to 45.20 knots . . .

Sjoukje is probably capable of inspiring a mass migration to her homeland, South Africa . . .

And let's not short-shrift our Australian friends. The man at the center of the Wotrocket effort, Sean Langman, has a wealth of credentials that only begin with his 18-foot skiff titles. He's done it all, or I guess, not quite all . . .

For the record, Rob Douglas took the record from French windsurfer Antoine Albeau, who made 49.09 knots last March in the special-purpose "French Trench" in the south of France. That's been the main playground for speedsailing windsurfers. Douglas made his run in the "real" water of Walvis Bay, and I like that—Kimball

Sometimes You Have a Long Headline and It's Important but What You Really Want to Say is Very Simple

2008-09-12T09:14:00.001-05:00

Nick Scandone for Sailor of the Year.

Not Just for Breakfast

2008-09-09T15:13:00.017-05:00

Living in the face of adversity. It's what these people do for breakfast, all these Paralympians who choose to do rather than fade away, but none more so than Nick Scandone and Maureen McKinnon-Tucker.

Scandone is beating the odds just to be alive to sail the Paralympic Games at Qingdao, much less leading the SKUD 18 class after three days of racing. Then again, the Games have been a goal worth fighting for, all the way through the progressively-debilitating stages of ALS. Airplane drivers talk about this sort of cool determination as, "flying it all the way to the scene of the crash."

Maureen? Most sailors already know the story of the February regatta at Miami, where she got the word that her three-year-old, Trent, had brain cancer.

The reaction of horror is easy to imagine.

So let us speak instead of Ms. McKinnon-Tucker's decision that this thing that was tearing her heart apart would not blow her life apart. She would continue to train and sail. She would continue to work full time from her wheelchair. She would make sure that healthy little Dana received parental attention along with critically-ill Trent. She would explain, "Dan & I feel it’s important to show the kids that life goes on in the face of adversity. Giving up the Paralympics would be conceding a battle to cancer that it has no business winning."

Trent now has been through a course of chemo and a course of radiation. So far, so good, though the side effects can be greater on a little kid than on an adult. Maureen already knew plenty about that. Her full-time work is at Piers Park Sailing Center, Boston Harbor, an adaptive-sailing facility. "We started it a year ago," she says. "We've had one thousand percent growth."

Piers Park is for adults and kids, but adaptive sailing is especially valuable for the young, McKinnon-Tucker says, "Kids with disabilities have very few opportunities for recreation and almost no opportunity to compete on a level playing field. These kids get turned away from every other sport, but they don't get turned away from sailing."

Then, with a little grin (she's been in a wheelchair since falling off a seawall in the 1990s) she adds, "Sailing is something most of us do sitting down, right?"

Ah, but that conversation took place a while ago, before she left for China. Now, in a fleet of 11 SKUD 18s [Editor's Note: This is updated on Thursday] Nick and Maureen are in the lead, and 2.4mR sailor John Ruff also leads his class.

SKUD 18s sail a trapezoid course, which was developed for the 1996 Olympic Games at Savannah. Paralympic coach Betsy Alison explains, "Trapezoids are used in China only for the SKUD 18 class. The Sonars and 2.4mRs sail Windward-Leeward courses.

"The Trapezoid is used to separate two fleets in the same race area so that one does not interfere with the other. SKUDs and 2.4mRs race on the same course. SKUDs start first, sail a windward beat followed by a reach, an outer leeward, windward, leeward course, then a short port reach to the finish. While they race the outer loop, the 2.4's sail a W-L course on the inner loop."

Wednesday was a layday. On Thursday the breeze was drifter-light off Qingdao (just say 青島啤酒廠, same as the beer, and did they punt a marketing opportunity or what?) at the same facility that hosted the Olympic Games last month. One race per class was completed. The standings:

SKUD-18: 11 boats
1. Nick Scandone (Newport Beach, Calif., USA) and Maureen McKinnon-Tucker (Marblehead, Mass., USA), 2, 1, 1, 1, (3), 2; 7
2. Daniel Fitzgibbon and Rachael Cox, AUSTRALIA, (4), 2, 2, 2, 2, 4; 12
3. John Scott McRoberts and Stacie Louttit, CANADA, (3), 3, 3, 3, 1, 3; 13

2.4 mR: 16 boats
1. John Ruf (Pewaukee, Wis., USA), 2, 6, 1, (9), 1, 7; 17
2. Paul Tingley, CANADA, 1, 1, 5, 2, (9), 9; 18
3. Thierry Schmiter, NETHERLANDS, 5, 3, 2, (10), 7, 1; 18

Sonar: 14 boats
1. Bruno Jourdren, Herve Larhant and Nicolas Vimont-Vicary, FRANCE, 4, 1, 1, 2, (7), 1; 9
2. Colin Harrison, Russell Boaden and Graeme Martin, AUSTRALIA, (8), 4, 2, 3, 3, 3; 15
3. Jens Kroker, Robert Prem, Siegmund Mainka, GERMANY, 5, (6), 3, 1, 4, (11); 19
8. Rick Doerr (Clifton, N.J., USA), Tim Angle (Marblehead, Mass., USA) and Bill Donohue (Brick, N.J., USA), 1, 9, 10, 6, (11), 10; 36

ड्राइविंग होम इन अ रेंटल

2008-09-04T16:23:00.015-05:00

Driving home in a rental is not what I pictured for Skip Allan when he set off on the Singlehanded Transpac, much less when he won the thing going away. And when I first saw a note that Skip had abandoned his beloved Wildflower on the return from Hawaii, I wondered if it was just a sick joke. Unfortunately, no.

(The joke is the headline for this post, which blogspot.com software translates into some mysterious Eastern-looking script no matter what I write. Never happened before; probably will never happen again, and right now I just want to get on with writing. Shrug and go. Skip Allan abandoning his boat pitches me into a jabberwocky world anyhow.)

There's been a lot of talk about the loss of Wildflower, a boat that was closing in on 100,000 miles after two cruising circuits of the Pacific, a cruise of Alaska, seven races to Hawaii for the boat, and 28 for her builder/skipper. A typical comment, from "Don" on Warrior's Wish, " If Skip chose to step off of Wildflower it had to be real bad. She was part of him."

"My consort and magic carpet," he called her. Now, thirty-four years after he built his 27-footer, and thirty years after he first raced it in a solo Transpac, one of the legendary sailors of the California coast is suddenly boatless.

On Thursday morning at SAIL West, the phone rang. It was Skip calling from a rental car on Route 101, "in a state of heartbreak." He was driving north from LA, on his way home to Capitola. The container ship MSC Toronto that had plucked him off Wildflower some 350 miles west of California had been en route to the Port of Los Angeles, and that is where Skip stepped ashore.

We agreed to talk again later, when we had something better than a cell phone connection. "There's going to be a lot to catch up on," he said. "My Skype mic went down with the boat."

In his account, a few observations stand out. Gale conditions lasted for days, through a series of evolutions.

On day three: "At noon, it looked like the gale was lessening. I left the safety of the cabin, and with two safety harnesses affixed to the windward rail, began to hand steer eastward on a reach with the #4. It was mogul sailing at its best."

On night three: "Breaking crests would poop the boat about every five minutes, filling the cockpit and surging against the companionway hatch boards. Even though I had gone to lengths to insure fire-hose integrity of the hatch, I found the slamming power of the breaking crests would cause water to forcefully spray around the edges of the hatchboards, into the cabin."

In the wee hours before dawn: "There was no doubt that if the tiller pilot was lost, we would round up and be at the mercy of these breaking waves, some of which I estimated at 25-35 feet, bigger than anything I had seen since the '79 Fastnet storm on Imp. The anxiety and stress of the night, and the 70-degree knockdowns that would launch me across the cabin, created serious doubts that we could continue this for another night, much less the three or four days the conditions were expected to continue."

Going into day four, with no improvement in the offing, Skip began to lay the groundwork of an escape plan, working with "my longtime sailing friend, ham radio contact, router, navigator and weather man, Joe Buck of Redondo Beach. I explained that I'd had a difficult night and wasn't sure I could safely continue. Joe's info had the highest wind and wave overhead on my current drift southward continuing for at least another three days, with continuing gale force winds and 18- to 22-foot significant wave height. I asked Joe for help in some difficult decision making."

That difficult decision process involved communicating with the Coast Guard and assessing the options while "Joe helped me to understand that if the boat were lost, I would likely be lost also. But if I left Wildflower in advance, only the boat would be lost. I spent the next hour sitting on the cabin sole on my life raft, debating.

"At 1200, like a gopher popping out of its hole, I slid the hatch open to get a clear Satphone signal and called SAR. Lt. Saxon already knew my details and position and only asked, 'What are you requesting?' I replied, 'I am asking for assistance to be removed from my boat.' "

Epilogue

Despite some reports elsewhere, Skip says he never put out a PAN call. He was beyond the range of Coast Guard helicopters, and the MSC Toronto, one of the largest container ships in the world—too big for the Panama Canal—was the closest vessel to him.

Consistent with reports elsewhere, Skip did indeed scuttle his boat: "Lt. Saxon said that if I left my boat, she would be considered derelict and a hazard to navigation. I assured her I would not leave my boat floating or derelict."

Notes

The MSC Toronto triggered Wildflower's Automatic Identification System at a range of 30 miles, closing at 23.4 knots.

The ship's radar did not read Wildflower until it had closed to 2.5 miles.

And what to take?

"With no idea how the transfer would be made I decided on my documents, wallet and passport, laptop, camera, cellphone and satphone, logbook, EPIRB and a change of clothes and shoes. And in a moment of whimsy I decided to try and offload the two Singlehanded Transpac trophies, as they had a 30-year historical value to our Race.

(Much of the above comes from a very long SSS Forum posting written by Skip Allan, and there is a special irony for both of us, because my profile of Skip and Wildflower appears in the current issue of SAIL. This development is not a followup I could have imagined. And there is the now-standout quote in the print story about flying a storm trysail only once, "but I didn't really need it." To read the full posting go to SF Bay SSS Forum.
Skip closes his account:)

Treasure each day
Skip 9/3/08

United 889 to Beijing

2008-08-29T14:27:00.028-05:00

While America barbecued, America's Paralympic teams flew to China over Labor Day weekend and settled into their quarters on a mission brightly vivid, highly emotional, long-sought.

SKUD 18 crew Maureen McKinnon-Tucker, waiting on Friday morning to board United 889, San Francisco to Beijing, said, "I've been in tears more than once over the last 48 hours, just thinking about the opportunity and the responsibility."

Team USA first gathered in Colorado Springs for "processing," or as one-armed Sonar crew Tim Angle put it, "to receive official team gear, learn how to be a good ambassador of our country, and sign a ton of flags." He couldn't avoid the thought, "Michael Phelps slept here." The team then flew via Denver to San Francisco for an overnight stop and morning boarding to Beijing and a connection to Qingdao. Left to right on wheels, Maureen McKinnon-Tucker, Rick Doerr, Nick Scandone . . .

The signs at Counter 29, Aisle 3 of SFO's international terminal read, Counter Closed. Meaning, in effect, reserved for Team USA. When Sonar crew Tim Angle said hi but quickly excused himself, "It seems I don't have a ticket to Qingdao," this looked to me to be some hassle. But Tim (with the one hand he has left, he could hurt you) later said no to that: "With this many people and 28 bags, United has been doing a great job for us. They're a sponsor, and everything gets worked out in a hurry." That's Tim at left below, then his fellows in the Sonar, Bill Donohue and Rick Doerr . . .

And so things did get worked out, as described. The blonde figure, also at the counter above, is coach Betsy Alison, energetically working things out. Maureen added, "It's good to have a pit bull on your side . . .

"I don't think she'd mind my saying that."

Thanks to a benefactor in Boston, there were upgrades to first class. Tim: "I've never sat upstairs in a 747." Maureen: "If we arrive rested, that's an extra day on the water."

For Maureen and her skipper, Nick Scandone, time on the water holds extra importance. Scandone, a past Rolex US Sailor of the Year, has gold medal written all over him, but he is racing to the races against the progressively debilitating effects of late-stage ALS. The pair skipped all pre-regattas at Qingdao for fear of over-taxing Nick's strength. His handshake was weak, but the eyes were bright. I screwed up the focus on this, but not even my ham-fisted work can screw up the spirit, so here's the shot anyhow . . .

Maureen fretted about learning to read the currents, but Scandone said, "I just wonder if there'll be more than three knots of wind. And if there is, will it blow in the twenties the way it did for some of the Olympic races."

2.4mR rep John Ruf was grinning ear-to-ear and I don't think he ever stopped, there was so much excitement in the air. Back in Wisconsin, he's an attorney, but for a while to come now, he's all-sailor.

Dr. Rick Doerr, Sonar skipper, practices medicine from a wheelchair much as Ruf practices law from a wheelchair. Of the Paralympic Games Doerr says, "It's been a journey. We started with a humble program, and every year it got more intense and more complex, and every time we stepped it up it still made sense." Doerr, Angle, and Donohue just won the Clagett regatta in Newport, and here they are in winning form, as snapped by Amory Ross . . .

Then it was time for Team USA to head for Security, Maureen McKinnon-Tucker leaving behind family in America and a three-year-old son who apparently is winning against brain cancer but who knows, who knows, and not before Southern Californian Nick Scandone and I had our everyday-sailing-in-California bull session and I remarked that I was rushing home to put together this column (blog, if you will) then rushing back to SFO to catch a flight to LAX to catch a cab to San Pedro to meet my friends Ric and Monika to sail out to Catalina, Howland's Landing. And he said, "Wow. My wife is going to Catalina too." Well, of course.

My country. My people.

Good luck and good hunting . . .

The Paralympic Games
Qingdao, China, on the Yellow Sea
Sonar, SKUD 18, 2.4mR
September 6-17

With Love from 1982

Express 27s wrapped their nationals over the weekend on San Francisco Bay, and the beauty of that is having 19 boats on the line in a still-healthy fleet of sweet-to-sail boats.

They were born in the heyday of Santa Cruz ULDBs, these Express 27s. Terry Alsberg—he had built boats at Moore's so he knew how good work is done—commissioned a design from the late Carl Schumacher, and the result to everyone's delight went downwind like a feather in a hurricane (except for being easy to control). To everyone's surprise (excepting Alsberg and Schumacher) it went to weather like a bandit.

A small car could trailer one of these puppies, and two people could step or unstep the mast. With two fingers on the tiller the boat felt like a dinghy, and—

Wanna race to Hawaii? No reason not to.

I'm still trying to decide whether to account for the design as reverse engineering or inverse engineering, per this quote stolen from a mid-Eighties Latitude 38. The voice is Schumacher's: "We started off with the idea of building a boat the same weight as a Moore 24, but two feet longer. We eventually decided on the largest possible boat that could use a (single speed) Barient 10 for the jib winch, which turned out to be 27 feet."

Alsberg had wanted a boat where you did not see a trimmer plus tailer on the winch.

Congratulations to Nick Gibbens, in 2008 a first-time Nationals winner with hull #67, Shenanigans. By 11 points, no less. St. Francis YC laid the courses, and it was very San Francisco Bay . . .

Photo by Peter Lyons, Lyons Imaging

So's I Finally . . .

. . . got around to doing a profile of Skip Allan, which came out in the September issue of SAIL. Skip is one of my sailing heroes, and darned if he didn't go out and win the Singlehanded Transpac, not necessarily to my surprise, in the pending-months between filing and publication.

Can't beat that timing.

And darned if Skip didn't lose Wildflower on the way back to California from Hawaii on the boat's seventh racing-round-trip from the mainland (and Skip's 28th).

This is the MSC Toronto (Liberian flagged) that plucked Skip out of his predicament, details of which are yet to come. From the deck of a 27-footer, in seas evil enough to break an accomplished boat and outwit an extraordinary seaman, this behemoth (photographed in the Oakland Shipping Channel with the Golden Gate off the bow) must have looked even behemoth-er . . .

Photo by Kevin Collins as posted on flickr.com

This puts my world out of joint. The MSC Toronto was due in Los Angeles Harbor on Tuesday. More to follow—Kimball

The Biggest Maybe Ever?

2008-08-22T15:54:00.003-05:00

If you're sharing my part of the planet you know that the America's Cup is in legal limbo, and we may or may not be on our way to a Deed of Gift match between former (very former) friends Ernesto Bertarelli and Larry Ellison, as in Alinghi vs. BMW Oracle Racing. May or may not be, because we have yet another legal appeal under way and as things stand now, the ball is in Alinghi's court. Unless it loses the next round, it can organize the next defense and ignore BMW Oracle's challenge in a 90 foot trimaran. This 90-foot trimaran, unveiled today in Anacortes, Washington.

In a release, team captain Russell Coutts pronounced himself pleased with this product and expects to sail it soon. Probably before a court ruling comes down, in fact. The boat represents a collaboration of Van Peteghem / Lauriot Prévost (VPLP) of France and one of the most successful skippers in multihull racing, Franck Cammas.

24 Hours

2008-08-21T11:28:00.008-05:00

If it's too soon to call this a happy ending, howzabout a happy chapter?

I'm a fan of SAIL contributor Margie Smith, who shed a life in television news to sail and travel and then diverted to deal with a bout of a decent-odds variety of cancer. She's been writing about all the above at Cancer Is Hilarious, wherein we've discovered that some aspects are more hilarious than others.

But, here's an entry that makes my day. Notice date and time . . .

August 15, 12:45 p.m.
Philadelphia
Last Day of Radiation

August 16, 12:45 p.m.
Cape Cod
Catboat Regatta Start Line

Margie, I like your priorities.

Meanwhile on the other side of the globe

Olympic sailing is wrapped and done with joy here and disappointments there and plenty to stew about going forward.

Before we leave our China-mind entirely, and at the risk of a touch of bad karma, I have to share some pics that have been going around the Net. They originate at engrish.com, which collects submissions from wherever . . .

I'm skipping the scatological ones, even though they're funnier.

Go fish—Kimball

On the Foils of Eagles

2008-08-18T15:34:00.009-05:00

BUT FIRST

Before we address our topic of the day, and for all of us who sat up stateside to watch your race in the Laser Radial, Anna Tunnicliffe, congratulations. You showed what it means to occupy First.

Occupying first as in, I'm not leaving.

Whilst being a target . . .

It looked pretty squeezy as you jammed yourself into a place next to the committee boat at the start of the Laser Radial medals race (the most-exposed position) with no bail-out room to leeward.

It looked pretty grim as you went back to restart just-in-case. Just in case you were over along with the boat next door that was called OCS (On Course Side) and so you went back to restart, not alone, but functionally last.

It looked slow and consummately hectic, mentally, as you climbed back to place second for the race and Gold for the sailing games of the 29th Olympiad.

Very cool.

And now back to our regularly-schedule programming . . .

This is going to be fun

The Moth Nationals that wrapped last weekend on the Columbia River are proof of concept for the Moth Worlds one year away, and that leaves time to build the fleet in the USA. Sean "Doogie" Couvreux spent 2007 on the bow of an AC boat, but he's spent a lot of 2008 flying through the air with (some) ease.

"We're all still making boathandling mistakes," Doogie admits. But in a few days at Cascade Locks (downstream from the Hood River Gorge), strides were made. Last Friday, the already-accomplished Bora Gulari led at every mark in every race. By the end of the series, Bora was still winning, but, "The top 10 were having close roundings," Doogie says. "The US fleet is building pretty well, considering how expensive the boats are and how hard they are to sail. With the likes of Dalton Bergan, Morgan Larson, Charlie McKee, it's not a ho hum fleet."

Nope, nothing ho hum about a foil-born dinghy. And there's still a long way to go to catch Bora Gulari.

Rohan Veal, Mr. Bladerider brand Moth, showed up to coach on technique, which also sped progress on the learning curve for 16 sailors including two from the Midwest and one from the East. Doogie's prognosis for the Worlds (August 5-14, 2008) allows for 70-80 boats.

For a British point of view we turn to past world champion Simon Payne and a "Letter from America" blog entry: "Cascade Locks is beautiful and errr... small. Think Garda beauty sans the cappucinos and the scale. Chichester Harbour at full tide would dwarf it. This is in contrast to everything else in Amercia which is huge. Tom's Harley Davidson Ford truck is so tall that my ears popped when I climbed in."

Come to think of it, these guys are already having fun. Here's Tom Driscoll's Prowler Moth in a photo posted on Payne's web site . . .

And Charlie McKee checks in with these remarks on Gulari's nine-straight win: "While some competitors could keep up with Bora downwind or upwind in the light, his upwind speed when overpowered was crushing. It was an eye-opening and awe inspiring reminder to the fleet just how far there is to go still.

"Simon sailed well but had a somewhat inconsistent series to finish 2nd. The rapidly expanding Pacific NW fleet was well represented with 7 boats, with Seattle's Dalton Bergan and Gorge local Morgan Larson (showing up for the regatta with only a few days of Moth sailing under his belt) particularly impressive. But the most impressive performance aside from Bora was undoubtedly 16 year old Hans Henken, who finished in 3rd place behind Bora and Simon. Good starts and tactics, solid boathandling, and excellent downwind speed put him on the podium for the 2nd time in a month, following his bronze medal in the World Youth Champs in the 29er Class."

More Future Tense

Also looking forward, the 18-foot skiffs that just passed through San Francisco. The grand old man of that fleet, John Winning, tells us the skiffs believe they can build a world tour with a world championship rotating between Australia, Europe, and San Francisco. No, they wouldn't take their Giltinan trophy on tour. That's against Aussie religion. This would be a new way for them to look at a worlds. True success will depend upon that long-in-its-infancy US fleet.

Holding my Breath

I had medium-level hopes for the broadband webcast of Olympic sailing, and it's had its moments, but there's no overcoming the fact that it's a narrow periscope of a view.

And it is with great regret—because we're all tired of this conversation—that I've allowed Olympic sailing to remind me: We're overdue to revisit Rule 42, kinetics.

It's not just about choosing between the coyote side . . .

Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (as a different cause puts it)

And those who take offense at the air-rowing that went on
(and on) in the RS:X board fleet.

The problem that won't go away is uneven enforcement. When you travel, you have to learn over and over how much is too much movement, and there have been cases on the road to the Olympics (think certain stops in Europe) where having USA on your sail would single you out for, shall we say, special attention.

Folks, what we have just isn't working—Kimball

Success Story

2008-08-17T14:42:00.012-05:00

Dean Brenner has this line: "There was a time when the only thing I knew about Zach Railey was that he's Paige's brother."

No more.

Zach quietly but relentlessly laid the groundwork for the silver medal that he just captured in Qingdao. He lived years on the wavelength of cautiously telling people he was looking toward 2012. While passionately pursuing, etc.

There's another dimension too. Zach knew then and he knows now: "Past Olympians say, remember to step back and enjoy the moment; it's gone before you know it. This whole year just flew by. I was in the U.S. maybe 30 days."

And there's another figure in this saga: Kenneth Andreasen, Railey's coach for five years in Optis, beginning when Zach was nine and peaking (for example) when Zach at 11 was the youngest sailor to qualify for and compete in the 1995 Opti Worlds. High-level coaching is a prominent theme for each member of the US Sailing Team.

After finishing fourth at the pre-trials in 2006, Zach says, "I re-evaluated. The one thing missing was the right coach. There has to be a high level of mutual comfort and trust, no second-guessing, and when you find that one person, you know it. When Kenneth says 'jump' I say, how high."

Now the press is discovering and Americans will soon know what a smart, well-spoken, focused, driven competitor Zach Railey is. It was a big win for him to kick off Olympic competition ahead of Ben Ainslie, then close it with Ainslie covering his every move. This 24-year-old from Florida has made something of himself in the last two years, and Ainslie has to consider that he could be crowded at the front of the Finn ranks, come 2012.

The Playbill:

Ben Ainslie being The Man in this class, now with a third gold medal on top of the silver that he took in Lasers in his first Olympiad. With the 2012 Games coming to Britain, his home country, Ainslie will be very tempted to go hunting for a fourth successive gold medal to tie the so-far-unmatched record of Paul Elvstrøm. And that will be a show to watch, beginning, oh, about the day after tomorrow.

Dean Brenner being the chair of US Olympic sailing.

Paige Railey being the past world female sailor of the year that Anna Tunnicliffe had to get through to win the U.S. Trials.

Zach being the brother who has a piece of Paige inside his head, and vice versa.

The devil in the details (for Ainslie) being a competing America's Cup match in 2012 or not. It's an unlikelihood that no one can do much to help or prevent. But Ainslie has America's Cup ambitions. He was part of Team New Zealand in 2007, and he chose to skipper the B boat rather than be a part of the afterguard on the A boat. All part of his own longterm thinking. Big Ben, as some of the British writers like to call him, doesn't see himself as anything less than in charge. Neither did Sir Keith Mills when he hired Ainslie to helm for the British challenger, Team Origin, in the alleged next America's Cup. Whenever and whatever that may be. But let's not sink into that quagmire, not now.

The Olympics are on and the US Olympic team is putting up a great show in Qingdao. That includes the up and comers who won't make their medals races but have proved they can win a race or two at the Olympics. And this is a young team as Brenner will not have us forget.

For Sally, Debbie, and Carrie I'm still feeling the ouch—Kimball

Voices

2008-08-13T17:15:00.008-05:00

Olympic racing at Qingdao has lived up (or down) to expectations that it would be light, streaky, and puffy with a dice roll here and a dice roll there. A few people seem to be making their own luck. Zach Railey has been terrific, keeping it conservative but loose at the edges—to seize opportunities when they arise—and that has kept him solidly in second in the Finns. Andrew Campbell blamed his poor early showing on being too conservative up the middle but loosened up to win a race on Tuesday and yes, that's a good thing.

Anna Tunnicliffe—I want to say she's a rock, because she's been so solid, but that would have be a fast rock and the metaphor starts to fall apart, so let's just listen to a few of the voices from Qingdao:

"It is certainly nice to have those first race jitters out of my system. There are few experiences like sailing your first Olympic race, and I had some butterflies that I thought I’d put behind me in my youth sailing days.
Andrew Campbell (Laser)

“If you look at the scores it’s anybody’s game.”
Sally Barkow (Yngling)

"You know when you’re behind some boats and your hands start shaking and you wonder, ‘Am I going to pass them?’ I really had to breathe and calm myself down.” Anna Tunnicliffe" (Laser Radial)

And a voice from the corps, thinking ahead to Weymouth 2012:

"So how would the Olympic Regatta have been if it had been taking place this week, in the middle of the English summer? We would have had just one day's racing so far, because it's been blowing over 30 knots every day, not to mention the fact that it's been pissing with rain."
Andy Rice at SailJuice.com. He's a Brit, so he can speak.

And let's close this lightweight survey with the one and only Austin Sperry, who takes to the water for the first race of the Star class on Thursday. He's looking back to the opening ceremony in Beijing:

"The USOC sent a car to pick me up and take me to the Olympic Village. WOW! I have done many things in my life that warrant say, Cool, I am living the dream. But this was far and away the coolest thing I have EVER done in my life.

"I hooked up with my US Sailing Teammates and started walking around the Village taking it all in. People watching. Star gazing. The first place I went was the dining hall. This place was HUGE! I think you could fit four football fields under this one roof. It had every kind of food you could imagine. It even had a McDonalds. I never ate there, but LeBron James & Carmelo Anthony were eating a Big Mac after opening ceremonies!"

US Sailing has been doing a nice job of keeping the standings posted, with news updates from Team USA in Qingdao. I'm glad to hear that Gary Jobson's commentary kicks in for the next races; it's been a bit wearing, watching through a camera lens via a laptop screen and trying to read the course. That would be nbcolympics.com starting at 1000 PDT. Sorry, East Coast amigos.

The 18-foot Skiffs had a great day of racing today on San Francisco Bay, and btw, they're talking about bringing their Worlds here in a couple of years. Am I ready for that? I am so ready. Eric Simonson shot this beauty of some Sydney lads doing their thing, and yes, there's an Olympic tie-in. They'd have their coach here, the man who once dominated skiff sailing, except that Iain Murray is racing a Star for Australia in the Olympics, his first Olympics at what must be about age 50, and as I write, starting signals are just hours away in Qingdao.

See below for the American view of Olympic standings at the end of Wednesday's racing—Kimball

Laser Radial: 28 boats
1. Anna Tunnicliffe (Plantation, Fla.), 4, 5, 6; 15
2. Petronijevic (CRO), 8, 9, 5; 22
3. Volungeviciute (LTU), 3, 13, 8; 24

Finn: 26 boats
1. Ainslie (GBR), (10), 1, 4, 1, 1, 10, 2; 19
2. Zach Railey (Clearwater, Fla.), 2, 5, 2, 2, 7, (8), 7; 25
3. Florent (FRA), 5, 8, (20), 3, 4, 6, 4; 30

Yngling: 15 boats
1. Ayton, Webb and Wilson (GBR), 2, 3, 4, (7), 4, 2; 15
2. Mulder, Bes, Witteveen (NED), 9, 1, 2, (13), 1, 5; 18
3. Sally Barkow (Nashotah, Wis.), Carrie Howe (Grosse Pointe, Mich.) and Debbie Capozzi (Bayport, N.Y.), (14), 2, 8, 5, 6, 11, 1; 33

49er: 19 boats
1. Outteridge and Austin (AUS), (20 DSQ), 1, 7, 3, 1, 1, 6, 4, 6; 29
2. Warrer and Ibsen (DEN), 2, 4, (10), 4, 2, 3, 4, 2, 9; 30
3. Sibello and Sibello (ITA), 3, (9), 1, 1, 6, 9, 3, 8, (12); 40
5. Tim Wadlow (Beverly, Mass.) and Chris Rast (San Diego, Calif.), 5, 14, 15, (16), 5, 10, 1, 1, 1; 52

Laser: 43 boats
1. Romero (ITA), 6, 3, 5; 14
2. Lima (POR), 5, 8, 3; 16
3. Alsogaray (ARG), 1, 12, 10; 23
8. Andrew Campbell (San Diego, Calif.), 14, 18, 1; 33

Men’s 470: 29 boats
1. Wilmot and Page (AUS), 4, (7), 3, 3, 3, 4; 17
2. Charbonnier and Bausset (FRA), 6, 3, 8, 1, 6, (18); 24
3. Rogers and Glanfield (GBR), (19), 5, 1, 4, 9, 6; 25
17. Stu McNay (Lincoln, Mass.) and Graham Biehl (San Diego, Calif.), 26, 12, (OCS), 17, 15, 1; 85

Women’s 470: 19 boats
1. De Koning and Berkhout (NED), 3, 1, (9), 5, 2, 2; 13
2. Rechichi and Parkinson (AUS), 2, 2, 4,1, (9), 4; 13
3. Dufresne and Tutso (ESP), 4, 5, 2, 6, (13), 10; 27
14. Amanda Clark (Shelter Island, N.Y.) and Sarah Mergenthaler (New York, N.Y.), 14, 12, 10, 15, 4, (17); 52

Men’s RS:X: 35 boards
1. Zubari (ISR), 1, 3, 1, 3; 8
2. Chan (HKG), 5, 4, 2, 5; 16
3. Ashley (NZL), 4, 7, 7, 1; 19
22. Ben Barger (St. Petersburg, Fla.), 21, 22, 24, 26; 43

Women’s RS:X: 27 boards
1. Yin (CHN), 1, 1, 1, 1; 6
2. Albau (ESP), 3, 5, 5, 2; 15
3. Crisp (ASU), 2, 4, 3, 8; 17
26. Nancy Rios (Miami, Fla.), 25, 26, 22, 26; 97

Taking it Personally

2008-08-10T14:33:00.011-05:00

Who would have thought that what everybody thought would happen, would happen?

Light air for the opening of Olympic sailing. Puffy zones of pressure. Confounding currents.

My little self in viewerland at home was not at all prepared for the thrill of the live broadband feed from Qingdao—there they are, those are my people—and then the disappointment that what we get is so limited.

Meanwhile I'm becoming more adept at following two screens at once, TV and the laptop. Most of the time it's no problem, operating on California time.

But that first night. Sheesh.

It was such an unfair roll of the dice to have Team USA walking into the National Stadium in that thrilling opening ceremony in a televised rerun at the same moment that the Finns were rounding their first mark live in Qingdao on my computer.

It was such an unfair roll of the dice to have the televised rerun of the lighting of the flame at the same moment that the Finns were finishing race one, live. There was three-time Olympic sailing veteran and IOC president Jacque Rogge stepping up to the microphone to open the Games in Beijing and at the same time finish-line horns were sounding from Peter Reggio's RC boat in Qingdao (faintly) through the speakers in the laptop—and I could see that Zach Railey was looking good. But for lack of commentary it was hard to figure how good. And all the way through these races it seemed that the producer and/or cameraman were often misjudging when they focused on a "leader." And other races were going on that I wasn't seeing at all, or perhaps through Finns I could see Ynglings in the background, or when we shifted to Ynglings I could see Finns in the background but don't even dream of reading that action, babe. When they added 49ers, same frustration, and it won't be cured on Monday when we add 470s and boards.

You can see more shots like this at Ingrid Abery's hotcapers.com. This would be the US 49er team of Tim Wadlow/Chris Rast bearing down on Canadians Gordon Cook/Ben Remocker (rounding). And the host team looks rather part of the action, no? That would be Fei Li and Xianqiang Hu. Unfortunately, none of these three boats have finished above tenth, and the Chinese are having a so-you-want-to-race-49ers experience at the back of the pack. Italians Pietro and Gianfranco Sibello are the early series leaders.

Okay, back to the Finns. The world finally has an opportunity to discover what an articulate, driven young man Zach Railey is. He went into this show with many goals, among them to not make his own bad luck. Leading off ahead of the one and only Ben Ainslie is a great statement, even if Mr. Ainslie has allowed no one to forget that he is Ben Ainslie. Yep, he just keeps winning races.

There's a lot of sailing yet to come and it's a fiendish racetrack. I was puckered up in pain watching early developments on the Yngling course and later opened up my email to read this description from Carrie Howe, crewing on the U.S. boat, " We were pretty happy about the right-hand side of the course for the second beat but that was a bad call because, after rounding, we found ourselves on the outside of a large left-hand shift. The fleet inverted quickly and we went from challenging the lead boat for first place, to rounding the last weather mark in tenth."

Not even the hardest of hard-luck stories in these races, and there is plenty of time for the regatta to live up to the expectation that everyone will have at least one bad race.

Fortune improved later for Team 7 Sailing, aka the U.S. Yngling team of Sally Barkow/Debbie Capozzi/Carrie Howe on day two as they climbed to fourth overall amidst difficult circumstances. This added missive from Carrie relates: "The conditions made it extremely difficult to make good tactical calls using the observed weather. The key was simply to stay in the hunt and keep plugging away. In a high-caliber fleet like this one, it's easy to drop a few places. Just one bad lane or a bad move and you can be in trouble."

Eventually we get to the Medals Race in each class, double-points for the top ten only, and won't that be a day.

But Carrie's eblasts always give me a smile. Dig her pic of the RC boat, noting that the Yngling class flag is flying upside down . . .

And her comment: "Guess the Olympics are stressful for all of us."

The central source for Olympic sailing news can be found at nbcolympics.com/sailing.

For a quickie results fix go to the results center.

WAIT! The Snipe Nationals—

Augie Diaz is a name we know. The businessman from Miami was the 2003 Rolex Yachtsman of the Year, honored for a season that included racing Lasers and Stars and becoming the first American in (then) 22 years to win the Snipe Worlds. More recently he partnered with crew Kathleen Tocke to win the Snipe Nationals on San Francisco Bay. That series wrapped over the weekend with, Diaz said, "More breeze than the sailors needed, but from the point of view of downwind sailing, it was pretty spectacular. The courses were long, and with two races per day they were hard to sail, but they were very fair."

Tocke, Diaz said, put in a dedicated workout program this year, to be ready to crew in lots of wind, and the work paid off.

Asked how many times he's won the Snipe Nationals, Diaz could only say, "Hmm. I'm not sure." Then it was time to load nine Snipes onto a trailer for the haul back to the East Coast.

But Diaz had one more thing on his mind: "Make sure you give a lot of credit to the race committee and to Richmond Yacht Club. They did a great job."

They usually do—Kimball

Compression, Multitasking

2008-08-08T12:20:00.016-05:00

If time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once, it's not working.

First came the simple comment from our U.S. Finn rep, Zach Railey, "Talk to you once the Olympics are over."

Just like that.

Just like a lunar orbiter disappearing to the far side.

Then it was looking at the sked and seeing that here in my California Friday, I can watch the Opening Ceremonies on TV beginning at 1930, continuing to midnight.
Rerun.

At the same time I can watch Finn and Yngling racing online.
Live.

Already I'm looking at the knockout opening ceremony pics that are floating around the net. No more of this waiting-waiting . . .

It's all pop and sizzle . . .

And silliness taking off . . .

You will be guarded and you will like it . . .

But those soldiers have to sleep somewhere when they're off duty . . .

For me it's all about Qingdao. My people. First up, Finns and Ynglings.

Coverage begins live online at 1000 Pacific and I'm glad I'm not watching from the East Coast but I know I'll have plenty of company in those quarters.

As I write, we have hours to wait, but I picture myself sitting in front of the tube and NBC (no, I don't get to go to Qingdao, but I did get four months in Spain before the Euro rocketed out of sight) and I'll have a laptop humming along, simultaneously following the racing on broadband through nbcolympics.com/sailing.

Everything happening at once.

Having the US Sailing Team pass through San Francisco en route to China—spending time with them, picking up their excitement and energy—I'm charged up and emotional and anxious.

Zach was one of many sailors who skipped the Opening Ceremony because his racing starts too soon after. He watched about half the ceremony from Qingdao and then hit the sack. Ditto for Sally Barkow and her Yngling team, and our 49er guys who kick off on Sunday. (New Zealand did not send any of its sailors to the stadium in Beijing).

Laser rep Andrew Campbell was one of those whose schedule allowed him to make the trip away from Qingdao. Beforehand, he wrote: "I am forcing myself to take days off from sailing and tapering my training routines. I’ve reached my fighting weight of 168 pounds for the first time since I was about sixteen years old. Luckily, that’s the weight at which I won my first Youth Champs in Seattle in 2000."

Pretty much every Olympic sailor has trimmed weight in anticipation of predominantly light air at Qingdao, so all they've done in that regard is orbit around parity. But for each individual, it was necessary. Then comes the "what if" we see a day with 20 knots and the race committee runs three races and after that the weather shuts down and we don't get to sail a full sked? Too many what-ifs, but our sailors have had to consider them all as they lay out training, strategy and (in the more complicated classes) appropriate gear.

Abner Kingman shot this for US Sailing as the team passed through San Francisco. Looking good, looking good . . .

What's the Right Junior Trainer?&Skip Allan on the Solo Transpac

2008-08-03T13:53:00.013-05:00

Soon after his world youth championship win back in 2002, I talked to Andrew Campbell about "stuff," including the quirky
(and beloved) little Sabot in which he learned how to sail and race. Southern California for a long time now has been talking to itself about the Sabot and whether or not clubs there should be training kids on an international platform. Optis, for example, instead of a sinkable shoebox with leeboards.

A Sabot "nationals" extends all the way from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Beyond, there be dragons.

Andrew recalled that, "Growing up, we used to read about these kids from the East Coast or wherever. They were always racing in South America, or Europe, or Miami. They seemed huge."

The debate about Sabots usually includes an assertion on the order of, "We're cheating our kids," by not switching to an international trainer. This view of kids in Sabots was lifted from SDYC . . .

Now, OK, there's been some movement, and junior sailing in Southern California is no longer all about the Sabot but the Sabot is with us still. My question is, who's being cheated? Quoting Andrew again: "We all grew up and went on to the Laser, kids from all over the country, and when we hiked out and put the boats on the wind—well, there we were."

And here he is, about to represent the USA in the Laser, and a guy like me would be tempted to conclude that if you let kids be kids, the ones who want to learn how to race will learn how to race. I gotta admit, though, when Campbell was one of the little tykes launching into the basin at Shelter Island, alongside San Diego Yacht Club, I never imagined him as America's sexiest Olympian. But who am I to argue with the lathered-up ladies at cosmopolitan.com . . .

SKIP SPEAKS

If time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once, let me tell you, the system is broken. There's great catamaran racing under way at Cowes (all our AC friends are in the fray) and my buddies in the Pacific Cup are all wrapped up at Kaneohe Bay, and my friends in the Singlehanded Transpac are (mostly) wrapped up at Hanalei Bay and—

I'm not much at arithmetic, but it does appear that Skip Allan's Solo Transpac win, corrected time, is on the order of 32 hours over second place. That's a three and a two. That's big even for Skip, but there's nothing average here.

Allan skippered his first Transpac (fully crewed) win at the age of 20 in the family Cal 40, Holiday Too: "All our boats were called Holiday because nothing goes faster." This was Skip's 28th race to Hawaii and the seventh for his 27-foot, Tom Wylie-designed Wildflower, first put to the test with a second-place finish in the 1978 Singlehanded Transpac inaugural. So much for Skip's "unfinished business."

Let's let Skip tell us about the 2008 Singlehanded Transpac:

From a slow couple of days getting away from the Golden Gate in winds 0-5 knots, "A northerly filled in very evenly, and the boats that had worked their way ahead got richer. The High was far north and looked as if it would stay there, so for my boat that argued for the rhumb line. But you had to be careful. Farther along there was a very defined line between wind and no wind. I stayed on or below the 1024 millibar line, but some of the tailenders weren't aware and got stuck.

"The main competition was an Olson 30 out of Duluth, Minnesota named Polar Bear. Eric Thomas was well-prepared and he sailed hard. He would hand-steer under spinnaker until the first squall of the night. He was making 160-200 miles a day while I was making 140-160, but then he ran out of runway.

"It was a close-knit fleet," Skip says, "and it was a wonderful experience to talk to everybody twice a day at roll call. Wildflower somehow seemed to know what she was supposed to do, and I can't explain that but there it is."

One key to success—simplicity.

Allan favors hanked jibs for uncompromised sail shape, "and when you drop the halyard the sail stays on deck"). The boat converts easily to a cutter by leading the inner forestay to a tie rod–supported padeye 3 feet aft of the stem. This configuration centralizes the CE, and Skip can switch easily among among the boat's three jibs. Offwind sails include spinnakers plus a pair of 255-square-foot jib topsails that can be set singly (for close reaching) or together with staggered hanks and twin whisker poles (for broad reaching).

When I visited last month in Santa Cruz, the repositories for grain, granola etc were empty and waiting . . .

The finely-calibrated knotmeter was tuned to minimize electrical draw . . .

This, to me, is a beautiful log (1978 race) and yep, this has to be an entry from the Gulf of the Farallones. Catch that "wind down to 25" line . . .

Skip reports that he had only one, shall we say, incident in the 2008 race. A squall broached the boat while he was sleeping—running under twin jibs—"and it was a mess for about half an hour. One pole broken. The topping lift wrapped around my radar and I don't even know how it got there, so I had to climb for that. It was one of those 3 a.m. things."

One of those 3 a.m. things. And this would be the look of speed . . .

Now you know—Kimball

Torchinsky It Is

2008-07-30T19:07:00.020-05:00

Even if we never get enough regatta-type regattas there's a yen for that different thing, and the Laser Slalom fits that need but good. Newly-crowned North American Laser champion Dave Wright went undefeated through the eliminations ladder to an all-Canadian final three and then to the final round and—

That's where Abe Torchinsky came in.

Torchinsky had lost to Wright in their first meeting in this double-elimination round, but he then went on to eliminate Anthony Boueilh and set up a final shot at Wright, who needed just one more win to take the title. Torchinsky needed two wins. Maybe not the house bet, but a good bet. He did what he had to do.

Both skippers nailed their gybes in a 20-knot seabreeze and the crowd hooted from the deck of the St. Francis Yacht Club—noise from the beach is what really drives this thing—and Chris "Boomer" Boome, winner back in the day of the second-ever Slalom, said, "What hasn't changed in twenty-five years is the crowd."

All, especially new Slalom champ Abe Torchinsky, agreed that we have to do this thing again the next time we have a fleet at the ready on San Francisco Bay. Abe was feeling pretty good as he put the boat away . . .

A quick scan of Abe's blog at torchsailing.blogspot.com (pretty good read; I'll be back) is all it takes to make the unsurprising discovery that these top guys have sailed together all over the world, traveled together, trained together. Become friends. They just don't like to lose to each other is all. Thorchinsky is from Vancouver. Wright lives in Toronto. Boueilh is Québécois .

I note that Vancouver, B.C. is well into bear country, which adds a dimension to Abe's account of a long night looking for a place to get comfortable in the very dark, uncomfortable ferry port of Piraeus, Greece:

"I heard barking and realized that I’d just about stepped on two sleeping black dogs. I turned quickly to retrace my steps but the dogs were quicker and started to chase me. Remembering the lessons taught for bear encounters I dropped my bag and continued my retreat. The dogs stopped to investigate. I was alright, but any attempt to retrieve my bag was ended by the dogs’ protesting barks."

The story ends happily, however, one long night and one ferry ride and one car rental later on the island of Paros where Abe arrives at his goal and encounters, "A young tanned muscled fellow who could only be a windsurfer. I introduced myself and explained my presence. Immediately I was welcomed and no time was wasted grabbing boards and heading to the beach."

These guys are windsurfing fools, by the way. Four days of racing the Laser North Americans on top of training and prep followed by three days of Laser Slalom were not enough to keep them on the beach when they left the Laser. I don't know anything about sailing in Toronto, but I do know that few places have a seabreeze to match the wind that flows through the Golden Gate, and I know that Dave Wright was out there a lot on his board and was heard to say, "I can't believe it blows like this, every day.

It doesn't, but isn't it pretty to think so.

Now. Which of these men is not Lazarus?
bye byeee—Kimball

Dad, What's a Laser Slalom?

2008-07-29T15:00:00.032-05:00

For one thing, son, it's a lot more fun than another day in America's Cup court (take my breath away, Justice DeGrasse) and it's a game that's perfect for San Francisco Bay. Once upon a time, when the original Laser Generation was coming on (Bertrand, Madrigali, Cayard, Silvestri for a short list) people came from all over the world to play. Now, with the Laser North Americans just completed, we have a new Laser generation stepping up.

Picture two rows of buoys side by side, windward-leeward. Two competitors rally-up at the bottom of the course, each of them nose-to one of the bottom marks. When the judge figures they're even, he signals a start. The job is to tack up through the marks, cross over, gybe down through the marks, and repeat, and don't crash, and finish first. Keeping the marks close together keeps the gybes "interesting." Two days into a three-day event, we've seen moments when both boats were down. Looks kinda like this when it's going wrong . . .

Photo by Erik Simonson

And like this when it's done gone wrong . . .

Photo by Erik Simonson

The bigger the breeze, the better the Slalom. It's supposed to be hard. Work your way through the eliminations ladder to the finals, and you have bragging rights.

Our 2008 North American champ, David Wright of Toronto, says he grew up on "the legends" and wouldn't miss this opportunity to take a crack a Laser Slalom himself. Special rule: Exchanging sides at the top of the course the starboard-tack boat is required to pass above, and neither is allowed to "hunt" . . .

Photo by Erik Simonson

There's an intimate relationship between those on the course and those waiting their turn. Here we have two boats nosing-up for a start . . .

And as we say in the trade, "a reaction shot" as somebody bites the dust . . .

Crash and get tide-swept down the course, and you have to beat back up the course to get the mark roundings right. Brendan Wilton in one heat had the thing in the bag—his opponent had issues and sailed off the course—but Brendan went down and was tide-swept through the line on the wrong gybe. Sorry, Brendan. That's not a finish. You have to get the boat on its feet and back up the course, and he did that, and sheeted out and went for the gybe and then he crashed . . .

Did I mention that it's supposed to be hard? San Francisco Bay is one of the few places where you could pull off a Laser Slalom. First, you have the breeze. Then you have the location of the St. Francis Yacht Club, with a race course right in its front yard: a place to stage the racing, a place to trade-out boats, and a place for spectating.

Spectating is key. Where else while racing do you get to hear your best friends howling in glee when you screw up and take a dose of saltwater up the nose? We've been seeing wind in the twenties, but with wave action (unfortunately, I say) reduced by flood-tide currents moving in the same direction, no ebb-tide/countercurrent moguls. Alas.

Here's a little history lesson. The picture below was shot by one John Hutton (an amateur photographer of the first order—in its original form this is a much better image—and also a surgeon, a US Army general, and later White House physician to Ronald Reagan). We're looking at one of the early Laser Slalom races. Whitecaps. Reefed sails(!) And if you squint real hard you might see a figure on the bow of Wee Willie, now respectfully but less-colorfully known as the William L. Stewart, and that would be me with a camera. Oh dear. Despite wind and windage, there is enough ebb current to have Willie streaming upwind of the anchor. I recall, at one point, rolling in the trough and scooping water with both gunnels . . .

The Slalom wraps up on Wednesday. Dave Wright is sailing well and advancing, but this is still a wide open deal for many of the 32 entries on the ladder. Updates at St. Francis YC web site.

Quote of the day from Qingdao:

"As we near the start of the Games, the sea has been turning blue again. People were worried a few weeks ago because the race course had been covered in green algae, which was hard to sail through, but thousands of volunteers in fishing boats have been trying to clear the sea of sludge. The knock-on effect is that restaurant prices have rocketed because all the fishermen have been out catching algae instead of fish."

Ben Ainslie, Finn rep, UK

Thought of the day from the high Pacific:

Congratulations, Skip Allan, for finishing your unfinished business.

Thirty years ago Skip sailed his Wylie 27, Wildflower, in the Singlehanded Transpac and placed second. This year it seems impossible for him, on his 28th race from California to Hawaii, to do anything but hit it out of the park. He's in and the numbers look good. I've got more to say but it will have to wait because I got seriously sidetracked this morning by news out of New York and . . .

Thought of the day from the America's Cup beat:

Don't talk to me. Don't even come near me—Kimball

Rub Your Eyeballs

2008-07-27T09:06:00.020-05:00

They'll still be doing that, the U.S. Olympic Sailing Team now on the ground in Qingdao but not yet fully recovered from their sendoff or their travel. I can report that they partied hearty last Friday in San Francisco then flew on Saturday with connections through Beijing. All except for coach Gary Brodie, who traveled ahead because he was committed to having every bit of gear unpacked, ready and waiting for the athletes.

Reality takes hold by degrees. Star skipper John Dane commented that his Olympic reality sank in or began to sink in ("sure we won the Trials, but") while he was being "processed." Think credentialing, team uniforms, that stuff. Supermom Jerelyn Biehl who's been supporting junior sailing more or less forever has a son going to the Olympics but she's still working on her personal reality. Graham is crewing the 470 and Jerelyn says, "I thought, when I saw him in his uniform, that would do it but here he is in uniform and now I'm thinking reality will hit with the opening ceremonies."

Reality hit for 49er skipper Tim Wadlow (perhaps) when he was elected team captain. Congratulations, Mr. Wadlow.

Many Olympic sailors have lost weight in anticipation of light winds, but that's not the whole game. Catamaran skipper Johnny Lovell, going to his fourth Sailing Games, called this one "the most wide open" because conditions could be light and fluky, but then there's the challenge to be ready for anything because anything can happen. "Charlie [Ogletree] and I both shed some body weight," Lovell said, "but our program this year was to sail with light-air gear and try to make it work in a breeze. That's a learning curve. If it cost us some places, that's OK. We've won all the European events in the past. We don't need to win them again."

That "quote" is approximate, by the way. It's true to what Johnny said, but I wasn't standing with notebook in hand. Between processing on Friday and flying on Saturday the team was feted Friday night at St. Francis Yacht Club in what will be remembered in these parts as one bloody fine evening. I can't possibly write-in the energy and high spirits, but trust me, our Olympic team was fired up and ready for something and it was inspiring to share. Those of us who were on the scene are still talking about it and finding moments to recall and relive and it added pure wow to race day two of the Laser North Americans.

Here's a hasty snap of Jerelyn, left, and Graham Biehl that might help a little bit to tell the story . . .

The USOC in reviewing video of the 2004 opening ceremony decided to ban any use of cameras, recorders, and especially cell phones during the American team's upcoming entry to the new National Stadium in Beijing. Here's Graham, again with words approximate but the meaning (I'm confident) intact: "When I first heard about the camera ban, I didn't like it, but now I get it. There will be plenty of pictures of the opening ceremony, and that's exactly what they told us. We don't have to be taking pictures ourselves, and face it, you'd look pretty stupid marching in with a cell phone to your ear saying, Hey, I'm at the Olympics!"

And 58-year-old John Dane has a great riff about all the product endorsements waiting out there if he and Austin Sperry can win a medal: "Viagra, hair-grow, liver pills, I'm ready, I'm ready."

Oh, the BS was flying. John had admirers and charmed them all . . .

To actually get Dane you should understand that he'd take the money but he doesn't need it. As the owner of Trinity Yachts, Dane is a major builder of megayachts and, separately, of military craft. He is also I say an American hero for rebuilding his business and putting a couple of thousand people on the Gulf Coast back to work, even though insurance payouts would have made it possible to walk away after Hurricane Katrina wiped out everything from factory to home.

He didn't walk away because that's not what a man does. At the same time he won a Bacardi Cup and the US Trials, his seventh attempt, and qualified for the 2008 team. Dane's first Trials, in 1968, ended in a second-place finish, and if I'm not mistaken, that was before his career as a two-time All American sailor at Tulane where he went on to take a PhD in engineering: "No formalities, please. Just call me Dr. John."

Early on, 470 skipper Amanda Clark took a moment to say Hi before digging into the sushi. In the background, that would by Olympic chair Dean Brenner and Laser Radial rep Anna Tunnicliffe conversing with someone off-camera. The uniforms are cute, Ralph, but we may have overachieved with the in-house branding . . .

It was the kind of night where everybody was grinning wide enough to hurt. This would be 49er crew Chris Rast and his consultant, Heather . . .

I'm guessing the grins were not so wide, come time for the 0730 flight out of SFO, but with a 13-hour time difference, San Francisco to Beijing, and a dateline to cross, there never was a tomorrow.

Set Lasers to Stun

David Wright was strong going into Sunday's final day of the Laser North Americans, also at St. Francis YC, with opponents on the order of Bernard Luttmer, Brad Funk and Luke Lawrence. The competition also includes 17 Laser 4.7s and 85 Radials. It looks like this through the lens of Chris Ray's camera . . .

But if you've never experienced race-watching on the San Francisco cityfront you should know that it also looks like this . . .

And the spirit is this . . .

There is a wrap story and podcast on sailmagazine.com.

Across the Pond

Lyn Hines has sent us an account of the start of La Solitaire du Figaro. The first stage, from La Rochelle, France to Vigo, Spain should finish Tuesday-Wednesday. The start was murky and light (Lyn's host-boat driver pulled out a fishing pole)and through his lens it looked like this . . .

You can read Lyn's account of this event, which breeds new solo stars, here.

Me, I'm looking at lots of finishers in Hawaii from the Pacific Cup and Solo Transpac. Stories to come—Kimball

Horizon-Free Zone

2008-07-22T12:00:00.012-05:00

You know it's been a good race when you get to the other end and you want to wear the t-shirt. Even if the race was a little bit hard.

Of the three great distance classics in America, the Race to Mackinac most revels in how hard it can be: The length of Lake Michigan, Chicago to Mackinac Island, 333 miles almost annually since 1898, and we've just completed the 100th running. As Rich Stearns says, "open-ocean races run point to point, but this is four races in one."

He's talking about the geography of succeeding stages, often coinciding with weather changes and risks of reshuffling the fleet. Add random stops and restarts with passing weather systems, and most Macs are more than four races in one. Our race was that, aboard Bill Zeiler's J/122, Skye, where we went a couple of days without seeing sun, moon, stars. I have never before been on the water with so little visibility and so many boats (a record 433 or something such) and so much land to hit. I worshipped our GPS/chartplotter as we took our section and placed, we hope, pretty high overall. What a difference from the puckered navigation of yore.

But the basics are eternal. Midwest legend Dick Stearns made part of the crew (silver medalist '64 and much more) and when one of our younger guys hit on him for a sailing lesson he just said, "Close your eyes and feel the boat."

What's strange is the addictive nature of this Mac thing—not the only going cult in Midwest sailing, but it’s the 697.7-pound gorilla. The organization for veterans of 25 Macs or more, the Island Goats, describes the Mac experience using (remember, their words, not mine) these active verbs: endured, survived, suffered.

I get it.

We had it cushy, though, watching the cruiser divisions start in the rain, from our vantage point in Rich and Lori Stearns' apartment high above South Michigan Avenue. The plan to motor out early and explore up-course was abandoned in the face of reality: we wouldn't have seen a thing.

A day later, after a sweet, sweet hectic start, we were launched on what I called "the race that we know about." We had sailed through the cruiser fleet and on the rare occasions when other boats appeared through the mist, they were on the order of GL70s, TP52s, and other big, hot things whose crews must have been throroughly PO'd at the sight of our stock, 40-foot J. "We'll never know who it was that appeared out of the mist in the depths of Saturday night/Sunday morning on port gybe, and answered our "Starboard" call with what I suspect was an onboard emergency; I'm figuring that on account'a it would have felt like an emergency to us, if we'd been forced to gybe.

By and by I built up the conviction that it's not so hard to win a Mac. You just have to be fast enough and smart enough to deserve it, then you need to get lucky several times in a row, or more.

We were still feeling lucky as we made the first transition, around Point Betsy from the open lake and into the Manitou Passage where, true to Rich Stearns' prediction (he's Dick Stearns' #1 son and a sailor of accomplishment himself) boats appeared all around us as the ondeck murk cleared to an overhead cover. Somewhere in that process we passed the scenic Sleeping Bear Dunes, but I'll have to wait for some other occasion for a glimpse of it. This was my second Mac, but for Bill Zeiler, it was number 25, his qualifier as an official Island Goat. Here's Bill driving, with Star sailor Rob Maine and Rich Stearns, as a spot of sun broke through . . .

The arrival of a tiny sparrow (or near-cousin) was nothing new to me. Bird visits are common aboard boats out of sight of land, but this little guy was especially welcome. He arrived on Sunday, day two, right behind a wave of biting flies and other insects, and made regular and welcome counterclockwise circuits of the deck, chomping bugs . . . .

No fear. We named him Scrappy Skye. This was shot just before he hopped onto Zeiler's hand . . .

The arrival of a bat—Scary Skye—was, however, a first for me on a boat. We chased him off the mainsail once, but he came right back and clung to the mast until we went into a sequence of back-to-back gybes and spinnaker peels that must come across like a WWI bombardment. The thing about sailing with Rich Stearns (J/Boats Midwest) is that he's an affable, genial Type A, and you don't often find that crossover. Never any stress, always with a sense of detached humor regarding this crazy obsession for making a slow object go through the water as fast as possible, and always ready to jump on the next job or the next sailchange. He'll invoke the five-minute rule on a shift of the breeze, then 90 seconds later he's ready to go for it. The way he recalled the process: "We went from the wrongsail to the wrongsail to the wrongsail." But truth to tell, we were always going to the right sail. It just didn't stay right for long. And the way you keep yourself eligible to get lucky is by facing up to every skirmish.

I had awakened in the morning with a great sense of well-being. I'm good with the sound of a rushing bow wave. But as we flowed on through the mist I fell to remembering that I'd just the night before had word from a friend out West that Mark Rudiger had lost his fight with lymphoma, and I remembered Paul Cayard now at sea with his family on the Pacific Cup and how fine it is that this giant of grand prix racing has seized the opportunity to sail with family and friends at a special, unrepeatable time in their lives and I have so many other friends also on the high Pacific right now, some of them alone in the solo Transpac but not alone because they yak it up every day on the SSB so they are "family" too, and all these miles pass under so many keels—and Rudiger navigated Cayard's round-the-world win—and there are so many friends from all over that I'm running into here on the streets and last night the rain was bitter cold on Mackinac Island and most of the fleet was still out on the course and g'bless'em and now it's morning and I'm writing and boats are still coming in and time slips away from us and there is a sad beauty to that which seems to come directly out of this ephemeral, lovely thing that we do with water and boats and wakes that appear and disappear and there is no way to finish this sentence or as Kenneth Patchen would say, no way to begin. The sailing life is a good life. Thanks, Mark. Damn.

Rich Stearns asked Dick Stearns, as the half-hour ticked down, "Ready for a spell on the helm?" The response was a glance at a watch and, "Not for another 2 minutes and 43 seconds I'm not." In the mind of many a Star sailor, Dick's measure of accomplishment was not winning the Star worlds in 1962 but winning the North Americans something like 11 times in a row.

Father and son . . .

Come Monday morning, day three, we had horizons at last under a thick cloud cover, and one of the competors in our section was working hard to overtake us. Eagle's Wings, a Grand Soleil 44, owed us something like 45 minutes under ORR handicapping, so they were no great threat, trophy-wise, but the Skye team scrapped hard the rest of the day to stay ahead of that bigger, faster-most-of-time competition. Rich: "This could win the race for us. You know we're going to sail harder because we have them alongside."

First we got passed, slowly and steadily . . .

And then in The Race After the Bridge, Race Four, we would find a couple of shifts and get it all back.

I always go into a race expecting to win, but it was not until I had the Mackinac Bridge in sight that I allowed myself the emotion of imagining a win in the 100th Mac. Here's Lori Stearns and the bridge . . .

And a flashback to the crew that chose to sleep on deck rather than compromise . . .

Yep, to my milestones collection of Centennial Transpac and Centennial Bermuda I've added the 100th running of the Mac, and I trimmed spinnaker for Dick Stearns, and life is good . . .

Photo by Ted Martin

What was it I said that Dick said? Just close your eyes and feel the boat. Yeah, I'm still feeling it—Kimball

Racing Down the Coast

2008-07-15T11:48:00.023-05:00

What do you do with 22,000 square feet of sail? Chris Sinnett, Captain of the US Coast Guard training barque, Eagle, says, "It's basic sailing, just a lot of it."

Eagle is the grandest of the tall ships that have been calling on Pacific ports since late June as part of the American Sail Training Association's West Coast Challenge. They will arrive soon in California. The last time Eagle sailed down the Pacific Coast I was aboard, Portland to Frisco, and being a small-boat sailor, I had my epiphanies.

Best of all, it was a race.

Imagine a medium breeze near or forward of the beam. You will see the square-rigger crew "fanning" the uppermost sails—trimming them farther aft—to account for higher wind speeds aloft. (Maxi and America's Cup crews have a different tool kit but similar challenges.) In light air the uppermost sails of a square rigger are again trimmed farther aft than lower sails, to act as telltales and warn the driver if it's time to fall off. Aboard the Eagle, however, you will not hear too-cool-for-school racer lingo like "driver." Before we pulled out of Portland town, the crew was mustered on deck and the cadets were told, "Learn all you can. This is how you become a Coast Guard officer."

I don't know what may have been going through the minds of young cadets as they stood straight, listening to those words, but I have a notion of what they were thinking, three days later, as the light failed and the wind rose and there was a bite to that wind, and the ship was flying too much sail and came the call,
ALL HANDS!

All eyes were aloft, up up up to the rigging. There's this other saying aboard the Eagle:

If you don't let go, you don't fall.

I know pretty well what was going through the mind of Chris Sinnett those several years ago, because he was then the Executive Officer of the Eagle, and a dinghy sailor, and we struck up a small friendship as we sailed down the coast. He was not the least bit shy about saying that his ambition was to some day serve as Captain of the Eagle.

He made it, and that makes my day.

What an enviable signoff:

Wishing you "Fair Winds and Royals All the Way," I am,
Sincerely,

Chris Sinnett, Captain, USCGC EAGLE

(Royals fly above the Topgallant, in favorable winds only.)

One of the fundamentals of going through the Coast Guard Academy at New London, Connecticut is sailing the Eagle. Most cadets do not come from a sailing/voyaging background. Most have never been to sea when they walk aboard the Eagle for the first time, and on any voyage there is a mix of upper-form students who know the drill, plus raw recruits.

They are required to learn every sail and every line. You might see them of a mid-day, in a meandering trance, or so it seems, but in fact they're tracking slowly around the deck, classroom pamphlets in hand, touching first this line or that and reciting the names to themselves.

Again.

Again.

Two hundred+ lines.

Six miles worth.

The journalist in me decided that I was going to write out a prescription for how to tack the Eagle. I went to the book, and how-to-tack ran twenty-three pages. The end of that.

But there is no end to basic services, some of them performed on hands and knees as if in prayer. Perhaps because the grip clutches something about the size of a Bible, the phrase for this is, holystoning the deck . . .

Do they keep the brass binnacle polished? Let's inspect . . .

Eagle is 295 feet long, 1,816 tons. The hull is .4-inch steel plate, built in Germany and seized as war reparation at the close of hostilities, mid-20th century. She carries a crew of 6 officers and 55 enlisted to ensure the safety, training, and bonding of the next generation of Coast Guard officers. This is a leadership laboratory. It's about teamwork. Captain Sinnett: "You can't gainfully employ 120 cadets in one shot on any other ship in the Coast Guard or the Navy."

My only job was to walk around and take a few pictures and smile at people who called me Sir. I had this rare and special ride not because I was a journalist, but because I was a journalist and I was lucky and I was at the time a director of the Coast Guard Foundation, a do-good outfit that raises money to buy scholarships for service offspring and useful things like gym equipment and computers for remote duty stations.

Oh, you thought stuff was like that was taken care of? Dream on. Just because these people jump out of helicopters to haul people into rescue baskets and go to sea in lifeboats when no one else wants to go to sea (Their saying: "You have to go out, you don't have to come back"), doesn't mean they are reasonably compensated. Sure, I've heard my share of stupid-things-the-Coasties-did stories, but if cowpies are raining down on my head some day, I'll be looking for that big orange stripe. We as directors talked about the 30-30-3 rule: The average Coastie is 30 years old, makes 30 thousand dollars a year, has 3 kids and never enough moments like this . . .

Through the Coast Guard Foundation, I met remarkable people. One of them was Lieutenant Commander (soon to be promoted) Alda Seabrands. She was called in for the shouting at a Foundation fundraiser.

Alda had been flying a pollution patrol over Puget Sound (meaning, no rescue jumper), when her helicopter was diverted to SAR. A fishing skiff had capsized, spilling two people into white water. The chopper made the scene quickly, dropped a basket, and one man climbed in. He was hauled aboard and the basket lowered again. The second man put one arm over the edge of the basket, then rolled unconscious. Alda looked at her copilot, said, "It's all yours, Binky," and jumped.

OK, she didn't exactly say that, and I'm sure the events, however dire and hurried, were more complicated. But Alda Seabrands was flying as Pilot In Command when she, in full awareness, left her post. As a certain Admiral put it to me, "We had to decide whether it was a court-martial or a medal. We decided it was a medal."

Throughout our three-day passage from Portland to the Golden Gate, the ship received visits from service helicopters and cutters, all eyes out to see the Eagle. Their Eagle. I began to get it. What's hard to put into words. Eagle is magic.

On our last day out the wind piped up and the old girl was hauling the mail . . .

It was a great ride, but just between you and me, the quarter wave was scary . . .

And true to form, along about sundown, there we were with too much sail up and the breeze rising. All hands, was the call, with many ordered aloft, and remember, we had newbies in the bunch who had never been to sea. When the show bogged down, the bos'n cut through the howl of the wind with a voice that carried the length of the ship, LIGHT A FIIIIIRE UNDER'EM!

Then he turned to the fellow next to him and remarked, "As a bos'n, I could lighten up. But why would I?"

The wind rose. The night fell. The cold deepened. Figure it takes a minimum of ten cadets on deck to handle a single sheet in 30 knots of breeze. And each line had to be precisely eased to compensate as sails were furled high overhead or somebody(s) would get sail-slapped serious-like, and those were real people up there, scooping handfuls of canvas and dumping them into the furl. Very real, very young people, power-pumping adrenalin and how.

And so the job was done. Another crop of young cadets scrambled down from the heights to an emotional high that kept them floating above deck level. Slapping each other on the back. Sharing sillygrins. Exhilarated and relieved and ready for the next call to duty. A little less young. Shipmates for life wherever whenever they might meet. I saw the payoff for the Eagle, the leadership laboratory that is meant to instill, "an intimate knowledge of wind and sea." I was a witness. If you don't let go, you don't fall.

There were many moods in our three days offshore, leading to our passage through the Golden Gate as I climbed aloft, knowing our masts would not hit the bridge but it always looked as if they would, and yonder I could see my house up above Baker Beach and all those people in boats waving from way down at sea level and I was telling myself, this is a moment I will remember.

(And I do remember, but I never did find out how we fared in the "race.")

On the way aloft, a self-portrait . . .

And I recall just as vividly the quiet, early passage down the Oregon coast, with the deck at times almost deserted while classes were in session . . .

And the fog that swallowed us for a while. I observed the rotation and the youthful earnestness of the forward watch, and I was reminded of the unofficial motto of the service . . .

Elvis, if you're out there, we'll find you.

One Expensive Belt Buckle

2008-07-12T14:17:00.036-05:00

"It's about the people."

You always hear that.

Racing sailors feel a passion for boats and the motion of boats and the beauties of the sea, but what keeps them going is, "about the people." So it gave me a grin to hear exactly the same from a man about to cross 2,120 miles of open ocean, solo, in the Singlehanded Transpacific Race.

Ken "The General" Roper went out the Golden Gate on his 10th solo race to Hawaii on Saturday, and before the start that's what came out of his mouth.

"It's about the people."

How do you define community for somebody who has put more than 100,000 mostly-solo miles on a 31–foot boat? Roper says, "I keep up with a lot of the people who have done this race, and out of 23 boats this year there must be six or eight that I've raced with before."
(The belt buckles awarded to finishers define a pretty small club.) Roper: "It's one expensive belt buckle."

The 2008 race is his "last one." Again.

Mark Deppe, 2006 winner in a J/120, explains it this way: "There’s something addictive about the race. No one hesitates to help out and support their fellow competitors. We all share the experience of getting our boats ready and passing the qualification inspections. Then we share the experience of racing to Kauai for two weeks or more, talking twice daily on the SSB. By the time we cross the finish, we're a family, having shared our best and worst moments, and we're friends for life."

Roper very recently soloed back up the coast from Puerto Vallarta and wasn't caught up in any dramas or last-minute fixes. His Finn Flyer, Harrier, is "pretty much always ready to go."

About half of the skippers now on their way to Hanalei Bay, Kauai, are returning veterans. For Skip Allan, this is his 28th race to Hawaii. He did his first full-crew Transpac as a teenager in 1963. In 1967, at 20, he skippered the family Cal 40, Holiday Too, and won the Transpac overall.

Skip had sailed some of the most famous racers of the 20th century by the time he launched his 27-foot Wylie, Wildflower, and finished second in the inaugural solo Transpac of 1978. Norton Smith in a Santa Cruz 27 "sailed a heck of a race" that year, says Skip, and Smith won, and that leaves unfinished business for Mr. Allan, doesn't it?

I took a sail with him recently at Santa Cruz . . .

Lots of seamanlike touches on his simple little boat, including over-height, over-spec'd stanchions and beefed-up lifelines. Can't be wrong.

And I note that The General (Roper is a Brigadier General, US Army, retired, so what other nickname could a 10-race veteran carry) formed his interest in the solo Transpac by encountering the finish of the inaugural. He happened to be in Hanalei Bay on his way back from cruising the South Pacific when the race arrived—and that was a story in itself. Arrangements had been made for a hotel there to host the race at that end, but in the interim the hotel changed management and somehow that information never got transferred. Imagine the surprise.

Then you have the likes of Deppe, defending his 2006 win in Alchera, a sprit boat. Image from file. Saturday, July 12, 2008 did not look at all like this in the Golden Gate Strait . . .

Here's Deppe explaining himself: "This will be my fifth Singlehanded TransPac. My first was back in 1996. The second time was in 2002 with a new boat, a J/120 I named Alchera, which roughly translated means Dreamtime. Though I had a great second trip, I felt at the time that two Transpacs was enough for one person in one lifetime. Then, in 2004 I entered and raced just once more. Afterwards I solemnly vowed never to do it again. I said to all of my friends and competitors, ‘If I ever talk about doing this race again, please shoot me.’ Then I did the race again in 2006. No one shot me, though they gleefully reminded me of what I had said.

"I’ve accepted the inevitable, and now I’m racing for the fifth time. No one believes me anymore, but this really is my last time. Really."

The marine layer was 2,000 feet thick over Northern California over the weekend. That's fog, son, thinning toward race time to reveal the hazy, pervasive smoke from the wildfires. I don't notice the fire-smell anymore.

I had fish frying so couldn't go out to follow the start, but it's a short walk from the Sail West bunker to my favorite vantage point. Not much of a picture, but this is what was in front of the lens on Saturday, July 12, 2008 . . .

At least, unlike so many ocean-racing starts through this patch of water, nobody started the race soaked through. Below we see the 2006 race winner, Mark Deppe's J/120, as the right of three. The coastline opens to the north, wrapping back at Point Reyes, but these guys as they cleared Point Bonita had only one rock—25 miles out, the Southeast Farallon Island—between them and Hawaii . . .

The fleet had a generally light-air day for clearing the coast. By Sunday, the breeze was a proper northwesterly, 10-20 knots, with a prediction of seas 8-11 feet (and the standard reminder that occasional waves will double the significant wave height).
So, these guys are out of Dodge.

Racing for the Ida Lewis Trophy

A slow solo start aside, what the National Weather Service called "locally strong winds in the San Francisco Bay" created some adventures for the 66 young women racing the US Junior Women's Doublehanded Championship out of Sausalito Yacht Club.

The racing area off the north face of Angel Island was civil enough (most of the time), but there's a hurricane alley between the racecourse and home base, and yes, we saw 30 knots. That's a lot for anyone in a C420. Of course it helps when there's a mother duck, as we see in this shot from Peter Lyons, lyonsimaging.com.

Congrats are due to Sydney Bolger and Caitlin Beavers, up from Southern California. It was their regatta from Day One.

AND I've been enjoying Rich Roberts' reports and photos from the Cal 20 class championship down south at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club. Twenty-seven years, now, these doughty little 20s have been doing their thing, and around Long Beach, home to ABYC, there's been a heap of attention paid to this class. As in, expensive plastic-classic restorations.

Can't say as how I have a lot of nostalgia for my days of pounding one of these things through an ebb-tide chop in the Alcatraz Channel, but Cal 20s are not going away, and this is good. Here's Keith Ives. He rushed back from sailing Los Angeles-Tahiti on Medicine Man (can't miss the next regatta) winning race one . . .

Dads, pay attention. As crew, you have a lot to learn, but the kids'll shape you up . . .

I wasn't there, Rich was, so I'll quote him re. the winner: "Any competent sailor can make a hot boat go fast, but Mark Gaudio's affinity for old, slow boats is becoming the stuff of West Coast legend. The 51-year-old Newport Beach institutional bonds trader completed a triple crown of sorts Sunday with a strong finish in big winds to win the 47th Cal 20 Class Championship, hosted by Alamitos Bay Yacht Club. It was his third class title in the past year following similar successes in Lido 14s and Naples Sabots---neither known for speed---and now he is the Cal 20s' first four-time champion, all four in the last eight years."

And hey, there's a Cal 20 racing to Hanalei Bay. That would be Robert Crawford on Black Feathers. Here's how he explains himself:

"The mantra of the Singlehanded Sailing Society in the early 1990's was, 'Do the race in the boat you have.' At the time, I had an Ericson 32, and after a couple of seasons of sailing the SSS races, I did the '94 TransPac. The preparation for that race, and the race itself, proved to be a worthy and memorable adventure. They say the greatest challenge in this race is getting to the start line. I think that's true.

"Now, fourteen years later, I'm back. The Cal-20 holds a warm spot in the hearts of many a San Francisco Bay sailor. I have enjoyed the last couple of years outfitting mine with equipment appropriate for a safe and exciting run for Kauai. I'm sure to be among the last to finish, but I'm hoping my high handicap will keep the hot boats on their toes."

And Thomas Coville with Sodeb'O is outpacing Frances Joyon's transatlantic record and, holy smokes, the first of the Pacific Cup starts leaves the San Francisco cityfront at 1250 on Monday, and we're only a week away from the 100th running of the Chicago-Mac and . . . and . . . it's a busy world—Kimball

Blue Green Algae&50-Knot Checkup

2008-07-06T17:57:00.007-05:00

blue-green-al-gae (blü-grēn-alj'ē), —1. A phylum of bacteria that obtain their energy through photosynthesis. 2. A nutrient-dense food containing glyco-proteins, vitamins, minerals, simple carbohydrates, lipids and biologically active enzymes (sez one "health foods" company) 3. A negligible source of nutrients. Like green plants, they are rich in chlorophyll, a pigment that enables them to turn sunlight into energy. But chlorophyll is of no use to the human body (U.C. Berkeley Wellness Letter); 4. The only way to get Olympic sailing on TV, apparently.

Said it before, saying it again. The guys who run China live in interesting times.

In a still-mostly-poor country, they're rich, but are they 愉快的 ?

And if they assure us that everything will be fine, just fine, why, we have to believe them, don't we?

And . . .

Debbie Capozzi is certainly smiling through it all. Here she is on the water off Qingdao as Yngling crew for Sally Barkow, along with Carrie Howe, who is doing most of the blogging for US Olympic reps Team 7 Sailing . . .

You can see some of the algae cleanup in progress in the background. These pics don't have credit lines, but I assume they're shot by one of the ladies and probably by Carrie. I'd "credit" the photographer with a good editorial eye. This one's too good not to share . . .

So Carrie, just how bad is it?

"Team 7 has always taken the attitude of "Roll with the punches" so we are learning to deal with the seaweed, the fog, light wind, and strong current. Funnily enough, amongst all of the negative reporting going on around us, we have been logging some great training."

50-Knot Checkup

There's a mood of expectancy that somebody is close to finally busting 50 knots. Windsurfer Antoine Albeau has pumped up the 500-meter record to49.09 knots–so close—and there is pressure from—

L'Hydroptere: Presently "calculating measurement systems" in moderate winds around Marseille and waiting for the mistral to come roaring out of the Rhone Valley, in the south of France. When the mistral comes, the team will move to Port-St.-Louis-du-Rhone. It's hard to not believe this thing is capable.

Wotrocket: Frustrated so far by teething issues and too much or too little breeze along the southern beaches of Sydney, Australia. The most recently-posted news: "As the media gathered for the much-anticipated first shot of Wot Rocket up on its hydrofoils, the breeze hit the high twenties and the test sail was abandoned."

And now, less pressure, from—

Sailrocket: After an extensive development session in Namibia, headed home to England for further development. Project head and driver, Paul Larson says, "I know I keep saying this, but speed will come with control. Part of the joblist will be to install sensors on the foils to give a better indication of the balance of the boat."

Cal 40s? In the Big Boat Series?

2008-06-28T11:47:00.026-05:00

Could happen. Should happen.

The thought comes up for me, right in the middle of trying to draw a comparison between the Newport Bermuda Race now wrapped up and the Tahiti Race still shaping up. Can't get there. Los Angeles-Tahiti is an act of whimsy as much as it's a race, and have fun transiting the doldrums, boys and girls. But this Bermuda thing, well, I got a chuckle out of talking to grand prix navigator Stan Honey about the Cal 40 that won its class for the fourth straight time.

"Sally and I went to see Peter Rebovich before the race," says Stan. "His boat is maybe a little rough around the edges, but in every aspect of preparedness and seamanship it is spot on, and the crew is good. It was also cleverly set up for the Bermuda Race. Peter makes the bet that he won't be doing much, if any, deep reaching—you might expect a lot of close reaching on that course—so he gets Sinn Fein rated for asymmetric spinnakers tacked to the stem.

"Of course, if he ever had the wind over the transom, he'd be hosed."

Hmm. I sailed the Centennial Bermuda Race in '06 and wrote about it from the point of view of an Open 50, then received a letter from a reader saying, in essence: Dude you missed the story; the story was the Cal 40. Okay, he had a point.

Here's Rebovich (in shades) with the crew . . .

Photo by Barry Pickthall/PPL

Stan was home in California (briefly) after navigating Speedboat to first-to-finish in the Bermuda Race, but he red-eyed back across the continent over the weekend to prep for a shot at the west-east transatlantic monohull record, Sunday night being Speedboat's target takeoff time, and Speedboat being a cant-keel maxi, the latest thing from the design board of Juan K.

If Stan, far left, (photo by Lynn Fitzpatrick/PPL) looks like this after 635 miles, Newport to Bermuda, we know it won't be pretty after an Atlantic record shot, however normal one more crossing may be to him. The boat is black down below because it's built of carbon to be light, and paint would only add weight.

For the record, Stan's "Sally" is Sally Lindsay Honey, past US woman sailor of the year and co-owner of the family Cal 40, Illusion. In that boat they once won the Pacific Cup doublehanded (overall, with the best corrected time ever recorded in that race) and Stan once won the Singlehanded Transpac (with the fastest-ever Cal 40 passage, California to Hawaii, with crew or without, and that's 100+ passages since 1965).

Stan sails cutting-edge boats all over the world, but he and Sally are royalty in the Cult of the Cal 40, and I think I caught a quickening of the pulse when I mentioned a movement on behalf of a Cal 40 class for the Big Boat Series. Get some boats up from Southern California to race on San Francisco Bay. Heck, bring enough for a north-south team component. Maybe down from Seattle? Then line'em up at Tinsley Island. Make it an Event.

Bill LeRoy, who is a relatively new Cal 40 owner, threw the idea at me, but he was talking September 2008. When I pinged my friends in Los Angeles, I didn't get any traction for 2008 but nobody said, Heck no, on 2009.

St. Francis is cool with this, but the club wants a minimum of six boats for a class start. Even if we got that out of the local fleet, it wouldn't be the same as a gathering of the tribe.

Hey, Peter Rebovich, when was the last time Sinn Fein went for a truck ride?

Moving on. Here's a Jas Hawkins pic of Illusion rumbling down the Molokai Channel at the finish of the Centennial Transpac, one of 14 Cal 40s in that race, with Sally Honey and an all-woman crew. I was, ah, some place behind them, and my crewmate Ric Sanders sez, "My wife has no idea I've spent all this time chasing girls."

A Thousand Miles and Gone

Having sailed a tiny bit with Captain Morgan (who is very much that) on his Santa Cruz 50, Fortaleza, I'm naturally following along with Jim and the crew at their blog for the Tahiti Race, svfortaleza.blogspot.com.

They crossed the thousand-mile mark late last week and spent the weekend digging into the doldrums, the grand tactical challenge of a race that crosses the equator.

Only four boats (the "whimsy" in a race of 3,571 miles), and there's Magnitude 80 at 80 feet, compared to Jim's Santa Cruz 50, and a few weeks ago on a crossing home from Catalina Island Jim quipped, "I just hope we get across the equator before Magnitude 80 passes us on the way back."

But the fleet's not spread that wide, as we see in this doldrums chart that I grabbed from the Transpacific Yacht Club web site.

With the equator at bottom, we see Magnitude 80 farthest down the track, west of the rhumb line, with Medicine Man to the northwest of them. Good old Ragtime, everybody's sentimental favorite, is east of rhumb ahead of Fortaleza.

From his writing, I can tell that Jim is having an experience not unlike mine in the 2006 Newport Bermuda Race, when all the fine-tuned tech data in the world read like fiction: "Today has been a bit of a challenge as a navigator. We have all kinds of technology now, so we can get the latest forecasts, as well as the satellite that actually measures the speed of the wind over the ocean. This is supposed to make it possible to find a path through the Doldrums (officially the Intertropical Convergence Zone/ITCZ).

"Unfortunately, the model predictions do not match each other, even for present conditions. They also don't match what the QuikSCAT satellite has been showing for wind. To top it off, the QuikSCAT doesn't seem to match what we are seeing on the water.

"So, what to do? If you are following us, you can see I'm doing some ‘naviguessing.’ If it were the old days and we had no idea of the future wind, one would just try to make best miles to the finish. We aren't currently doing this. We are instead hoping the gap in the ITCZ seen on QuikSCAT will be there when we get to it, and/or we will get some extra pressure from the tropical low pressure system to the east. At the very least we'll get some significant squall activity soon."

They left on June 22.

They'll make the halfway mark some time this week—Kimball

A Download World

2008-06-15T10:07:00.021-05:00

Wondering how much air time NBC plans for sailing coverage during the Olympics in China? Wonder no more.

Sailing is one of 22 events going large—webcast online at nbcolympics.com—and shrinking at NBC broadcast television.

I dialed Annapolis to talk to Mr. TV Facetime, Gary Jobson, who will be commentating. "It's a tradeoff," he pre-comments. "There will be no sailing coverage on television except for special moments [a gold medal? a pantsing?] but sailing is one of 22 sports for which the entire daily feed will be available online as a download. That could be 90 minutes worth of sailing. Just go to nbcolympics.com. It's an experiment, but I'm liking it."

It's a download world. The 21st century is due to begin soon.

Among the US Olympic sailors already, temporarily, on site in Qingdao, aka 青島, is the Yngling threesome of Sally Barkow, Debbie Capozzi, and Carrie Howe. They've done a month per summer in Qingdao, each of the last two years, and before her long plane ride across the Pacific for the current month-long stint, I talked to forward hand Carrie about stuff that sailors talk about and what she calls the "battle of conditions" on the shores of the Yellow Sea. To the Chinese, that's the Eastern Sea. Carrie reports:

"We live in the Sea View Garden Hotel [standard room US $148/night] where the staff has made us feel at home in the middle of an unknown world. At first they did not speak a word of English, but we are all working together and now we know how to communicate. They give us new stuffed animals every day!

"The hotel has several buildings where other teams set up as well. Brits, Spanish, not sure who else, but they have several restaurants where they try to understand our customs. We are a bit more messy and unorganized compared to their ways, if you know what I mean."

The race course off the former fishing village of 青島, now a city of three million, has hazards that have been and will be much discussed. There is also the matter of getting to and fro, in this period of training. On that subject, Carrie says, "We take a scary taxi ride or a shuttle to sailing each day. We have to be careful.

"It's chaos, all traffic and smog and unorganized with horns sounding 50 percent of the time in the car and people cutting each other off as if that's normal, and I guess it is. It seems to work for them. When we get back to the hotel, the staff makes us feel welcome with a smile and fruit trays. They know our names and our rooms and they know that we have been out sailing. The air conditioning is pumping to help us recover. Outside, the humidity is 99 percent."

And Then

Barkow, Capozzi and Howe are training in this environment until July 10. Then they're home for a bit and returning to China on July 27 for the Games. When next they arrive in Qingdao, they'll move into the Athletes' Village, which cuts the stress of the daily commute.

Coach Betsy Allison has already experienced the Olympic Village—our Paralympic team stayed there for a pre-event—and she is giving it high marks. "We were their first guests," Betsy says. "The staff took over three days before we arrived, but they were phenomenal, all 500 of them, and there will be 1,000 of them for the Games.

"They've built four housing towers, the tallest at about 17 or 18 stories, and the rooms are modern and comfortable and accessible for paraplegics. The Chinese paid careful attention to international standards."

The Athletes' Village is enclosed within a security perimeter, with race administration close to the housing and the boats about a hundred meters away. "It's easy to access notices. "You don't have to search for anything, and that makes a big difference. Once you're inside you feel very secure."

Rather Less Secure

Just the name, Extreme 40, tells you that this class of catamaran is not for the weak of heart. Tour sponsor iShares took me for a ride on their own boat when it passed through San Francisco Bay on a promo tour that just might lead to a US installment of the 2009 tour. I hope so. Meanwhile, ISAF World Sailor of the Year Ed Baird (he's paying his dues all over again) has skippered Alinghi to a win at the second 2008 stop, Hyères. There's a news report at sailmagazine.com, and now we'll wrap this with a few shots showing why these boats are crowd pleasers. The crews are pro. They don't mind sailing oddball courses close to shore.

Congratulations are in order, Ed—Kimball

© Jean Francois Dedieu

© Tornado Sport: Tommy Hilfiger

© Pierrick Contin DPPI.OC Events

MARINE ANIMALS STRIKE BACK!

2008-06-05T00:14:00.010-05:00

Outraged by seemingly endless accounts of Open 60s colliding with whales in the Artemis Transat and other boats likewise elsewhere and fed up with tales of basking sharks sliced in two by speeding sailboats—and get this, ICAP Leopard had to park, drop sails, and back down to remove a sunfish that got wrapped around the rudder on the boat's screaming transatlantic record crossing and people talk about sailboats setting records and how cool that is which is fine, just fine, but who's talking about that poor sunfish's family and oh the nerve of these PEOPLE—the creatures of the sea are mobilizing to fight back.

Their message:

IF WE'RE NOT SAFE WHERE WE LIVE
YOU'RE NOT SAFE WHERE YOU LIVE

Inspired by Japan's Kamikazi, the "Divine Wind," these selfless patriots of the sea are the "Divine Wave."

Dang. It's hard times all across our great republic, and this comes as one more blow. I just checked my homeowner's policy, and I'm pretty sure I'm not covered.

On the other hand, I am assured that the humans are "winning."

In a presentation by The International Seakeepers Society—and I should say that these people are the antithesis of wildeyed reef huggers (check out their web site)—board president Jim Gilbert offered it as a conservative projection that, on present trendlines, with industrial fishing expanding and fish stocks declining, all the fisheries will collapse by mid-century.

Just like the many fisheries that have already collapsed.

I feel so much better now.

For the Record:
The America's Cup and all its little friends return(ed) to court Thursday in New York to renew their frolic regarding the latest appeal. You will not read about it here, not soon anyway. Think of me as somewhere's west of LA but completely surrounded by LAYC. Have fun in New York, everybody—Kimball

P.S. J World San Francisco has an opening through cancellation for a spot on its J/120 in the Pacific Cup, San Francisco to Hawaii, next month. At $10,000 to sign on with two offshore coaches (I'll vouch for them) and six paying participants, that comes to roughly $4.50 per mile to be taught how to get to Hawaii doing the fast thing. Win or lose you'll come back different. Want to skipper, next time, with confidence? More info at J World San Francisco/Puerto Vallarta. You never really know what you will get, California-Hawaii, but it is a benign passage by the standards of ocean passages and halfway across you are farther from land than at any other point on the globe. At the end there's Hawaii. Suck it up and cope.

I Think You Ought to Know

2008-06-02T11:05:00.010-05:00

It's only fair to let you know, the foiling Moth crowd has a name for the rest of us.

Lowriders.

I picked that up from the freewheeling online forum of International Moth USA, where one Richard Draeke of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced his intent to build a Moth and perhaps add foils later, "after I learn to lowride."

I just thought you ought to know.

What we have above is a Sally Collison pic of highrider Rohan Veal on one of his production Bladeriders. Richard Draeke is planning to build a Moth of plywood, and part of the fun of the Moth class in 2008 is that everything is happening at once.

Now, let's see, in my world it's morning again? ALREADY?

I've had work of late that distracts me from the blog, which I miss. Trying to get my writer's head back on, but meanwhile I can share this:

Success Story

Escaping the growing chill of New Zealand, Katie McWilliam checks in from Fiji:

"One thing we keep hearing about cruising Fiji is that there are
three kinds of cruisers—those that have hit a reef, those that will hit a reef, and those that are lying about it. Keep reading to find out . . . "

I guess we know where that's going, don't we.

Coulda been worse. Katie describes the experience as "a gentle, sudden stop." Scratched up the freshly-painted keel, cracked the bottom of the rudder, and left our heroes with another of life's lessons: Pack carefully. "Chay was able to repair the rudder," Katie relates, "but only after 2 days of hunting for the underwater epoxy and fiberglass repair kit. Good thing we weren't sinking!"

I met Katie, Chay, and young Jamie in '03 in the Baja Ha Ha rally, San Diego to Cabo. They knocked around Mexico in their Peterson 44, Esprit, then took off for South America, the Galapagos, and the Pacific, mixing cruising with trips home to Boulder City, Nevada. I think you could call the experiment a success. Jamie's 11 now, the home schooling is going fine, most of a circumnavigation still lies before them and their web site sums up:

"We are no longer the McWilliam family. We are Esprit."

Thanks for the smile, Esprit—Kimball

Olympic Experience Experienced

2008-05-28T16:36:00.023-05:00

The 2008 Olympic Games is not an August 8-24 experience. For team members, the Olympic experience has already begun. Sure, they were sailing all the time before the US Trials, and now they're sailing all the time, but it's different now.

I checked in with Andrew Campbell—to me, he's a San Diego boy, but Andrew spent so much time at Georgetown U. that D.C. wants to claim him—and the U.S. Laser rep mused about the comparisons between sailing in college, post college, and as a member of the US Olympic Sailing Team: "I went from college, where people put me in a position to win, to a post-college situation where I had to position myself to win. I didn't have much coaching going into the Trials, and there was a whole new step-up in administration. You have to learn how to make a budget; you have to learn how to market yourself. That got easier after I won the Trials. For the first time in my Olympic campaign, I'm comfortable with the amount of money that I'm spending."

The expenses, we might note, now include intense coaching to meet new international norms. St. Mary's sailing coach
(formerly at Georgetown with Campbell, and current US Sailing coach of the year) Bill Ward is coming on board next month. "A year ago it was more important to go to regattas," Campbell says. "Now money for coaching is money well spent."

Also changing, the faces: "A year ago the racing was as hard as it gets. Now you go to a regatta and maybe there's one Swede, one Brit. The other people are staying home. The competition is thinning out, not accelerating."

John Dane's Star crew, Austin Sperry, frankly admits it was irritating ("I was a bit grumpy") to be required to fly to Chicago for a day of ambassador training. But everyone, not just sailors, had to do it, and if nothing else he came away with factoids that don't often make the rounds: "Did you know there are 6,000 living Olympians in the USA?"

And, actually, he took away a lot.

The idea of "ambassador training" was two-fold, to give our athletes a few clues regarding Chinese culture, and to help them learn how to manage themselves in uncomfortable situations by placing them in same. Sperry recounts, "Imagine being stood up in a circle, a group of 12 or 15, and there's a teacher—an actor, I guess—who tells you that your task is to whoosh power to somebody else in the circle. You can whoosh it left, right or across, and no way are you feeling anything but stupid, but everybody's in the same boat, and everybody in this circle is an Olympic athlete, and somehow, before it's all over, it becomes kind of cool."

(Dang. Now I realize that I didn't ask Andrew Campbell, a graduate of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, how the ambassador program went for him.)

Tornado silver medalist Charlie Ogletree, returning for his fourth Olympics, has seen it all before, but he allows, "The shades of Bode Miller may have been driving the ambassador program. The USOC was a bit put out by the performance of their golden boy at the Winter Games in '06. Common sense is what most of this is about, but some people need help with that. And we're going to a very foreign country with a very different culture. And Communist."

That's Charlie far right, with skipper Johnny Lovell.

Getting granular: Austin learned that in China you never point the spout of a teapot at a table companion ("very rude"), and this early-Olympic experience also afforded him the opportunity to meet people outside of sailing. First it was the water polo team and then the friendly wrestler who finished Austin's dinner for him.

Austin! Dude! It was a setup. Of course the wrestler guy kept asking you questions about boats . . .

This phase of the Olympic experience continues for U.S. sailors, with training trips to Qingdao planned for June and July, to coincide with tides similar to those predicted for the Games. As Austin says, "To make it as much like game day as possible."

August 8, 2008. Not so far away on a path strewn with controversies over the torch run and Tibet. I had my own moment as the torch passed the marina in San Francisco . . .

On its way to Everest . . .

And eventually, like our athletes, to the opening ceremonies in Beijing in China's new national stadium. It's a fascinating structure . . .

Include the Aquatics Center and you have to awards marks for architectural exuberance and, how's this word, optimism . . .

Even without a terrible earthquake, the leaders of China would be living in interesting times (the ancient curse)—Kimball

Bombs, Rockets, and Bears, Oh My

2008-05-23T17:59:00.024-05:00

In the wake of last week's bombing of the Real Club Marítimo del Abra in Bilbao—the new flag behind Desafio, the Spanish America's Cup team—Cheryl Lincoln checks in from London with the thought of the hour . . .

"So they were better off with a virtual club."

On the coast of France, meanwhile, in La Seyne sur Mer, French record hopefuls have launched the re-jiggered l'Hydroptere, with a plan to tow asap to Marseille for a go at 50 knots. It's hard to believe the so-called 50-knot "barrier" won't be broken soon, by this rocketship or some other . . .

It's nice to see the French having fun, ne c'est pas?

Shifting hemispheres: One of the most interesting people in the sailing game is Sean Langman, an Aussie who's lived the life at the high end of canting keels and high performance, with a third-place finish once on the 18-foot skiff championships, and he has a thingamajig he calls Wotrocket that he hopes to step up to 50, then 60 knots.

But first let's appreciate the individual drummer. It was in 2005
(I think) that Langman finished his 17th Rolex Sydney Hobart, this time at the helm of cant-keeled AAPT, and told a reporter, "My feeling when I stepped off was, this isn't what the race or sailing is about for me."

In 2006 Langman was back with the restored gaff rigger, Maluka, built in 1932, for a top-ten finish. It was the smallest and oldest boat in the race . . .

Photo by Daniel Forster/Rolex

Now he's wet Wotrocket on a theory that "supercavitation" will allow the machine to operate at the interface of water and air with impunity. Eventually. He also told his sponsor, "You need to be prepared for us taking a few trips up the beach to pick up bits of broken carbon." Truth in promotion, eh? The machine is modular, as a hedge.

Wotrocket does not have a dedicated web site. I know that Langman has had his problems since launching a few weeks ago, but nothing to match the inoculation he gave his sponsor. What I do know about this deal comes from deep Down Under web sites including Sail-World.com. Rob Kothe takes a whack at explaining supercavitation in his christening story HERE. Thanks to Crosbie Lorimer for the pic at right.

Sailors have already passed 50 knots—fast enough to hurt yourself—but the official record demands a sustained average over 500 meters. The record belongs to windsurfer Antoine Albeau, who came so close in March at 49.09 knots in the specially-dug "French trench." (Thanks to windsurfer Steve Bodner for reminding me to update from Finian Maynard to Albeau; sheesh; just because I wrote about it when it happened I'm supposed to remember and all that stuff?). Like the waters off Marseille, the trench gets the wind that comes roaring out of the Rhone Valley. When the breeze is up, it's serious stuff.

High speed windsurfing is all muscle and nerve. Wotrocket and l'Hydroptere are technology shots, and a bit of nerve.

There are others, but the one that I know of that's actually in the field right now is Paul Larsen with SailRocket, working it hard at Walvis Bay, Namibia and aiming (for now) to achieve consistent control at speeds in the 40's.

It's hard work on a hard problem. Paul's latest posting, as I write this, goes:

"No joy. We were a little late onto the water due to being a man down. We should be back up to strength as of Saturday when we will gain another local team member.

Overall the boat and team gets stronger by the day as the detail work gets attended to daily. The spray deflector did work... but it wasn't perfect. We still have it with us... but I will try some side skirts on the forward planing surface next... and a new forward planing surface after that.

Let's see what tomorrow brings. Cheers, Paul Larsen"

HERE IN RIVER CITY

The Saturday of Memorial Day brings out our biggest race of classics on San Francisco Bay, the annual Master Mariners Regatta. I'm glad to see three Bears in the list, Bears being an indigenous local class built to handle the bearish conditions under the wind slot of the Golden Gate. The first of these 23-footers was launched in 1931, and they've had a presence since. But that presence was slipping away.

It seems that, as with another local class, the Bird, the breed had to fall to near-extinction before people panicked and rushed to the rescue. I say, better late than never. Here's a look at the Bear, Camembert . . .

As for matters of greater moment . . .

Thanks Dad.

And thanks to all you other Veterans out there.

And thanks to our boots in the field right this minute—Kimball

Bridge Height, Smidge Height

2008-05-20T16:09:00.015-05:00

Brave the perils of the sea? I don't have to.

Sure, I know that along the 3,000 miles of America's Intracoastal Waterway there are bridges that limit passage, forcing tall-rigged boats to sail offshore instead.

That is so five minutes ago.

Here's a boat with an 80-foot main mast approaching a bridge at Vero Beach, Florida . . .

A bridge that is only 65 feet off the water . . .

Each bag weighs 2,000 pounds, so I'm told . . .

The pics have been bouncing around and were forwarded by my friend, Jack Reichel, along with someone's editorial comment: "What a treat to watch the crew execute!"

So, what's the effect on the structure of 4,000 pounds of undistributed load? Since I don't know how the weight is attached, I can't properly frame the question, and that's just as well because, as engineers go, I'd make a better fry cook. I'm still trying to figure out how they weight goes from hanging vertical to being, shall we say, way out there. This doesn't appear to be a Photoshop job, so your enlightenment is welcomed.

THINGS HAPPEN IN THREES
Or Is That Just My Mother Talking?

First it was Artemis Transat leader Sébastien Josse hitting something with BT and turning for home. That opened the lead of the singlehanded transatlantic race to Vincent Riou and PRB, and then Riou hit something and was sufficiently concerned for the keel that he politely requested rescue. Riou left PRB on Tuesday afternoon to join Loïck Peyron on Gitana Eighty, and Peyron is now the leader and is he worried that things happen in threes?

Dunno. But here's what his people are putting out:

At the 1800 UT position report, Gitana Eighty had a 29 mile lead over Armel Le Cléac’h. Now, along with time lost in the rescue
—which will be redressed following evaluation by the jury—Loïck Peyron will have to get used to a new configuration.

The reluctant stowaway, Vincent Riou, will not be able to help his host under any circumstances, either in his manœuvres or in his choice of course. During the remaining 830 miles (three days more at sea), the skipper of Gitana Eighty will have to consider himself as being alone aboard. Peyron says, “It's the first time I’ve ended up in such a situation: sailing double-handed in a single-handed race. It’s disconcerting as I was into a precise rhythm, making decisions automatically and with a set routine. Now I have to regain focus to tackle the next stage, which promises to be fairly complicated. However, the essential thing was to recover Vincent.”

Jungle Drums of España

2008-05-16T12:51:00.008-05:00

No question, the hottest action of the moment is in the Med, where a lot of America's Cup sailors who might otherwise be out of a job are plying their trade in a true grand prix fleet, the TP52.

Can you say, eight new boats in a fleet of 19? The King of Spain dropped in on Friday to sail Bribon, but it's Mean Machine and Peter de Ridder who seem to be all dialed in for the Audi MedCup opener at Alicante, Spain.

German photographer Heike Schwab, down from Munich to shoot, has taken the words right out of my mouth.

Four pictures, four thousand words, right?

Photo © Heike Schwab

Photo © Heike Schwab

Photo © Heike Schwab

Photo © Heike Schwab

Welcome to the Family, Iran

2008-05-11T17:34:00.006-05:00

Most of the sailors in America hate US Sailing, and they don't know why.

Write that on the blackboard a hundred times and see me after class. Or don't.

'Tis the merry month of May and we don't need another journalist pundifying on. We need the reincarnation of Franz Kafka. To hold up a mirror.

It's not as though the world of sailing suddenly woke up transformed into an insect and then proceeded in the manner of Kafka's traveling salesman—lying in bed testing his new-found, wiggly legs and ruminating on how hard he has it relative to other traveling salesmen. (The Metamorphosis)

It's not as though we are on trial and no one will tell us why. (The Trial)

We are on trial before ourselves, indicted for delivering neither a comprehensible America's Cup nor a comprehensible Olympic mission. It's an international problem, however, not an American problem.

It seems we cannot agree to stand on this leg, or those wiggly many. Is Olympic sailing obligated to represent every corner of the sport, or is it an opportunity to shape and promote high-end sailing? If the former, then we are failing. If the latter, why isn't anybody in the driver's seat? How did we, as a sport, get to this point, with both our international governing body (ISAF) and our American governing body (US Sailing) addicted to funding through the Olympic Games, which doesn't hate us, but does not need us.

I suspect the answer is "easily." Witness people resisting the suggestion that more skippers be required to pay dues to US Sailing. People are confused, and I don't think that's clarity rising on the horizon.

Last November the U.S. delegation clearly explained why it did not vote to support the multihull as an Olympic category for 2012, even though as individuals they like multihulls just fine. The moves and the pressure points, however, were so Machiavellian as to be incomprehensible to the average joe who just likes sailing and wants to do the right thing for the good of all.

I wasn't expecting any other outcome from the ISAF re-vote on 2012 equipment—the voting in Qingdao over the weekend left everything as-is, dropping the multihull as a category—and I have no vehemence to express on behalf of this faction or that. Is it absurd to not include multihulls in an Olympic lineup? Of course. Is it absurd to be making the choice in the way that we do? There's the thing.

I don't see a beaten path toward a higher level of dialogue. Perhaps, dare I say it, toward inspiration. Olympic participation is a powerful force that shapes sailboat racing in a way that is too important, and has too much potential, to be left to politics. Very often the "debate" about putting our best foot forward (out of how many wiggly little legs and feet, Franz?) is reduced to personal attacks, and we saw a lot of those in the wake of the decision last fall that dropped the multihull. Had the US Sailing delegation voted the other way, "for the future of the sport," the attacks would have come from a different quarter, but they would have flown just as thick and fast. Sometimes it takes a thick skin to be a volunteer.

You gotta love this paragraph published at ISAF to explain the vote in Qingdao:

The first step in the proposal, to “reaffirm their decision on the 2012 Olympic Events made in November 2007” was not carried. Council then proceeded to the next two proposals in the submission, to vote on whether the selected events for either the men’s or women’s events should be changed. Standing by their decision of November 2007, the Council gave a clear message to support the events as already approved, with neither proposal securing the two-thirds majority required to change.

Hmm. With none of those proposals carrying, it sounds to me like a conflicted group. The "clear message" to me is not that, and this paragraph quickly follows in the report published by ISAF:

Speaking after the Council decision, Olympic athlete and President of the International Tornado Association, Carolijn BROUWER (NED) commented, “The multihull sailors had lost some faith in ISAFs direction on the Olympic events, but after today’s decision where more than 50% of the Council did not reaffirm the November decision, it feels a little bit like an apology. There is a glimmer of hope. Listening to the debate, we are confident the multihull event will be back on the Olympic programme in the future and the multihull community will work with ISAF to achieve that objective.”

Which, as voices of reconciliation go, is fine. But again it sounds like one more competing special interest, not a vision of what the Olympic Sailing Games could be. Kafka said of his own life, "I have hardly anything in common with myself."

Say it ain't so, and welcome to the family . . .

The latest member of the ISAF family was welcomed with the approval of Iran as an ISAF Full Member, bringing the total number of ISAF member nations to 126.

The America's Cup? The next absurd turn in mismanaged PR is, I believe, playing out live on Scuttlebutt—Kimball

Voice of a Sailor

2008-05-06T09:23:00.013-05:00

Two sentences into the first piece I ever read by Margie Smith I knew I loved her writing. With just a few stories in SAIL, Margie made her case as a woman who kicked over the traces of one life
—a news career in front of the TV cameras—in favor of something that's going to have to define itself, so let's get out there and make something happen.

The poet Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going where I have to go."

SAIL readers first met this lady while she was waiting tables and learning to sail in the BVI. Very soon she was off through the Caribbean, writing about the classics regatta at Antigua, crossing the Atlantic, exploring the Med, recrossing the Atlantic and then dashing off to replenish the kitty with a spot of work back home in Philadelphia. Which is where she was diagnosed.

Things are different now. Margie Smith's blog, Cancer is Hilarious, is no romp in the park. But she's the same writer, and yes, she can find the hilarious note in almost anything. Her reflections upon taking off when she did—and sailing a few miles and meeting a few people and having a few laughs—get served up on a seething platter of hope and fear and love of life and dire honesty and wrenching humor that not every one of you, my readers, will want to take the time to emotionally digest. For me, it's been a good investment. I've learned the term, Infusion Room, and as a cancer/chemo civilian I would not otherwise have known that wigs are marketed with names like, "the Raquel Welch."

I'm not going to represent her most personal voice here. It simply is too personal. That belongs to Margie.

But I believe she will forgive me if I excerpt a passage as to why she is glad, so glad, that she went sailing when she did. These are the thoughts of someone who got out there and did something she had dreamed of doing in the thick of life, and she's going to get back out there. Or not. What I've been reading is a life or death struggle, happening live.

I'll shut up now.

This is Margie:

It's exhausting being upbeat. But dwelling on the negative is even more work. People die from cancer, yes. They also die from heart attacks, drunk drivers and freak accidents. When people asked if I was afraid of drowning at sea while sailing across the Atlantic, I told them the odds were greater of dying in a traffic accident on the Schuylkill. To this day, I worry about meeting my demise on that expressway (maybe while driving into Center City for chemo). If nothing else, the Zen-meets-fun philosophy I’ve honed during a couple years of island life and unstructured travel has taught me not to waste precious time fretting about things I can’t change.

In the end, the questions about how you die become a lesson in how to live which, barring suicide, is the only part we have any control over anyway.

Exactly one year ago, I was in Antigua, racing in a classic boat regatta with my friend, Captain Kidd. He had been debating whether to keep sailing on toward the Pacific or do the practical thing and head home to Cape Cod, get a real job and sock away some money. One night, he announced he had decided to sail the Pacific. He said, “If I only had a year to live, that’s what I would do. That seems like a good enough reason to do it now.”

Once I was on a plane with my St. John friend, Fun Kim. We had just spent two weeks in Venice. Prior to that, I had made my first trans-Atlantic crossing, sailed around the Mediterranean with a crew from Malta and traveled solo through central Italy. Fun Kim had been sailing the Aegean and cavorting around Istanbul. Before all that, we were both living and working in the Virgin Islands. We were on our way to Palma de Mallorca to look for yachting jobs.

Security was tight as there had been a bomb scare in London. We decided to fly anyway and, while sitting there waiting for take-off, agreed that if the plane went down, well, we couldn't complain too much about how things turned out. We had done more in the previous few years than many people do in a lifetime. And we had both called our mothers to tell them we loved them.

That plane conversation happened in 2006, a full year before the summer in Spain when we saw the running of the bulls in Pamplona, sailed to the America’s Cup, and discovered the vending machine on a dock in Valencia that dispenses that coldest Heinekens on the planet for only one euro. Clearly there is more life to be lived.

I do, however, like to think I contemplated What If? three years ago when I first quit my city job and moved to paradise in search of more. There were reasons the timing was right—I was healthy, my parents were healthy, I had money in the bank and no major responsibilities—but the final motivator was, What if? What if a year (or three) from now, something happens and I’m no longer in a position to do it?

I thank God every day I did not fail to seize the moment. Having that regret would truly be haunting.

Racer/Cruiser/Voyager/There

2008-05-02T11:07:00.019-05:00

Looking for a Valiant 40? Come to Lake Texoma, my friend.

The Valiant 40 was among the most influential race boats of its day, albeit born as the first of a new breed, the "performance cruiser." Bob Perry's plastic classic double-ender achieved a legendary status on both sides of the aisle.

As a racer, short-handed long-distance was the Valiant specialty. To this day the boat is a sleeper, as she sits in the water. "The boat" meaning all 200 built plus the new crop of Valiant 42s that share the same hull but add a bowsprit.

The first Valiant 40 was launched in 1973, with all the man-against-the-sea visual cues to compete for hearts and minds against true believers in crabcrusher technology—tiny ports, a canoe stern, a trunk cabin that a Tahiti Ketch could love. Only out of the water did the alter ego emerge, the fin keel and skeg-hung rudder hinting at surprising numbers, including sail area/displacement and displacement/length ratios not far from those of a Cal 40. Those numbers in 2008 are not at all radical, but you can be pretty sure that if you're ever unlucky enough to crush a crab, you'll squash that sucker with the bow, not the stern.

What set me off on this was a recent foray into sailing grounds that a lot of my friends have missed. It's called, North Texas.

The game began on Lake Texoma, which hosted the first of three weekends—three lakes in three weeks—of the latest Leukemia Cup circuit. The last of the three lakes is up this weekend, and that would be Lewisville Lake in Oak Point, Texas (think Dallas; Dallas is big enough to absorb most of the galaxy).

So, returning to our original theme: Bet most of you didn't know that Valiants, originally built in the Pacific Northwest and still identified with that region, have long been built on the Texas-Oklahoma border on one of the most popular sailing lakes you've probably never experienced. Sailing is big here, but football is religion . . .

And don't take the name on that billboard, "Munson Stadium," lightly.

Back in the 1900s, when phylloxera was decimating the vineyards of France, it was one T.V. Munson of Denison, Texas who identified a resistant rootstock in American vines and shipped the rootstock cuttings that, for practical purposes, rescued the European wine industry. Munson was awarded the Chevalier du Merite Agricole, and "Munson" to this day remains a big name in North Texas. Even the mailboxes look fast . . .

Valiant has been here for a couple of decades. Rich Warstell was a major Valiant dealer before he bought the company and at first tried to keep the production line where it was born.

Eventually Rich realized that his specialty line wanted a place where he could create an artisan community of semicustom boatbuilders.

A place where the price points would work.

A place where longhorns are not crowded out of the neighborhood, just for looking scary . . .

A place called Gordonville, Texas, where sailing north will take you across the border into Oklahoma in a lot less than an hour.

Yes, there are Valiants that ply the waters of Lake Texoma, a flood-control reservoir formed by damming the Red River (there are more Catalinas and Beneteaus than Valiants, to be honest). This is the big boat lake in a region that is mostly about sailing trailerables. Older Valiants return for factory refitting alongside boats under construction . . .

So let's just look around.

The man responsible for bringing Valiant to Texas, Rich Warstell, also has a background in aviation. If you really want to get him talking, that's the subject. What's behind the door . . . ?

A vintage Bonanza with original paint and upholstery . . .

And a "baby Beaver" built from a kit, right here . . .

If you've ever spent a sleepless night wondering what Cedar Mills Resort, Gordonville, Texas, looks like on a rainy day in the springtime, wonder no more. I realize this isn't much of a sales tool, but if you ever get the chance to sail here, don't pass it up. This is a big world.

Thank You, Race Committee

2008-04-23T10:16:00.022-05:00

On the north coast of Texas, you can see all the way to Oklahoma.

But what I carried away from Lakefest on Lake Texoma was a renewed appreciation for the volunteers who make sailboat racing possible. My friend “Johnny” did a little Hobie cat racing in his youth, but he’s not a sailor at heart. He’s a powerboater who “likes to look at sailboats” and for seven years has brought out one or another Savannah Jane to serve as signal boat for Lakefest. You know—I hope you know—that you can judge the importance of a sailboat race by how many motorboats it takes to run it.

The ladies of the Texoma Sailing Club who raised flags and kept the scoring have been at this so long that they run their own show. You don’t tell these women what to do.

And if you've never breathed the early morning air or hunted down the breeze of the day—if you've never done your time on race committee—you're missing something. It's really pretty cool.

The certified RC people and judges who came in from Houston, Oklahoma City and the like to work with PRO Jim Tichenor were smooth as clockwork. I think the sailors on the 50-some raceboats know this, but I’ll say it anyway.

We are blessed. And it's not that Texoma Sailing Club is unique, rather that all across this country there are volunteers who turn out to make sailing happen. At Fairhope Yacht Club, on the shores of Mobile Bay, people have worked for months (more like a year) to be ready for Saturday's 50th Anniversary Dauphin Island Race. There's a race to prepare, yes, but what surrounds the race is just as important. This is one of the great sailors-and-all-their-cousins-and-aunties reunions of the Deep South. It's a spirit thing. Also a spirit thing—what Long Beach Yacht Club does with its Congressional Cup. Over time, this event has been a leader in developing features we now take for granted on the match racing circuit: identical boats and sails, assigned ends, on-course judging, etc. LBYC also embraces the Congressional Cup as a communal celebration of what it means to be "us." Making the Congressional Cup happen is at the heart of club life.
Thank you, race committee.

(Congressional Cup racing kicks off next week and we'll have a winner in a week.)

On the Red River

Lakefest has been a going concern for 22 years (it was a pioneer in charity regattas and fundraising for a cause). But 2008 was the first year that Lakefest tied into the Leukemia Cup circuit to create the opening round of “three lakes in three weeks.” That has a nice ring to it, eh?

Texoma was created by damming the Red River—the state border—and over time it has become a major sailing destination for both Texas (Don't mess with Texas) and Oklahoma (Right on top of Texas). Texoma, nearly-equal drive time from Dallas and Oklahoma city, may be the only thing these two states agree on. Twelve-foot dinghies? Forty-foot racer-cruisers? They got’em. Now, one week after Lakefest, Leukemia Cup action edges closer down toward the heart of Texas, to Dallas and White Rock Lake, for centerboarder racing Friday through Sunday. Add another week and we'll have keelboats and multihulls at Lewisville Lake, May 2-5, which is also part of the Dallas big picture.

When Melges 24s hit the line, they look about like the Melges fleet racing anywhere . . .

Texas is primarily a trailerables sailing environment. Texoma is an exception. Last month I went to Mexico for MEXORC and the Banderas Bay Regatta and I spent time aboard a Beneteau 47 that was previously a Texoma boat. The name, appropriately, was Sooner Magic. Is it overkill to sail boats this size on a lake? Maybe. But what about sailing ever made sense? And let me tell you, there is plenty of elbow room. We’re talking 89,000 acres and depths to 100 feet. It’s the sixth-largest manmade lake in the USA. Grandpappy Point, home to the Texoma Sailing Club, looks like this . . .

I have a sneaking suspicion the best parties happened in the campgrounds . . .

Regrets? I have a few. I’ve been on the road for more than a week and haven’t been able to revisit the old blog in a while. That will self-correct next week. Also, Lakefest was scheduled one week too late for me to get to the Madill Spring Rodeo. On the other hand, I’ve been here . . .

And you probably haven’t. Pretty country, too.

Fink, Texas was never incorporated after its founding in the early 1800s. The population topped out below 100, and I’m guessing that I could count all of today’s denizens on my fingers and toes. But Texans know a good Fink when they see one. The state celebrates Fink Day every fourth Friday of June. Get ready to haul out your Lone Star bunting—Kimball

P.S. It's back to the road. See those trailers rolling, rolling, rolling?

Soft Water Only This Time

2008-04-13T14:08:00.010-05:00

Things change when you win the Olympic Trials.

US Finn rep Zach Railey has just wrapped up racing at Lago di Garda ("probably my favorite place in the world") where conditions have not smiled upon the Expert Olympic Garda event. Think light air, rain, and the threat of not making a complete calendar of races. Going in, however, Railey was recalling other regattas at this stupendously scenic mountain lake in the north of Italy. "I'd sail all day and ski all night," he said. "But not this year. Even if I didn't hurt myself on the slopes, Dean Brenner would kill me."

Brenner being the tough-minded volunteer chairman of the US Olympic Sailing Committee who has made it his mission "to maximize US medal chances" in the Games and to get his charges to Qingdao in good order. Brenner has also been voted to a second term as OSC chairman, the first time that US Olympic sailing has had such continuity. Brenner says, "It's unique for us because in the past we've thought in four-year cycles. Instead, we're taking a young team to Qingdao, and we're already doing our diligence on 2012."

Don't underestimate the demands placed upon anyone who occupies this unpaid position. It takes initiative, brainpower, a lot of travel, and a willingness to face a heap of grief. Look for Brenner to be at the center of the storm next month when ISAF at its mid-year meeting in Qingdao reopens the question of "equipment" for the 2012 sailing Games at Weymouth, England. The hullabaloo over dropping the catamaran—that was the vote last November—is heading toward a crescendo, and let's not be simple-minded. Many forces are in play, and there is good reading at Andy Rice's blog on the subtleties of ISAF's invitation to delegates to "reaffirm" decisions already made, and the vote count required for changes, and questions of the longterm best interest of Olympic sailing given that both our international and national sailing authorities depend upon the Olympics for their lifeblood cashflow.

I called Brenner "tough-minded." A man would have to be that to stay in this game. The US vote received a lot of attention at the last ISAF confab, and will again next month. With that thought in mind, let's revisit some conversations from last fall about why the US delegation did not throw its support behind the multihull:

So here we are talking to Dean Brenner on his cell phone, and Brenner is telling us . . .

"There have been suspicions of secret deals. I'll look anybody in the eye and say, no. But we never shied away from saying that men's keelboat was a priority for us, and that's because we believe it affords the US team our best medal chances. You could take a different approach. Some people say you should make decisions, not on medal prospects, but on what's best for the sport, and that sounds good, but if your team doesn't win medals your fund raising is going to dry up and you're not going to be successful in the long run, are you? In the end, we made a sensible, tactical choice on how to vote, and the only legitimate gripe is if you think the US would have a better medal chance in catamarans."

And now we're talking to another volunteer on his cell phone, and that would be US Sailing President Jim Capron, on the subject of the ISAF Annual Meeting in Estoril, Portugal . . .

"The Events Committee put up a slate, but the Council typically does not vote the slate," Capron says. "That was true again in 2007. Once that happens, each event is back on the table. Our proposal for 5-5 gender equity was voted down, and soon it was apparent that five of seven events were a shoe-in, no matter how US Sailing voted. The windsurfer was in, because the rest of the world wants it. That left keelboats and multihulls in question. If we had voted exactly in line with our submission—no to the windsurfer, yes to the rest—it would have been a non-vote because the windsurfer was going to be in. So we had a choice, and the only way we could express that choice was to vote for one and not the other, the keelboat and not the multihull."

Switching back to Dean Brenner . . .

"We believed that if we voted for both the keelboat and the multihull," Brenner says, "we were wasting our vote and leaving the final decision to somebody else. It was a close vote. It could have come to a tie, and that means you've taken a chance. My dream scenario would have multihulls racing and not boards, but somebody was going to be left out, and the boards were definitely in."

It will be no less labyrinthine, and Byzantine, methinks, when next ISAF meets.

Final results for the Garda event, including Vincec Gasper's first and Zach's sixth, can be found HERE.

And, hmm, since Peter Huston has taken the trouble to write a thoughtful comment in response to this blog—find it at bottom; it's worth the read—and since my purpose was not to "parrot" a party line but to hang a few things out there in stark relief—I'm coming back to add this other thought. It too is dragged forward from my response to the ISAF vote in Estoril, and it's a bit closer to my own thoughts, because . . .

There is no other sport where being part of the Olympic Games has so much power to skew the deal. I mean, there's no reason for Lightnings to be part of the Olympics, but if they were, it would radically redefine what it means to race Lightnings. And there was a point ahead of the 2007 ISAF Annual Meeting when keelboats were apparently being squeezed out, and keelboat sailors were complaining in the forums that this large group of sailors was being, that word again, disenfranchised. As of April 2008 we see the mostly-American readers of Scuttlebutt sending a strong signal that they are not happy with the present state of affairs.

And as I try to listen to all sides I only increase the depressing sense that ISAF—no matter how informed and motivated the individuals—is incapable of making any inspired, creative leaps.

And unless my ears deceive me, I hear you, my friends, replying, well . . .

Duh

—Kimball

The Torch is Passed

2008-04-09T18:32:00.017-05:00

In the news bz, we have a saying, there's always a local angle.

And, there's always a sailing angle.

San Francisco officials hoodwinked a horde of spectators, protesters, and scene-makers by switching the route of the Olympic torch, but the crowds were ample, nonetheless, when they brought the thing right to my home away from home on the San Francisco cityfront.

The sailing angle . . .

And the crowd. I had to hold the camera over my head to take this shot of people holding cameras over their heads . . .

And the torch. Hard to spot, but it's in there. I believe the message is, Don't even think about about messing with this . . .

We had dueling flags . . .

Plenty of opinions . . .

Partisans . . .

And danged if I know. It's San Francisco . . .

BMW Oracle Goes Sailing

Now it's Russell Coutts' turn to try his hand at sailing a Formula 60 tri. Knowing how badly Ed Baird got burned, is he reciting Shepard's prayer?

(don't know Shepard's prayer? you could google it up)

Photo by Gilles Martin-Raget

Gitana Gets Her Record

Pacific records have yet to be beaten down hard, so it is no surprise that Lionel Lemonchois and crew aboard the maxi-cat, Gitana 13, were able to claim a new record on the San Francisco-Yokohama route. But that is not to belittle the gutsy seamanship involved. The boat covered 5,616 miles through the water at an average of 21 knots, and it was kicked around by one weather system after another. Top speed burst was 39.7 knots, and the best day's run covered 612 miles. Normal sailing for these guys, but not for the rest of us mortals. At 11 days, 12 minutes, they took a big bite out of the old record of 14 days, 22 hours.

New to the crew was Around Alone veteran Kojiro Shiraishi, who was hired to help scout the tricky final approach to Japan. Before he left San Francisco, however, Shiraishi made a pilgrimage to the museum at the Maritime Historical Park—closed for renovation, but opened for him—and the 19-foot Mermaid that Kenichi Horie solo-sailed from Japan to San Francisco in 1962 in 94 days. That epic voyage is etched into the minds of Japanese sailors. The boat may not look like much, but for a Kojiro Shiraishi, it's like touching the holy grail. Photographer Christian Buhl was his guide, and Christian supplied our pic . . .

A Trench for Your Maritime Museum?

2008-04-08T16:09:00.021-05:00

As he shut down the "French Trench" and the Masters of Speed event where Antoine Albeau set a new sailing speed record earlier this year, organizer Christophe Simian mused that, perhaps, the moment for the purpose-built trench has passed. He described the trench as, "still the best place for breaking records, but only for windsurfers. Don’t forget, the kitesurfers aren’t far behind now and they're climbing fast. And l’Hydroptère is a serious project. Either of them could end up sending the speed canal to the maritime museum."

As in, 50 knots in 2008.

Albeau made 49.09. So close.

The trench has set the standard for quite a while now, but?

l’Hydroptère just looks as if it ought to be good for 50 knots, probably with a smoldering Gauloise dangling from the helmsman's lips.

Photo by Arnaud Pilpre/Sea & Co.

Bursts of 50 knots plus? That's already happened plenty of times. It's that sustained speed over a measured, controlled 500 meters that is still out there for somebody. There's no "barrier" even though it's a seductive word. It's just plain hard to go that fast under sail. We're talking 57.5 mph, enough heat to earn a speeding ticket on many of America's highways.

Paul Larson's innovative SailRocket project out of the UK topped out in the 30's in its most recent outing. Larson is in the field right now at Walvis Bay, Namibia and updating his web site daily . . .

And the should-be promising effort from Australia, Macquarie, topped at 44.71 knots as of their last update a year ago. This is the same team that set a 46.52 knot record in 1993 with Yellow Pages Endeavour, only to have it snatched by the windsurfers on the trench. Their web site still says, "It's getting harder and harder to justify updating this page as the story is, unfortunately, pretty much the same each time we write." I repeat, that's a 2007 update. SailRocket and Macquarie represent the technogeek side of the race; the windsurfers are pure muscle and nerve, not that it doesn't take plenty of nerve to pilot one of these technogeek contraptions, and not as though there haven't been some spectacular crackups.

So 50 knots is out there. It took a while for someone to finally overtake windsurfer Finian Maynard's old mark of 48.7 knots, set in April 2005, but it's easy to imagine that 2008 will be the Year of Fifty. It's not as though this covers every one of the hopefuls.

l’Hydroptère went back into the water last month at La Trinité sur Mer, and it will be sailing soon, looking for those big winds that come roaring out of the interior of France.

At the end of the Masters of Speed event, Simian reflected, "It’s left me with mixed feelings. I was disappointed by the women’s performances; they just didn’t dare risk it. That’s a big shame because it was a great opportunity for windsurfing to grab back Sjoukje Bredenkamp’s record, and we didn’t manage to break 50 knots. Despite Antoine Albeau’s gigantic achievement I still come away feeling like it’s a job not done. With more work and more money we could have given the riders an even better water surface to work on."

Sjoukje Bredenkamp is the young South African who last year set the women's speed record with a kite at 42.35 knots . . .

On the men's side there is Alexandre Caizergues, whose mark of 47.92 knots stands as the overall speedkiting record for 500 meters (yes, it hurts to crash).

Back to the trench—

An artificial canal is a difficult thing to create and maintain, especially when it has to be in a high wind area. Pronouncing himself exhausted at the end of the Masters of Speed event, Simian put a bottom line on the experience: "It’s all down to the fine details. Albeau made his run but with quite a bit of damage to the northern canal edge after the big southeasterly storms we had in November and January. The edge wasn’t perfectly straight. That may have cost us one or two tenths of a second. But 50 knots is very close, we touched it with the tips of our fingers. A shame for us and good for the others. That’s how it is."

And when Albeau took the record, this is how it was, the fastest man in sailing, as seen through the lens of windsurfjournal.com . . .

Tether or Apart

2008-04-03T16:23:00.013-05:00

There's always a lesson in an overboard recovery. Cliff Shaw looks back at pulling two live bodies out of the water in the recent Doublehanded Farallones Race and says, "You see people in the water and you think, This is not a drill; I have to get this right."

The breeze was 25, up to 30 at times on the Unpacific Ocean, outside the Golden Gate. Shaw figures the seas at, "Six to eight feet, with an occasional twelve. I did the wrong thing on my first approach. I tried to luff up to them and misjudged and fell short."

The Golden Gate entrance looked like this, as seen through the long lens of Erik Simonson . . .

Hmm. Maybe I'm not sorry I missed the 2008 Doublehanded Farallones, but get this. Shaw wasn't even racing his Crowther 36 cat. He was shadowing the fleet for the fun of it—he's a member of sponsor Bay Area Multihull Association—and doubledog get this: he also shadowed the whole 2006 Pacific Cup, San Francisco to Hawaii. "I signed up to race," he says, "then I discovered that my insurance wouldn't cover the rig if I was racing, so I 'withdrew' and went anyway."

I like this guy.

Shaw's Rainbow was about 75 yards behind the Olson 40, Pterodactyl ("We were aimed right at their transom; I was actually trying to pass them") when Luc de Faymoreau and Disun Den Daas were ejected from the Olson. As Luc put it, "We were SNAPPED off the boat in a violent motion, what I call a pitchpole/broach."

(see last Monday's post, Suddenly Swimming)

When Pterodactyl spun out and turned erratically upwind, Shaw grabbed the binoculars. "I saw right away there was no one on the boat, so I made a sweep and there they were. Bright orange and yellow inflatables standing out very bright against cobalt blue."

In making that first, missed pass, Shaw saw quickly that the two men in the water were unable to swim: "Then I remembered what they told us in the Pacific Cup safety seminar, that people in a PFD can't swim. After that everything came straight out of the textbook. The lesson: Don't try to do any precise maneuvering. Just get that Lifesling out there. It's a great product."

Rainbow has a swim platform mounted low, and with two people standing aft - Shaw and crewmate Gregory Yankelovich - it stayed submerged, not threatening the men in the water and greatly aiding the recovery. The water outside the Golden Gate is cold year-round and definitely cold in the springtime. De Faymoreau and Den Daas were able to climb and help themselves aboard, with assistance, Shaw recalls, "But Luc came aboard saying that he couldn't grip, couldn't grip. That happens fast. I gave up two or three minutes by missing them the first time. If I'd missed a second time, and they'd gone colder, we might have had to winch them out instead of haul them over the transom."

Other lessons? "Seeing two other boats stop and stand by really helped my morale. Knowing they were there helped me calm down and focus.

And?

Tethers?

Cliff Shaw tells me that he always uses a tether offshore.

In the Comments section of our Suddenly Swimming post, we find the following:

Luc said...
although the obvious lesson from this incident is to wear tethers, it is not clear that we would have survived any better had we been tethered. The reason I say this is because I do suspect this was a sneaker wave. We were not dropped off the boat, nor slid off the deck. we were on a large wave of unusual steepness, I remember saying to my buddy Disun, "hey, look at this one". He, eating an apple did not have time for any response because we were SNAPPED off the boat in a violent motion, (what I call a pitchpole/broach)which may have resulted in broken bones, back, or some other related injury, had we been wearing tethers. Disun commented that we had become complacent, the hard part of the race was over, and we were enjoying what an O-40 does best, surfing and playing in the waves on the way home.

earlier, changing sails, and later reefing the main, we also did not have tethers, but we were focused on the task, planned our moves, and succeeded. The boat had a reefed main and a #3 jib. the wind was 25 to 30 knots true, and the waves were large, but not particularly scary huge.

any of you that race and have tried wearing a harness know that getting tangled in lines and hooked on winches and other hardware is so unworkable that we usually don't wear them. Maybe that's foolish, I don't know. I did hear that a guy was dragged until he drowned wearing a harness in a previous Double Handed Farallones Race. As far as the swim was concerned, I think a wet suit and backpack with fins would have been more useful than a PFD. around here, cold is the biggest survival problem. A custom wetsuit would be the way to go, one that could float you face up, a pair of small fins, and one of those James Bond launching grappling hooks and we could have been back aboard.

Luc de Faymoreau
Pteradactyl

Mike said...
Luc can only write this because he was extremely lucky in being quickly rescued. Otherwise... seeing the boat sailing away from him, he might have wished for a tether. Better to die trying to reboard then tread water with 0 hope.

alan said...
I'd rather be on board with some broken bones than separated from an unattended boat 20 miles outside the Gate. I've done this trip several times in a variety of conditions both racing and cruising. I have jacklines for working forward and cockpit padeyes for the cockpit. Yeah, it can be challenging learning to work while tethered, but you do learn what works if you do it. I'm glad you guys were not alone out there and that you are safely back here able to tell your story.

ditto on the wetsuit/survival suit.

Ralph said...
Luc's conclusions seem to show bravery or a bit of a flippant attitude, but they are very fortunate to not have died - no?

John Siegel said...
Thank goodness Luc and his crew survived this potentially fatal situation. I don't, however, share his view toward harnesses and tethers.

In the 1999 DHF, my crew and I ended up in the water behind the island, courtesy of a sneaker wave.

My crew ended up on the mainsail. I vividly remember executing a perfect swan dive over the pushpit and entering the frothy water. It was then that the choral music and harps started playing.

As my tether jerked me back to the boat (and back to reality), I somehow managed an adrenalin-induced leap back into the cockpit.

Harnesses and tethers may not be perfect and sometimes might create bigger problems. But, I'll take my chances being attached to the boat!

ISAF Reconsiders

In response to the outcry over the decision to drop catamarans from 2012 Olympic competition, the international sailing authority has announced the following as part of its agenda for the mid-year meeting in Qingdao, China, May 8-12:

Council will also be given the opportunity to address the selection of events for the 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition. By the close of the submission deadline for the 2008 ISAF Mid-Year Meeting, submissions had been lodged by 15 ISAF Member National Authorities and two ISAF Class Associations regarding the events for the 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition. In accordance with ISAF Regulation 1.6(b), the Executive Committee has considered all these submissions and maintains its position from February 2008 that any submissions on the events for 2012 should be considered at the 2008 Annual Conference in November.

However, recognizing the level of concerns over the decision as per the submissions received, the Executive Committee feels it would be prudent for the ISAF Council to have the opportunity in May 2008 to affirm or otherwise its decision taken in November 2007 on the events for the 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition. Therefore, the Executive Committee has decided to put forward Urgent Submission M06-08, which invites Council to reaffirm or otherwise their decision on the events for the 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition made in November 2007. The Executive Committee intent in making this submission is to bring to a close the current speculation challenging the Council decision.

The Way We Were

2008-03-31T23:04:00.020-05:00

So per expectation we were back in court on April 2
- April 1 would have been so apropo -
to ask Dad to tell us, when may we go America's Cup yachting?

United Internet Team Germany closed the base and all sailor contracts as of March 31. New Zealand's Grant Dalton says his team could be back up and running almost instantly, given cause. But there isn't any cause. Pierre Orphanidis attended the press conference in Valencia of Desafio Español and reports that the Spanish team has got itself hooked up with a real yacht club for the next go-round and will occupy space over the next couple of seasons by representing its sponsors on the TP52 and GP42 circuits.

BMW Oracle is meanwhile physically on the water for training in Lorient, France with the Formula 60 trimaran, Groupama 2, and Alinghi is set back after flipping Alain Gautier's Formula 60, Foncia, off Lorient last week, and everybody's mad at somebody and eventually the America's Cup itself will again be fine, for a while.

Could take a while. And no, there's not a sked for when Justice Herman Cahn will come back with a go/no go ruling for 2008 versus 2009, the dispute du jour between the only two players on the field.

Remember the long ago, all-smiley days of the "Moet Cup"? The first round of what would become the Acts? People not on the scene were pretty sniffy toward it because it wasn't "the real thing," but in fact it was a form of the real thing and it turned out just dandy. I lifted this pure-nostalgia pic (you'd have to use Photoshop to replicate it) from Richard Spindler over at
Latitude 38 . . .

© Richard Spindler/Latitude 38

Then in an orgy of self-abuse I went back and reread these words, written when I was so much younger, from a posting in which I also noted that Al Jazeera fer crimineez sakes was covering the America's Cup:

Valencia, España
July 1, 2007

I woke up this morning and I felt so alive. I couldn't wait to get down to the port, and when I got here the place was already humming. Even the events that followed—no racing, the breeze never settled in, and we had a long wait—even that couldn't bring me down. No sir. I've seen America's Cup racing revolutionized twice now, and this is the real deal. The pre-events that built up a viable challenger fleet, and then the match itself, with races fought down to the last broken tooth and hangnail. Yes, Alinghi is up 4 races to 2 and needs just one more win to defend the Cup, but I doubt that Mr's Bertaralli, Butterworth, and Baird, sitting at the back of Alinghi, would want to resail those last two races that they won. Win them again they might, or might not. What more can you ask of a sporting contest?

And I reckon somebody out there is gagging right now because I sound like a cheerleader, so here, let me lend you a fork for that. The America's Cup has been debunked generation after generation, but you can't rationalize it away any more than you can rationalize it.

I'm not alone. Mark Chisnell has been doing a bangup job of analyzing the racecourse action in America's Cup 32, and when I sent him a note of appreciation, he answered simply: "It's not often something comes along where you just want to do it justice."

Excuse me. I have to go now. This hammer is wearing out and I need a new one so I can keep hitting myself over the head—Kimball

Suddenly Swimming

2008-03-31T18:16:00.019-05:00

I don't know why, but the Doublehanded Farallones Race produces more "adventures" than any other event on the California coast.

Well, a windy ocean, a narrow Golden Gate Strait, some pretty big currents and doing it in the springtime certainly factor in. We saw 30 knots out there over the weekend--Gitana 13 started for Yokohama because that's the breeze they wanted, but then the guys didn't like the sea state at all--and 30 knots is not uncommon in the springtime in the Gulf of the Farallones. And when it blows for a while you get your 10-15 foot seas and an occasional sneaker.

Having been around the Southeast Farallon a few times (or more), and being unable to remember a time when I ever clicked in with a harness, I reckon I won't be preaching to anyone what a good idea it is to do just that. But I suspect that two people by the names of Luc de Faymoreau and Disun Den Daas are recent converts to the concept.

They were pitched out of their boat and . . .

[Luc has checked in with a must-read comment, and he's not so sure about this harness thing. Find Comment at bottom. Thank you, Luc.]

. . . yep, just like that, there they were, swimming in the Pacific Ocean about five miles returned from the island and 20 miles out of the Gate. There had been a moment when something sneaked up on them, and they lost control (Luc: "We were SNAPPED off the boat in a violent motion, what I call a pitchpole/broach")and thus lost contact with one Olson 40 named Pterodactyl.

Fortunately, Clifford Shaw was nearby. He saw Pterodactyl go down and around and turn into the wind, then sail away looking not quite right. He went to investigate, and almost before the fear of death could set in, Faymoreau and Den Daas were aboard Shaw's Crowther 36 catamaran, Rainbow. They set out chasing Pterodactyl and were soon joined by the Coast Guard, which had been alerted when another boat encountered a crew-less Olson 40 and MOB gear in the water. It was too rough to transfer anyone aboard, however, and in the next scene we find our Samaritan Shaw donating his EPIRB to the cause. It was tossed into the cockpit of Pterodactyl.

Darkness fell.

At last report, boat awol out there somewhere. Sailors safe. An aerial search on Monday by a stalwart volunteer turned up nothing. (EPIRB presumably ejected from cockpit, much like sailors.)

Luc, if Pterodactyl beats Gitana to Japan, the beers are on me.

Okay, that's it. Don't overlook Luc's comment below, and if you want a good April Fool's read, I recommend clicking into Scuttlebutt Europe, pour l'exemple:

"Panic In Minden As Sail Membrane Gains Self Awareness."

3N's IQ is now at least 300 and climbing. Terrified scientists disconnected the membrane and all North computers from the internet. Turning off the power to the facility had no effect (other than making the membrane a bit petulant), as 3N has learned to generate electricity from the internal movement of subatomic particles and is now fully self generating.

"We are playing Mozart 24x7 to it and have a team of scientists reading 3N the entire Harvard Classics library and all the world's books on philosophy and religion in hopes that it will decide that kindness and goodwill towards man is the way to go . . . "

April 1. It's a good day for sailing, and that's no foolin'—Kimball

Suddenly Disappeared from Radar

2008-03-30T13:05:00.020-05:00

What happened to hand grenade journalism?

Love him or laugh at him, Magnus Wheatley made quite a show of himself (and made enemies) at the Rule 69 Blog and never met a hyperbole he didn't like and got a few things spectacularly wrong and got other things right in a way calculated to offend. He called his style, hand grenade journalism. Today the only return is:

Rule69Blog has now closed
Contact us
Magnus Wheatley can be contacted at magnuswheatley@yahoo.co.uk.

So I sent an email:

"Did a grenade go off in your hand?"

No response.

But the first version of this post - since edited - drew a response from a reader at www.segelwelt.de who saw a final Rule 69 posting that I did not. It includes statements "to stop the rumor mill in its tracks."

Well, there's a first time for everything.

Find it in the Comment section at bottom. Worth the read on multiple levels.

The Pacific, so Un-Atlantic

Now let me share a conversation I had with Stefan Fodor, just a few hours before he set out crewing aboard the 110-foot catamaran, Gitana 13, for a shot at the San Francisco-Yokohama record. It's a reminder that the Pacific is so very un-Atlantic. The boat cleared the Golden Gate in light air in the afternoon, but with a crisp northerly blowing on the ocean outside—the backside of a minor low pressure system—and officially launched the crossing at 2245. They passed outbound through the returning Doublehanded Farallones Fleet, as captured through the very long lens of Erik Simonson . . .

© h2oshots.com

"We're looking at reaching for six to twelve hours in a 30-knot breeze," Stefan said. "That will get us well off the coast, and then we hook into the bottom of a low pressure system and sweep away on that. But six days on, it's a crap shoot. It's not like the Atlantic, where you can hook into a system and ride your predictions all the way across."

Olivier de Kersauson and the crew of the trimaran, Geronimo, now hold the SF-Yokohama record at 14 days, 22 hours. "They had a good first half," Stefan said, "but as I understand it they hit calms in the last three days, closing on Japan. The crap shoot again. So we have room to improve on their run, and we have [Yokohama native/Around Alone veteran] Kojiro Shiraishi aboard to help us with the approach."

Sounds like a probable record, but yes, a crap shoot. It's been only two years since de Kersauson and company set the SF-Yokohama record. It had been ten years since anyone had a crack at the NY-SF record, which Gitana lowered to 43 days while leaving a lot on the table.

Most sailors in the record-setting business ply their trade in the Atlantic and the Med. Pacific records are the low-hanging fruit.

It is also a fact that de Kersauson and company were forced south early on their crossing and passed through the chain of Hawaiian islands to more-or-less fortuitously claim records California-Hawaii and Hawaii-Japan. They made Diamond Head in 4 days.

Sheesh. My personal best, California-Hawaii, is ten.

Moving on to Greater Piles of Bullship

There's no formula for creating something that works, but wherever you sail—on the coast, on a lake, on a river—you deserve to have not less than one Grand Nonsense Intergalactic Championship on your calendar. On my home waters, we have several such, the runaway leader being a thing called the Three Bridge Fiasco: round three marks, in any order, in any direction, in our season of highest current, in our season of most-erratic wind, and it brings out our biggest fleets (SAIL, January 2008: What a Fiasco!). Another, with a 54-year tradition, is the Bullship, a bay crossing for 8-foot El Toro prams. Since this deal is sailed cross-current and early in the day, generally before a solid breeze can build, the which-way-to-go question looms large. Let the record show that Art Lang went hard right. Buzz Blackett went hard left. And they finished one-two. At the, um, press conference, Mr. Lang (a veteran of three decades of this bullship) offered an insight that may inspire you in your own sporting endeavors: "Even a blind pig in the forest occasionally finds an acorn."

The finish was up-current so the fleet crowded the beach, and how . . .

Photo by John Dukat

And you couldn't call it a Bullship without a Tail End Charlie award, now could we, Chris Straub ? ? ?

Photo by John Dukat

Reason Number 11,334B.2 Why Compromise Is Nice

Photo by TNT Media Services

That's Alain Gautier's Formula 60 trimaran, Foncia, upside down, and not the Alinghi multihull that we assume we'll eventually see racing against a BMW Oracle multihull in the 33rd America's Cup match. It is, however, the Alinghi team standing on the bottom of the boat after stuffing a wave on Saturday off Lorient, France. It must have been a scary flip—no matter where you're standing on one of these things, it's a long way down as it goes over—and I'm glad that no one was seriously hurt despite a couple of hospitalizations. Which only goes to show how hard this is, and how hard it is going to be. Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton was quoted by Paul Lewis in The New Zealand Herald just hours before the accident, but aptly, speaking of the even-larger boats to come:

"The problem is that these yachts will be an enormously stressed engineering piece of kit. It's a bit like launching a lunar satellite into space - it's no mean feat. Under the Deed of Gift, you have to build everything in the country of origin - Switzerland, in Alinghi's case. They just simply do not have the facilities there to do this entire thing.

"I mean, you have the entire military might of the United States to draw on, versus Switzerland? It's a very tight timeframe and I just do not think they have the physical presence to do it in time.

"These are not the sort of boats that you can build and then spend a week sailing around in it before racing. In a perfect world, you'd want the boat built and on the water in January for a July race."

A reminder: Attorneys for the opposing camps are returning to a New York courtroom on Wednesday, and it is reasonable to believe that the timing of the next match will then be resolved beyond any further dithering. That leaves me a few days to play, so my plan is to follow my friend R. Crumb and just keep o-o-o-n
truckin—Kimball

All Boats Great and Small

2008-03-28T15:35:00.009-05:00

I love'em.

I could explain myself till I'm blue in the face but no amount of explaining will ever get through to those who don't share the passion, and those who do share it don't need my help.

Here's what set that off.

In my little corner of the cosmos—that would be San Francisco Bay—I find myself pig-in-clover thick with sailing matters great and small, each wonderful in its own way. Maxi-cat Gitana 13 has a plan to set out some time over the weekend to hook into a weather system that promises a few hundred miles of rapid westing before Lionel Lemonchois and crew have to start weather-routing their way across the Pacific. They're out to beat the San Francisco-Yokohama record of 14 days, 22 hours now held by Olivier de Kersauson and the big trimaran, Geronimo. We don't see a lot of 110-foot multihulls in these parts, so it's worth dropping a jaw. Here's a recent bay "cruise" as photographed by Peter Lyons . . .

© Peter Lyons Lyons Imaging

Gitana will probably get out the door on Saturday afternoon—or wait, if the weather lacks jumpstart potential. Fair-weather sailors might ponder this ocean-coastal forecast from the National Weather Service that apparently sounds pretty tasty to the Gitana gang:

SAT AND SAT NIGHT
N TO NW WINDS 20 TO 30 KT...EXCEPT FAR W PORTION 15 TO 20 KT. SEAS 8 TO 12 FT. HIGHEST WINDS AND SEAS NE. ISOLATED SHOWERS SAT NIGHT.

Ponder also this Pacific crossing as a puddle jump compared to the boat's recent 43-day record on the Clipper Ship route, New York to San Francisco and wrong-way-Charlie around Cape Horn.

Saturday morning, regardless of weather, is devoted to the Bullship.

Lives like it sounds. An event of intergalactic consequence and, as Janice Joplin might say, great social import. A San Francisco Bay crossing in 8-foot El Toros. The race starts early, before the seabreeze builds enough to swamp half the fleet en route. That means, however, that you're sailing in fluky wind the whole way, thus the rule of thumb: Everybody leads the Bullship Race for five minutes.

El Toros were once the standard junior trainer in these parts, and whacked-out events like the Bullship are important to keeping the flame alive. They're hard to recover if swamped, however—the race brings along a "cowship" fleet of escorts for the bay crossing—and along the cityfront of San Francisco, it used to be impossible to run a junior training program. For kids in El Toros, too much wind; wave. Now we have Optis, and the kids can sail any day, anywhere. The Opti is a better trainer for that, but El Toros have soul.

I know. I've raced the Bullship. For about five minutes, I was winning.

And then, on Tuesday . . .

Nick Moloney and the iShares Extreme 40 catamaran are doing a little event along with Jonny Mosely that promises to be very cool. Nick you should know as a guy who's gone around the world three times and is the only person ever to windsurf from mainland Australia to Tasmania. Jonny you may think of as an Olympic skier, but around here we think of all Moselys as sailors. Amazingly enough, that's only the shortlist—Kimball

A Cordial Exchange of Views

2008-03-26T13:20:00.010-05:00

I've believed for a while that the Alinghi camp is the victim of wishful thinking. Nothing in Wednesday's nonmeeting of the minds in Geneva changed that. This happens in Balkans diplomacy all the time, right? What Tom Ehman of BMW Oracle Racing calls "a cordial exchange of views" becomes, in the opposing corner, an engine inspiring Société Nautique de Genève/Alinghi/America's Cup Management counsel Lucien Masmejan to use the words "disappointed" and "frustrated."

The words coming out of the Alinghi corner sound cornered to me. They really had no next move except to go back to court, and that's what happens next, to ask Dad to rule on whether we race in giant multihulls in 2008 or--as Alinghi devoutly wishes--in 2009.

Wishful thinking? No one at Alinghi has moved past calling the first court ruling—the one that disqualified the Spanish team from acting as challenger of record—a "technicality." But to paint Larry Ellison as an opportunistic pirate out to hijack the America's Cup, which is what they attempt to do, ignores the nearly-universal negative reaction to their original protocol, the one with their lapdog "challenger," ignores the compromise proposal put forward by BMW Oracle last November and signed by four other challengers, ignores that they knew all along that nobody's lobbing softballs here and it's bad luck to crowd the plate.

On one of Ernesto Bertarelli's visits to the USA last year, we spent time together over two days, and the experience was genuinely cordial, and he looked me in the eye and said, "The changes we made to the protocol were really very small."

But thinking so doesn't make it so. I mean, the man also let time pass because he was counting on winning in court.

Now, don't imagine me as someone who is going to labor through all the pages of all the court documents to compare the details of the crucial dispute du jour: whether or not there was an agreement to stop the clock—on a ten-month-Deed of Gift challenge cycle—pending resolution by the court. Or, given such an understanding, the dimensions and start-stop dates of same. But I feel pretty sure that the BMW Oracle camp, in demanding to race in October 2008, is coming to this position with zero tolerance for wishful thinking. I'm sure they're sure their ducks are all lined up.

As for who wins the next round, let's quote a great American hero, Art Crumb's cartoon character, Mr. Natural:

Mr. Natural says, "Whatever's happening keeps right on happening."

Oh, one final thought:

"A cordial exchange of views."

Heh.

Tom, you crack me up—Kimball

For more on this topic see David Schmidt's story at sailmagazine.com.

FOILERS RISING

2008-03-23T13:33:00.029-05:00

Sean "Doogie" Couvreux spent a chunk of '07 on the bow of an AC boat in Valencia, but he spent last weekend in a more elevated position, sailing a foiler Moth a few feet above San Diego Bay. As he explains, "The boat rises and accelerates. Everything goes quiet. You can't believe it till you've tried it. And you wipe out from three feet higher than a 49er."

So with its first-ever Pacific Coast Championship in the bag and Bora Gulari the surefire winner, the Moth has officially arrived in the USA. There are boats scattered around the country, but San Diego has a concentration. Twelve of these 11-foot, hydrofoil-born dinghies raced there over the weekend out of Coronado Yacht Club, including true believers who traveled many a mile for the moment. Gulari has been racing these boats here and abroad, so he has the head start. His take: "By the end of the weekend everyone was up on the foils coming off the starting line, and even the newcomers were hitting some foiling jibes. With such a high calibre of sailors joining the fleet, and the openness and cooperation shown, the learning curve is going to be rapid".

There's tremendous energy in the class right now. The online forum is all cranked up, and Charlie McKee (49er bronze medalist with bro, Jonathan) says, "Moths have been around a long time, but it took about five years for the pioneers to figure out foils. We have our owner-builders in the class, and everybody knows about Rohan Veal's Bladeriders—they can't build boats fast enough to meet demand—but we also have manufacturers like Prowler pumping out a bunch of boats. We have adults and kids racing together, and I think that's very cool; it should be like that. You see all sorts of people getting into the class. You have your tinkering techno-geeks and you have people like me. I wouldn't get in if I couldn't just buy a boat and go sailing. Every development class goes through these phases of change. When you arrive at a point where off-the-shelf boats aren't swallowed up by development, the class is ready to take off."

McKee, originally a Seattle guy, lives in San Diego these days. Couvreux is living in the Columbia River Gorge, where the Moth class plans to hold a national title regatta in August at Cascade Locks—and if things go right, and they can convince the internationals, a world championship in 2009.

Let me advise you, Moth sailors of the world, come to the Gorge. Try it, you'll like it.

Now dig this Oskar Kihlborg shot that I lifted from the US International Moth site. Something important is missing, eh?

Reminds me of talking to Doogie, and encouraging him to bring the fleet to our lumpy, breezy San Francisco cityfront, and Doogie says, "Kimball, I don't think we're ready.

On the other hand, these pics from last weekend's PCCs are looking mighty ready. Here's Charlie Mckee . . .

And 15-year-old Hans Henken pulling it to weather . . .

Charlie McKee offered an account of the weekend, and here is an excerpt:

"For the last race the championship was solidly in Bora Gulari's hands, while the real podium battle was between Hans Henken and Charlie, with the winner determining 2nd for the regatta. The 15-year old and 46-year old have been training partners in Coronado and know each others' game well. Coming off the pin, Charlie and Bora were neck and neck footing for the left corner with less than 2 boatlengths separation the entire way. When they tacked back, though, Hans crossed them both and tacked in front. Around the top mark it was Bora, Hans, then Charlie. Hans held close to Bora down the 1st run, but Bora gradually pulled away on the 2nd beat, and Hans turned his attention to covering Charlie to secure 2nd. Charlie rounded the last mark about 7 seconds behind, and immediately jibed away in a right-y puff. Hans looked behind, coolly jibed to port, Charlie jibed back to starboard and a jibing duel ensued, McKee desperately hoping for a mistake from the young buck. Henken continued to carve perfect foiling jibes between McKee and the finish line, securing 2nd for the race and the regatta."

Now a Word from Mallorca

Ben Ainslie (no surprise) won the Finn class racing at the Trofeo S.A.R. Princesa Sofia that wrapped in Mallorca over the weekend, with Croatia's Ivan Gasper second. US Olympic Finn rep
Zach Railey was pretty happy with his third. Zach checks in:

I have just made my first-ever podium finish at a Major European Event in the Finn Class.

The regatta was a big step forward, and it is nice to rebound from the poor finish at the World Championships. The regatta had a range of conditions from light and shifty to windy with big waves, so we really got to work on a lot of areas. Even though this is a great result there is still a lot of work to do and I am motivated to keep working in the right direction so we can continue to put up top level results over the year.

At the end of the event there was the medal race which was extremely exciting. I had an 8-point lead over the 4th-place boat and was 18 points behind 2nd place. The conservative move was to protect my 3rd. The medal race was a huge battle between myself and Daniel Birgmark (SWE). I was able to gain the upper hand off the start line and push (SWE) out to the right side of the race course where I covered his wind.

My plan was to make sure the other 8 competitors got as far ahead as possible so that he could not gain the necessary points to pass me in the regatta standings. The plan came together well and I was able to push him back to almost a half leg behind the other boats by the 2nd weather mark rounding. We finished the race 8th and 9th as one of the other sailors flipped on the last downwind. This ensured my 3rd place finish in the event, was exactly what the medal race is all about.

Elsewhere in the USA's Olympic contingent, Sally Barkow placed fifth in Ynglings, and Andrew Campbell was ninth in Lasers. Full results here.

Pacific Records

It's been not quite a month since the big cat, Gitana 13, sailed through the Golden Gate with a new, 43-day record for the New York-San Francisco track. Now skipper Lionel Lemonchois and crew are prepping for a shot at the San Francisco-Yokohama record. That would be 14 days, 22 hours set in April, 2006 by Olivier de Kersauson and crew with the 90-foot Geronimo. In June of that same year Geronimo reversed direction and recrossed the Pacific in 13 days, 22 hours to set the west-east record.

As I understand it, Lemonchois and company have been sweating a weather window for their east-west departure, and then they're not coming back to California. Their intent is to instead record-hunt on from Yokohama to Dalian (meaning, I suppose, the Dalian in China).

I don't have these details screwed down tight because I was in Mexico most of the time that Gitana has been on San Francisco Bay, and my payoff for registering as press on the team website is meager—an occasional email suggesting that I go to the website for an update. Alina Zarr, who has actually had contact, emails thus: "New Harken mainsail slides are stuck on a runway in a blizzard in New England. So their whole departure is running into a glitch. Until that plane takes off, with 16 parts which broke during the Route de l'Or, everyone is on standby."

As of Sunday night, the guys were still waiting for their mainsail slides.

A New Age of Commercial Sail?

A while back we told you about Sky Sails, a German company experimenting with kite-assisted commercial shipping to reduce fuel costs. Now, with one kite-equipped voyage completed, the company is reporting success. Here we go:

Hamburg: "We can once again actually ‘sail’ with cargo ships, thus opening a new chapter in the history of commercial shipping," was the verdict from Captain Lutz Heldt following his return from the nearly two-month maiden voyage of the multi-purpose heavy-lift project carrier “Beluga SkySails”, which sailed from Germany to Venezuela, the United States and Norway. In even moderate winds, the first flights of an initial 160-square-meter towing kite propulsion system from the Hamburg-based manufacturer SkySails demonstrated how this innovative auxiliary propulsion system was able to substitute for 20% of the engine’s power.

And this:

“The initial focus during the first half of what is set to be an approximately 12-months pilot testing phase aboard the “Beluga SkySails” is on calibration work and adjustments to stabilize the towing kite propulsion,” reported Stephan Brabeck, technical director of SkySails, adding how “in the second half the flight times will be extended and the performance perfected.” On numerous days during the maiden voyage the system was in action for periods of between a few minutes and up to eight hours. During that time the SkySails-System pulled the ship with up to 5 tons of power at force 5 winds, which when compared to the engine output represents a relief of more than 20%. Projected onto an entire day, this performance by the “Beluga SkySails” represents savings of about 2.5 tons of fuel and more than $1,000 a day.

Qingdao to Santa Cruz

The Clipper Race boats I anticipate seeing on the California coast are now all collected (save one) in Hawaii for a breather before they continue on to Santa Cruz. Those who have followed this story know that race organizer Robin Knox Johnston ordered a halt to the racing on this leg after two masts broke. Finishes were awarded according to a boat's position at that time. The Western Australia boat has had more than its share of trouble, as we read:

westernaustralia2011.com has left Midway Island for the second time after
making repairs to their damaged gearbox. To get spare parts to the remote island at the north western-most end of the Hawaiian Island chain in order to enable them to make the repairs and get underway again so quickly has been a masterpiece of logistical planning involving dozens of people.

Clipper Race Director, Joff Bailey, says, "To get equipment to Midway Island quickly is almost impossible. westernaustralia2011.com was very lucky. Our staff in Hawaii have been working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to solve this problem and managed to get the components of the broken gearbox onto yesterday's supply plane. The load weight of the relatively small plane is critical. In the end the gearbox had to be broken down into parts so that essential bits could be loaded on.

"The personnel we have been dealing with at the US FWS and on the island of Midway have done everything within their powers to assist us," says Joff. "They could not have done more and we are very grateful of their assistance and thank them for it. The crew of westernaustralia2011.com have enormously enjoyed their two short stops on the island."

westernaustralia2011.com is expected to arrive in Ala Wai harbour in Honolulu within the next seven days which, by coincidence, will also be the same day their new mast arrives in Hawaii.

Here's the crew of Hull & Humber, stage winners, celebrating in a setting that will be familiar to all Transpac veterans, the lawn of Hawaii YC.

Get up to speed at clipperroundtheworld.com.

YEAH, RIGHT

2008-03-18T16:27:00.025-05:00

Is it just me or do I hear a roaring silence from BMW Oracle re. the timing of a Deed of Gift match?

Oops, cancel the question. The ink was still dripping from the first version of our little blog when the phone rang and it was BMW Oracle Racing's mistress of information, Jane Eagleson, saying, "Far be it from us to leave you listening to a roaring silence."

Cool.

My intent in posing the question was to point out a gap that you could drive a real big truck through sideways, a gap that appeared in the initial public statements issued by the rival teams:

Alinghi, proud defender of the America's Cup, but twice a loser in court, released a statement asserting July 2009 as a date for a Deed of Gift match.

BMW Oracle Racing, twice a winner in the same court, made no mention of a date. Silence on that.

But there's a reason.

They have long intended, and still intend, to race in 2008.

So get ready for the next round, merde-fight fans. This much happened in the first few minutes after the court ruling went public.

Conventional wisdom (which can be wrong, but I subscribe) has it that Alinghi's actions these recent months have been aimed at delaying the inevitable Deed of Gift match, while they play catch-up on design. Bertarelli was so confident of winning in court the first time around that he did not begin work on a multihull defender until the rug was swept from under his feet. His own people have said that, and who am I to doubt them? The American camp, meanwhile, was cranking great guns.

Today --
The defender issued a statement quoting team boss Ernesto Bertarelli: "Let's settle this on the water." Alinghi lead counsel Lucien Masmejan was quoted as setting July, 2009 for a best-of-three match.

However --
Among other matters, the Cup's Deed of Gift covers situations in which the parties cannot mutually agree to terms, and it addresses the timing of a disputed match.

Thus my email to Jane Eagleson, asking the question that leads this writing. And about two minutes later, in email time, comes:

"you would have to ask Alinghi – where do they get 2009 from?? This is nowhere in the court papers – we want to go as soon as possible"

My point exactly.

Interviewed on Radiosport New Zealand, Alinghi skipper Brad Butterworth had comments that laid out the next arena of conflict:

"It [the ruling] is pretty much what we expected to happen."

"Next year we're happy to meet them in a multihull."

"The strategy of BMW all along has been to race this year."

"There is no way we could do it in that time frame, and even when they went to court last year [if we had started then] it would have been a big push. They could have a regatta in July, but it'll be ridiculous."

"We're thinking the clock stopped when we went to court."

The DoG stipulates 10 months from the date of challenge, and the various back-and-forths since BOR filed its DoG challenge have us racing in 2008. I heard Butterworth talking July, 2008, but I believe he had the month wrong. I heard BMW Oracle talking October.

So can Alinghi persuade (whom?) that the clock stopped? Will we be going back to court to ask Dad to set a date?

I think so.

ee cummings asks for me . . .

how do you like your blueyed boy
Mr. Death

And then (we're still on the phone, remember) Jane hands the phone to Tom Ehman, Director of External Affairs for BMW Oracle, and I express my wonderment. He says, "When the judge ruled in our favor in November, the regatta date was October 2008. There is no basis for a match in July, '09."

And what of a way to reconcile this matter of the dates? Do we go back to court?

"As far as we're concerned, October 2008 is the date."

Yep, I'm working on my Spanish.

"It may not be Valencia, you know. The defender still has some rights in that regard."

Oh. Yeah.

● ● ●

OK, for the masochists among you, the meat and potatoes:

To read the court document, click here

And we have this from Alinghi:

(New York, 18 March 2008) In response to New York Supreme Court Justice Herman Cahn’s order today designating Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC) as America’s Cup Challenger of Record replacing Club Náutico Español de Vela (CNEV), lead counsel for the defending yacht club, Société Nautique de Genève (SNG), Lucien Masmejan, issued the following statement:

“Following today’s court order, Larry Ellison has eliminated the competition and gained access to the America’s Cup Match, a feat BMW Oracle Racing has never been able to achieve on the water. While we are disappointed with the outcome of this court order and believe that the matter of GGYC’s certificate of challenge wasn’t properly addressed, we have decided not to appeal the decision and we look forward to getting the fight back on the water and meeting BMW Oracle Racing on the start line of a Deed of Gift Match in July 2009,” Masmejan said.

Should Alinghi win the Deed of Gift Match, the Defender is committed to getting the America’s Cup back on track for a world class multi-challenge event in 2011 in Valencia, Spain. “The challengers can be assured that the 34th America’s Cup will be run with the same vision and commitment for a premiere multi-challenge sailing event that they supported in Valencia in 2007,” Masmejan concluded.

And this from BMW Oracle Racing:

Court Order Confirms GGYC America’s Cup Challenge

Valencia, Spain, March 18, 2008: Justice Herman Cahn of the New York State Supreme Court today issued an order confirming the validity of Golden Gate Yacht Club’s challenge for the 33rd America’s Cup and rejected a late-stage bid by the defender to re-argue the court’s earlier ruling in GGYC’s favor.

“We are very pleased with this decision. The Court has ruled that our challenge complied fully with the Cup’s Deed of Gift, and we are now keen to keep moving forward towards the next regatta,” Tom Ehman, the club’s spokesman said.

In its order today the Court reconfirmed its November 27 decision that GGYC was the valid challenger for the Cup.

The defender, Societe Nautique de Geneve (SNG), had filed a motion to re-argue that decision based on a new claim that the American club’s challenge was invalid under the Deed, but this was rejected by the court.

A Deed of Gift match is being held as the defender made it clear it did not wish to take up GGYC’s offers made before and after the court’s ruling in November of a conventional regatta with rules agreed by mutual consent and involving all teams.

Rad Man Gets Respect

2008-03-16T12:53:00.027-05:00

Multihulls are on-topic so it's doubledog right in 2008 to see Dick Newick as the first multihull designer since Nathanael Herreshoff inducted into the North American Boat Designers Hall of Fame.

In one adventure, Cap't Nat designed and built a cat named Amaryllis, sailed it 200 miles from Bristol to New York at an average of 14 knots, and then gave the 1876 Centennial Regatta fleet such a walloping that he was told to come back with a monohull next time or don't come back at all.

Ninety-three years later another phenomenon arrived, and on that I quote myself: "It's a story worth telling around the campfires of each new generation, how an outside-the-box 40-foot proa sailed by Tom Follett electrified the sailing world with an unexpected third-place finish in the 1968 Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, launching the multihull era in the Atlantic and launching the design career of one Dick Newick."

Newick and motoryacht designer Jack Hargrave are the seventh and eighth designers elected to the Hall of Fame, which is housed at Mystic Seaport Museum and sponsored by Mystic, the Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology, The Landing School, and the American Boat & Yacht Council. Newick and Hargrave join L. Francis Herreshoff, John Alden, Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, C. Raymond Hunt, Philip L. Rhodes and Olin Stephens on a short but distinguished roster.

And: while Herreshoff indeed famously designed multihulls, his stature rests elsewhere. The Wizard of Bristol designed every America's Cup defender from 1893 to 1920 and dominated yacht design for 75 years. Newick is the first Hall of Fame designer whose reputation rests upon multihulls. This at a moment when Olympic catamaran sailors are crying "foul" for being dropped from the 2012 Olympic Games, and while the possibility of a catamaran match for the America's Cup looms in our dark, uncertain skies like a visitor from outer space. (Where you perceive the good, or the evil, is a Rorschach test, my friend.)

When I sat down with Newick—after many years in Maine, he and wife Pat now live high on a remote hill north of San Francisco—he declared, "I wouldn't call myself a bonkers advocate for multihulls." Then, as the conversation evolved, everything the man put forward about his standards for happiness under sail whispered to me that it would have to be a multihull to do what he was talking about.

If you want to mark the beginnings of the French fascination with multihulls, the success of Cheers is as good a place as any to start. It was a French couple who recently rescued that deteriorating proa, restored it, put it back under sail, and got it designated as a monument historique of the Republic of France. However, Newick is definitely, absolutely, not a bonkers advocate of proas. His sweet spot is a trimaran with skinny hulls for low resistance and nonessential weight kept to something in the neighborhood of zero. The standard: "If you can't sail faster than the wind, comfortably and safely, you don't have a high performance boat."

Cheers was the first American boat of any kind to complete a solo transatlantic race. And talk about something from outer space. Proas don't tack. They're bidirectional, so they shunt instead, switching boards up/down. On Cheers, twin loose-luffed sails swung easily around the schooner masts, but the jib had to be transferred end to end. And Newick's design moved the rig, rudders, and accommodation from the leeward hull—the ancient Polynesian style—to the windward hull. We've since seen radical boats race across oceans, but nothing that radical for its moment . . .

To compete at all, Tom Follett had to overcome the reluctance of the race committee, following a capsize in early sea trials. There was this—

Race Committee letter, October, 1967:
Royal Western Yacht Club of England
"I notice that you are taking steps to enable the crew to right the vessel when it has capsized, but my committee are more interested in any steps you may take to stop the capsizing in the first place. We are still of the opinion that to race along at 25 knots in between periodically capsizing is not a proper way to cross the Atlantic..."

Follett's 27-day crossing from the Caribbean to the start line convinced the committee to let him race and change the world. In 1980, in the Newick trimaran, Moxie, Phil Weld became the first American winner of an OSTAR. Weld was a writer's writer, and his account is still a great read. Over the years, Newick multihulls placed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 10 in Atlantic solo racing.

As of 2008, asked about matters such as Olympic selection, Newick says, "If people are stupid enough to ignore multihulls, they get what they deserve." And the America's Cup? "It's interesting that every time they get into a squabble, they resolve it by going to a multihull. Rather backward, that's the kindest thing I can say about them, but I guarantee you that if the BMW Oracle multihull is 90 feet long and 90 feet wide, it's a trimaran. They wouldn't built a cat on those dimensions. They're not that stupid."

Now, dear reader, I know that print is, like, so five minutes ago, but print is actually quite dear to me, and it just happens that the April issue of SAIL magazine has a three-page profile of Dick Newick. If any of this stuff tweaks you, that is the place to learn more about a guy who really could have been headed under sail to St. Thomas, "to earn some money, but I caught a barracuda off St. Croix and anchored to cook it, and stayed 17 years."

There's nothing ordinary in this story. Here we see French psychiatrist Vincent Besin, at left, and the designer, at work on the proa. Vincent and wife Nélie (an M.D. and a French national karate champion) originally approached Newick for a cruising trimaran design, but while he was working on it they fell head over heels in love with the Cheers saga and took a hard left turn. The photo was shot a couple of years ago while Cheers was under restoration . . .

Hundreds turned out for the relaunch, which was done, shall we say, by hand . . .

2008 will be the second season in which Cheers is again sailing the Med. You can look her up at Port St. Louis du Rhône, where there is an ongoing revival of classic multihulls. Check out this You Tube video of the Golden Oldies Regatta, 2007. Cheers raced along with four Newick trimarans and two Derek Kelsall tris.

Here's how the proa looked, racing way back in 1968—Kimball

MEXORC, it's, it's . . .

2008-03-09T14:21:00.018-05:00

So tell us, John MacLaurin, is the MEXORC back?

"It's back."

And I believe the man, because I was there.

The 7-day series that wrapped over the weekend in Nuevo Vallarta was a rescue mission for a Mexican racing tradition of thirty-some years, a tradition that was hanging by a thread after a rough-edged series two years ago. As co-chair Mike Danielson put it, "We couldn't just do a facelift. MEXORC had to be new."

Ernesto Amtmann, who "built" the series decades ago, was called upon by the Mexican Sailing Federation (five months ago) to redefine the game for 2008 as regatta chairman. Amtmann said, "John MacLaurin is a bulldog. He's always racing, always in there, and he is an important example because he came here this year to give MEXORC one last chance."

He's not sorry. MacLaurin's red Pendragon (at left) won some races but couldn't break the top three overall in the final tally. The housekeeping: Twenty-one boats raced (I'm expecting more next time, 2010, given the renewed credibility), and top-three placings went, in order, to Bill Turpin's 77-foot Akela (Southern California), Jim Gregory's 50-foot Morpheus (Northern California), and Amtmann's 43-foot IOR classic Bandido (Acapulco).

The first mission for 2008 was to get beyond the handicapping issues that dragged things down in '06. Switching from PH to ORR accomplished that. And, mission number two, Ernesto wanted the parties to be memorable. I guess that's why the awards ceremony included the state orchestra of Nayarit. The trophy staging at your last regatta looked pretty much like this, didn't it?

Danielson, feeling the vibe, declared, "This is our new starting point."

Here's Turpin and the Akela crew accepting their award. Are we excited, Hogan?

A big part of what went wrong with MEXORC in the recent past was ratings. Under Performance Handicap numbers, the race committee felt compelled to adjust ratings to compensate for boats with location-specific ratings. That is, light-air ratings from Acapulco or San Diego do not translate directly to performance in the 14-18 knot winds of Bahia de Banderas. But with committee-determined adjustments you cross into the can't-win netherworld of reassigned ratings and unhappy losers who are sure that's why they lost. I gather that '06 was even more complicated than that, but I wasn't around, so I shouldn't write about that. Blood under the bridge, anyhow.

ORR as I understand it is aimed more at point-to-point races with enough history to enable some second-guessing of the math, but it definitely brought a good chunk of the fleet to the finish line together in the pursuit race. And ORR is a rating rule forever under development (Dan Nowlan was on the scene from US Sailing).

Ah, Bahia de Banderas

This is one sweet place to sail. In season, there's a steady diet of warm wind in the teens and warm waters teeming with dolphin and whales. It's a mecca for cruisers, and of the many cruiser shindigs, the Banderas Bay Regatta also just wrapped up. It was perhaps a bit much to have both events running at the same time (plus a day of match racing in old AC boats), but it sounded like a good idea at the time. Resources, resources. Myself, I was able to hop around and spend some days on MEXORC raceboats and other days on Banderas Bay Regatta cruiser boats out for their low-key racing.

I spent time with Richard Spindler and Doña de Mallorca aboard the catamaran, Profligate, for starters, and ran into old friends Cherie and Greg (met'em on a different foray into Mexico). Cherie wanted to share the sunburn lines, or maybe that's too much information . . .

Feel the love? I also got out on the water aboard a Jenneau 43 Deck Salon (this is a cruisers' regatta, remember) along with Bartz Schneider and crew from the Express 37, Expeditious, that he keeps on San Francisco Bay. Yes, we were laughing . . .

Given one more race day, I could have joined Jim Coggan and crew aboard the solid winner, Auspice, but I guess it's true that you can't do it all. But from the Jenneau, Tomatillo, (skipper Jim calls it, "The only boat in the regatta named after a vegetable") I had this view of the catamaran start . . .

ANTIPODEANS IS US

We've moved on from the day when every web site offered a list of "interesting links," but I got a few minutes of amusement out of AndipodeMap.com, if only to note that the opposite side of the globe from my outpost in California is a patch of water southeast of Cape Town that could truly define the word lonely." I have a few friends who have been through there, but I'm not going—Kimball

Racing in Two Gears

2008-03-06T07:06:00.010-05:00

It's one thing to invent a regatta and another thing to reinvent it. Another thing again to re-reinvent it back to original, and that is what they're trying to do right now in Vallarta with the 2008 MEXORC.

"A sporting social event" is one way to describe the idealized Mexican Ocean Racing Circuit.

"Sort of the way yachting was in the 1940's."

There couldn't be a better place for it because Banderas Bay, anchored by the vibrant, modern city of Puerto Vallarta (sorry, Night of the Iguana fans, but that quaintness was so very long ago), is a fantastic place to sail. Think: West-northwesterly seabreeze, clocks during the day, yada yada, backs later, yada yada, and the typical sailing experience is smooth water with wind peaking in the teens.

Our quotes above belong to sailmaker and regatta organizer Mike Danielson, who is keen for the high-end race boats, but he also dropped in to deliver a safety briefing at the skippers' meeting for the Banderas Bay Regatta for cruising boats, kicking off their portion of Festival Nautico on Thursday and overlapping with the second half of MEXORC. MEXORC has the serious raceboats. The Banderas Bay Regatta is the one where, regatta chair John Bollinger says, "If you take the cruiser-rating—if you're racing your house—we expect you to race full-weight, and we expect you to race with your tanks at least half full."

Define "half."

BLAST FROM THE PAST

I have more on Mexico, but I'm interrupting the Vallarta blog for a bulletin from Miami. Not a recent bulletin. Many of you will recall the glory days of the Southern Ocean Racing Circuit; others will "get" the fact that the SORC once was more than the sum of the attempted revivals. The Acura Miami Grand Prix starting today (IRC, Farr 40s, and Melges 32s) is far distant from all of that. Here is a relic from the tipping point:

Credit, the New York Times

By BARBARA LLOYD

Published: March 6, 1988

The annual Southern Ocean Racing Conference is having its second lean year in a row. Last year, organizers for the yacht-racing series off the Florida coast blamed the America's Cup in Australia for a poor turnout. This year, they cite the stock market crash last October. D. Blake Flitman, chairman of the 1988 Audi Southern Ocean Racing Conference, said last week that many yacht owners are short on cash this year. Depending on the size of the boat and seriousness of its crew, a single campaign costs up to $40,000 for a medium-sized boat.

Forty-two boats entered the regatta this year; in 1987, 61 boats raced. In its better days, the winter series drew more than 75 boats to the starting line.
For the first time in the series' 43-year history, organizers have allowed boats that sail within the Performance Handicap Racing Fleet to compete.

The racing fleet's measurement system rates cruising boats rather than the high-tech racing machines that sail under the International Offshore Rule. Other boats are competing under the International Measurement System, a handicap rule for racer-cruisers.

The decision to allow performance fleet boats came late in the year when it was clear that the number of competitors would be small. The racing format has been changed, with two of the traditional overnight races turned into four shorter daytime competitions.

BACK TO VALLARTA

The closest MEXORC racing so far would appear to be Class C, with a two-point spread between first and third led by a Beneteau 40.7, Cliff Thompson's Super Gnat, on scores of 1-3-2-1. The big chief of MEXORC 2008, Ernesto Amtmann, was second as of the layday with scores of 3-2-1-2 in Bandido.

The wisdom (or not) of piling multiple events onto Vallarta Yacht Club is one question—MEXORC and the cruiser regatta have been separated in the past and, I bet, will be again—but the theory of a glorious, everything-happening-at-once, über-scene has its attractions. Danielson again: "I got my juniors out on big boats for the Governor's Cup (the opener) and the jazz coming out of them was fantastic."

Personally, I wasn't around for the last MEXORC, two years ago, but it seems fair to say that the event needed (and deserved) a rescue effort in the wake. This much I know, the handicapping for Race 3, a pursuit race, was as near spot-on as it gets. Closing on the finish I clicked this looking left . . .

And this looking right . . .

And we didn't all cross the finish in the same magical instant, but hey, this was pretty good. I rode for the day with Mike Campbell and Dale Williams on Peligroso, their updated answer to the great days of the West Coast fleet of 70-foot sleds . . .

Peligroso won last week's Vallarta Race from San Diego that is the critical life-blood feeder for MEXORC (20 boats racing in Vallarta, and less would be thin blood), and Mexico race veterans won't be surprised to hear Campbell's analysis that, "I think we won it at the corner. We were farthest out."

Translation: At Cabo, you turn left for the reach across the mouth of the Gulf of California to the mainland and Vallarta. There's either wind close-in to the rocks, or there's not. Mike is telling us there was not, and it was good to round wide.

Banderas Bay, with Vallarta as an anchor, is developing into something unprecedented in Mexico. A successful 2007 J/24 world championship proved that such things can happen here, and then came an Opti North Americans ("We launched 183 Optis in 26 minutes." Mike Danielson) that helped cement Vallarta Yacht Club's self confidence. The sailing conditions are ideal (lots of long-stay cruisers and gringos with second homes) and easy access for left-coast residents. VYC is gradually taking over the work of running MEXORC and the Banderas Bay Regattas, which were founded by other associations.

VYC is manned mostly by part-time Vallartans and has a cruiser membership too. If you're not in town, you don't pay dues. It's grown into quite the clearing house. Here's Danielson again: "We do a lot of seminars for cruisers. We cover diesel mechanics, radios, everything you need, and we really work on getting them up to speed. It culminates with the Banderas Bay Regatta—we make sure they can sail upwind, the racing is their shakeout—and then the weather window opens in the Pacific and it's time to go and they're ready."

Aboard Peligroso on the morning of the pursuit race, there was a rare event: A broken belt in a grinder . . .

I wish I could tell you how the repair came out, but it was never stress-tested because the other grinder covered the needs of a day with only a handful of tacks. Nobody carries spare belts, apparently, because they never break . . .

A few of you will be amused to see who wound up on the grinders at the start . . .

Others will be more familiar with Roy Dickson's relentless earnestness . . .

For the record, one of his boys (Scott) is driving John MacLaurin's Pendragon.

Peligroso will soon be on its way back to California, but not for long. There's a Cabo race coming up. As Mike Campbell says, "We have to hurry the boat north, so we can race back south."

I think that's what raceboats are for—Kimball

Cross Cultural, and Not Just Because it's Mexico

2008-03-02T19:10:00.019-05:00

Many tired faces around the center of the West Coast racing world as we go into the new week, and the place would be Puerto Vallarta, and the tired faces would be the late finishers of the race from San Diego who rolled into Banderas Bay on Saturday after a slow go on the ocean. And then they had to quickly re-sort themselves for Governor's Cup racing on Sunday with a few hours sleep and at least a tiny celebration of arrival. Hoo, boy.

Rob Moore—you remember him from his days as the racing reporter for Latitude 38-arrived, looking a pit peaked, in the wee hours Saturday aboard Jim Gregory's Morpheus. They had spent far more time on the course than would have been the case, had there been more wind. And, doggies, this was the year (the first year) that the Governor's Cup race was included as counting for points as a MEXORC opener, so everybody had to race even if they were still drying spinnakers on the way out.

Monday is the kickoff for the Banderas Bay Regatta, a cruisers-for-fun series of races where it's okay to tow the dinghy. So you see, host Vallarta Yacht Club really is the center of the left coast world this week. How should it be? Well, we're still making it up.

Footnote to the San Diego-Vallarta Race: It's interesting to note that the Tim Kernan-designed Peligroso won whether you score it ORR or IRC. Which doesn't mean the results are identical, and doesn't mean that they are not. It just means that Peligroso won.

Peligroso - conceived by co-owners Mike Campbell and Dale Williams as an update of the wildly-successful 70-foot sleds that once ruled the West Coast - arrived with an elapsed time of 101.76 hours.

Under ORR, second place went to the first finisher, Magnitude 80, well ahead with an elapsed time of 87.79 hours. The corrected time difference was .16 hour, or a percentage difference of .002.

(Gosh, I hope I'm getting that right. I promised myself I wasn't doing arithmetic after I left college.)

Under IRC, second place went to Stark Raving Mad, Jim Madden's cant-keel Reichel-Pugh 66 out of San Diego that arrived with an elapsed time of 101.81. This single-number system produced a corrected time difference of 16.06 hours, or a percentage difference of .106.

As in a statistically-insignificant difference in outcomes of .1004 percent.

Note: Magnitude 80 was not included in the IRC calculations. Only a few boats carried IRC certificates, but ratings guru Dan Nowlan from US Sailing was on the scene; maybe he can find something of substance in this. And if not, count it not a moral failing. I'll consult The Dan.

I'll also catch up on Vallarta Race Week developments as the week goes along. For now, let me share the fact that it is good to be in Mexico . . .

This is a place where someone knows how to turn out the TV cameras for a pre-regatta ceremony . . .

It is also a place where families let it flow. This young lady was the firebrand of the dancing, following the awards ceremony for the Vallarta Race. All her prancing pics (that I took) missed the point, but get this closing gesture . . .

And this opener to the next number . . .

So the young man perhaps was a bit shy . . .

A few minutes later he was over it . . .

The Governor's Cup racing that followed on Sunday was a cross-cultural exchange of the sort that doesn't happen at every regatta in every port in the world. Because, you see, you can't kick off Vallarta Race Week without a parade. This is Mexico. So before the race of the day, there was a parade. Here is the parade . . .

No, you didn't miss much if you missed the parade, unless you missed the parade on our boat. Vallarta YC commodore John Moore thought it was quite a hoot that Puerto Vallarta Choppers/Route 200 Bar & Grill wanted to sponsor his boat in the parade. (His boat is a rather nice fish killer named Therapy.) Eduardo Cortes Delgado is the man at PV Choppers, and he brought along decorations (!) and a delegation . . .

Real nice folks, with their own strange sports addiction, kinda like mine but different. Here's Eduardo, design master, constructing a more fashionable top for his lady friend . . .

And celebrating the result . . .

Banderas Bay was as-advertised. Warm and lovely, with dolphins at play and a breeze a'building for the race of the day. The rest is gratuitous . . .

Shantih shantih shantih—Kimball

A New Cape Horn Record

2008-02-28T14:21:00.013-05:00

Gitana 13 day on San Francisco Bay:

Lionel Lemenchois and crew had a slow trip of it in their passage from the ocean to a finish line off the Hyde Street Pier. A finish line, that is, of their record-breaking passage from New York to San Francisco, via Cape Horn, along the route established by the clipper ships in the days of yore.

Here is the big cat entering the Golden Gate Strait . . .

The arrival marks the end of a 43-day, 14,000-mile journey that knocks big time off the old, 57-day record. Lemonchois, skipper this time around, crewed on the last two boats that lowered the NY-SF record, but this was the first attempt in 10 years. Considering that the crew hunkered down for weather short of the Horn -- and waited days for a weather window, and still lowered the mark by a chunk -- you know that 10 years of development in boats and weather routing have had an impact. And you know that there is room for another effort to shave time off of this mark.

Gitana 13 fought down-bay in light winds in wide, reaching legs as far as the historic ships of the Hyde Street Pier. She finished, looking leisurely, during San Francisco's morning rush hour . . .

By report, the boat is taking a mooring on the north shore of San Francisco Bay, at Corinthian Yacht Club in Belvedere. Myself, I'm packing to leave for Banderas Bay Race Week/MEXORC, so this is it for me. I'll be checking in on the boats now finishing the Vallarta Race from San Diego. Folks like the fellow in this shot, which somehow seems to want the caption . . .

Hmm. My dominatrix said to put it on this way. Or was it--

But before I go, let's recap the New York-San Francisco record. We'll start with the official capsule of the journey of Gitana 13: "Gitana 13 crossed the finish line of La Route de l’Or, situated just off the infamous island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, at 1707 (UT). After over 43 days 38 minutes at sea, including a forced five and a half day stand-by at Cape Horn, Lionel Lemonchois and his nine crew improved on the reference time held since 1998 by Yves Parlier and his men by 14 days 2 hours and 43 minutes. The maxi-catamaran in the colours of the LCF Rothschild Group covered the 14,000 miles, which separate New York from San Francisco at an average speed of 15.88 knots and thus set their first record time in their 2008 record campaign."

Those of you who read my January blogs on the history of the Cape Horn record -- and paid attention, and have a memory (both of you) -- should already be up to speed. Others might enjoy this look back:

Here I am on the shores of San Francisco Bay, brimming with nostalgia for a time when a passel of big guns were shooting for this unique, all-American record. Clipper ships around Cape Horn, bound for the gold fields—those guys set the standard. It took more than a century for technology to meet the pace.

The USA doesn't see much big-time record-chasing these days, except as a starting point or ending point. But I recall a few vivid years when the Clipper Ship record was the big one that lured adventurous sailors to one spectacular failure after another. In 1988 alone, no fewer than five attempts were planned in the wake of (did I mention) one spectacular failure after another.

Mind you, we are talking Cape Horn, the wrong way, at a pull-the-string-tight distance of 14,000 miles.

I seem to also recall some bickering over which clipper ship record really mattered, but the 89-day passage of the famed Flying Cloud was the benchmark. How hard can it be?

Flying Cloud went 89 days in 1854.

Two years later Flying Cloud made the same passage—reputedly including a 402 mile day—in 185 days. Do the comparison.

Today we have weather routing, but no guarantees. I like to picture Flying Cloud this way . . .

In the 1980s, as a sailing writer for The San Francisco Chronicle (yes, there used to be such a thing), I exchanged no telling how many letters with Frenchman Guy Bernardin, who tried for the Cape Horn record and cracked up more times than I can remember and never made it to San Francisco, and I never met the fellow but I feel as if I know him. He broke boats. He broke masts. He was alone on each attempt, but not alone in his misfortunes. Others tried once, failed, and limped away. Guy Bernardin kept at it.

Did I mention that we are talking Cape Horn, the wrong way?

In 1988/89 came the breakthrough. A year before, maybe two, I had engaged in a frank exchange of views with the sports editor of the paper. I was arguing for more space for one of my stories about a Cape Horn attempt. I expressed the opinion that, yes, these things keep on coming—and going—but sooner or later one will break through and as the boat closes on San Francisco the paper will dispatch a reporter and a photographer in a plane and it will be the biggest story of the season. The sports editor expressed the opinion that I was full of (substance found in a barnyard) and this business of hiring a plane for a photogger, for a sailing story of all things, would never happen.

A New Record at Last

The boat that finally cleared the Horn—after a five day Falklands stopover for repairs—was an early generation Open 60. As Thursday's Child closed on San Francisco in February, 1989, the cityside section of the paper dispatched a reporter (not me) and a photographer in a plane to hunt the boat down. I was meanwhile called in and encouraged to, ahem, proceed with vigor, lest the dratted cityside section steal our (the sports section's) story.

Cityside cared about a splashy passage into the bay. I cared about that too, but I knew too much. I knew that on that very day, Philippe Monnet was in far southern climes, trying to make port after ramming ice. Anne Liardet was closing on the Horn, but running behind the pace of Thursday's Child. And Guy Bernardin (a year earlier he had been in a 60-footer that fell off a wave, broke its mast, and eventually sank) was under tow in his latest broken boat; he would be taken ashore at Cape Desolation under the care of the Chilean Navy.

Honest, it was quite a time.

Thursday's Child was skippered by Warren Luhrs, a honcho at Hunter Marine. His bottom line re. 14,000 miles: "Wouldn't do anything different; wouldn't do it again.'' Luhrs had in company Courtney Hazelton and Lars Bergstrom, whose name lives on the backstay-free Bergstrom rig. Having finally found the right mix of technology, skill, and luck, they sailed through the Golden Gate, to great acclaim, under a bright winter sun on their 80th day out of New York. The weather was even a bit similar to that welcoming Gitana 13, come to think of it.

Lacking a plan, their team asked their only San Francisco contact (me) where they should time a finish.

And I, lacking the slightest clue as to how the Flying Cloud might have done the job 134 years earlier, suggested two possibilities: Off the San Francisco Marina breakwater (it's just inside the Gate) or off the maritime museum at Hyde Street Pier. Because that's down toward the harbor where sailing ships used to tie up, and where so many were abandoned by crews who took off for the gold fields. The Thursday's Child people decided to take a time at both landmarks.

It was in 1998, crewing on PRB for Yves Parlier, that Lemonchois set the 57-day record he just overturned.

Dig the 2008 sked for Gitana 13:
• Route de l’Or (New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn)
• The North Pacific (San-Francisco to Yokohama)
• Yokohama – Dalian
• Dalian – Taipei
• Taipei – Hong-Kong
• Route du Thé (Hong-Kong to London)

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Guy Bernardin is part-way around the world on a replica of Joshua Slocum's Spray. At the moment he's hunkered down in Talcahuano, a port city in Chile, with a boat that needs repairs and a pocketbook that needs replenishment.

Thursday's Child is alive and cared for on San Francisco Bay and probably can be seen at the Oakland boat show in April.

Flying Cloud is gone with the mists of time, along with so many great ships that plied the Cape Horn route. The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park has a fine collection, but there's nary a clipper ship to be seen.

Sad.

Because the West wasn't built by cowboys—Kimball

!

Stories Sailors Tell

2008-02-24T09:26:00.016-05:00

So here we are on the Mysterious East coast, and Harken has just opened a new shop in Newport, so Peter, Olaf, and a passel of the usual suspects from Pewaukee are basking in the (relative) warmth of Rhode Island, where the snow is only about 10 inches deep and a day old. Wisconsin, eat your heart out. Naturally there's a launch party. I'm on the scene, coaxing Around Alone vet Tim Kent to recount tales from the fluky weather of his qualifying sail with Everest Horizontal.

Not to fall asleep with the spinnaker up, that was Tim's goal. Because the breeze was light, except for the occasional slammer squall. And I'm not someone who can come away from a night like that with every detail in place, but the story went something like this—

Naturally, Tim did fall asleep. And naturally he awoke to discover that The Squall With His Name On It had arrived.

Boat on its ear. Spreaders in the water. Spinnaker way out yonder in the south forty with the fishies. Whitecaps hissing. Lightning flashing. I said LIGHTNING FLASHING. Fast-forward then through a few I'll-never-do-that-agains and we find our man Tim scrambling into position to do the right thing. As he tells the story:

"I had a moment when I said to myself, 'Tim, stop, look at this. Just look. Hardly anybody in the world will ever see such a sight.' "

And Now

Now we're in a four-wheel drive car and snow is falling and Ted Hood is driving us from Portsmouth to Bristol via the Mount Hope Bridge . . .

And the subject comes up, stories sailors tell, and I decide to tell a story about telling a story. Tighten your seat belt, because we're going all the way back to America's Cup, 1987, and in the media center (centre? it was Aussieland, after all) I fell into a conversation with Walter Cronkhite. It was a big deal for me to be talking with "the most trusted man in America," and he told a tale about searching for a bell buoy in the Maine fog and—

He got that far before a phalanx of phalanxers surrounded him and the head phalanxist announced, "Mr. Cronkhite, they're ready for you now." With an apology, he excused himself and was gone.

Oh, well.

A day later, maybe two, I was walking down a street in Fremantle. Walter was walking the opposite direction on the opposite side of the street. Then he crossed the streeet, came up, looked me in the eye and said, "So we could hear the bell through the fog . . . "

Back to driving to Bristol.

Ted is indulging me because I have never been to the Herreshoff Marine Museum, and it wasn't hard to talk our way in, even though the museum is technically closed for the winter. They close because boats that live outside or in the water in-season are brought indoors for shelter. No problem for us if things are tight-packed. In fact, for me, it's not the exquisite old boats but the model room that has the most impact. All those half models on the wall, and right there the cabinetry from the Herreshoff house and the lathe and tools used for making models . . .

For that matter, there's a half model that Halsey Herreshoff has in-build for someone right now . . .

A patient person, we hope, because Halsey is off on a long cruise.
Sorry, Halsey, you're busted.

I'm taken with the discovery that Jack Sutphen's Mushrooms have one of the larger exhibits. The Mushrooms, a few of you will need to know, were the speed-test team on Dennis Conner's other boat in his America's Cup campaigns. They became the Mushrooms when one of the crew remarked how they were kept in the dark and fed S#&@, "like a bunch of mushrooms."

That objet d'art above the sign is a set of wings briefly and forlornly attached to the 12-Meter Liberty in 1983 to see if the boat would suddenly take wing against the dreaded Aussie II. In the department of interesting to me: I've heard lots of analyses of why the Australians passed the US defender on the final downwind leg of the seventh race, but Hood was the first to ever say to me, "The Australians had a much better spinnaker—I didn't build it, Schnack built it—so I can say that."

Hood couldn't have built the Australian sail because that would have been illegal for an American sailmaker. Such was the case beginning 1962. As we stroll a little farther through the America's Cup Hall of Fame building at the Herreshoff Museum, we come to a print on the wall of a famous black and white photo you've probably seen--Gretel surfing past Weatherly. Ted points to it and remarks, "I built that spinnaker for the Aussies. After that, the committee decided that sails had to be built in the boat's country of origin. It was the Ted Hood rule."

I felt a bit evil doing this, but I made Ted pose for a tourist-style snapshot, close to his own picture on the wall . . .

Sailmaker, designer, builder, skipper of 1974 America's Cup defender Courageous. That's Ted Hood. In 1994 he bought back his 1959 ocean racer, Robin ("Sue, my wife, wouldn't let me name any of the kids Robin, so it had to be the boats") for $4,000. If anybody needs a reality check re. the cost of old, wood boats, consider that this one has been restored, still wins races, and has soaked up about $200,000 so far. Ted describes this first of many Robins as, "a heavy-weather hull with a light-air rig." The boat is dry for the winter, but not warm . . .

With that image of Robin we're out of the Herreshoff Museum, out of Bristol, and back in Melville, RI, which is, municipally, some sort of slice of Portsmouth, RI (I don't understand and I don't have to and I'm definitely not doing the research) and we're still in the car but now we're in this huge marina complex that Hood developed from nothing and then sold (mostly) to Hinckley. However, he still owns the signature office building at the front of the complex, which, if you squint through the snow and read the names over the door, you will recognize as quite a hub. Newport R&D, btw, is Garry Hoyt . . .

But I'm still in a car with Hood and we're down the way and looking up through the windshield at 12 Meter US19, Nefertiti, on a cradle on the hard. The snow is still coming down and Ted points to the underbody—the long keel of the day, attached rudder—and he says, "We went to the tank testing and the tank kept saying to make the keel longer, make the keel longer. So we made the keel longer. But the tank had the wrong numbers for wetted surface. When we raced-off against Weatherly [for the right to defend the America's Cup in 1962; Ted was, uniquely, designer, skipper, and sailmaker], we were faster in a breeze; they were faster in the light stuff. It came down to that. The last races of the trials were light air, so Weatherly defended."

His story.

Mine: Even the guy who landed the big one (12 years later) laments the big one that got away. Ted Hood is known as a man of few words, but that's a load of BS. Ask him, Ted, how do you feel? You'll get nothing. But he'll talk engineering till the cows come home. Watching him respond to generations-old but intelligent hardware at Herreshoff's was a revelation, and he's not exactly shy about the virtues and comforts of his new Expedition 55 Motorsailer.

I found the boat rather comfortable myself. Little though I wanted to, eventually I had to leave.

What Set Me Off

Was the San Diego Yacht Club's call, in connection with its Vallarta Race -- the fleet is off the coast of Baja right now -- for Mexico race stories to be published on the
Scuttlebutt web site.

I had a few chats with various parties associated with the race—I'll be at the other end for Banderas Bay Race Week/MEXORC—and I have to admit the process brought back a few memories of my own. Reading about their pre-start party plans sounded fantastic—except for all this talk of a genuine, Mexicano sendoff and my wonderment: Would they do that margarita fountain again?

I remember one San Diego Yacht Club margarita fountain (rather dimly) as the night before the morning that I remember (all-too clearly) as the only time I've ever had the dry heaves on a start line.

Shifting, gratefully, to 2008:

Dennis—that Dennis—offered thoughts on racing to Mexico, and so have others. Here's mine:

I was in grad school in 1974, but the situation was imperfect. For example, I was the only person in graduate school with a tan. I had a meeting with the dean and we agreed, more or less: If they would give me a masters degree, I would leave; and if I would leave, they would give me a masters degree. About 72 hours later I was on my way to Mexico on the last of the Acapulco Races.

SDYC had begun racing to Acapulco in 1953. Acapulco was the place to go at the time, but times change. Other good options appeared as Mexico grew and emerged, and eventually racers from the USA preferred to avoid the obstacle of the last few hundred miles down the mainland. Think light air.

We proved the problem.

In my 1974 race to Acapulco, we woke up on the morning of day nine (I believe it was day nine) looking at Acapulco off the bow. When the sun went down, we were still looking at Acapulco off the bow.

But that's not my story.

We had one guy on the crew who had promised us, long-distance rookies all, that he would take care of us once we got to that place where, apparently, most of the people spoke Spanish. That faraway place called Mexico.

So when a light breeze finally carried us into Acapulco Bay and across the finish line in the deep darkness when we felt like we should have been there hours before, we motored over to the only light we could see on the water. It was a small fishing boat with two guys dangling poles over the side. Our man said, "Dandee istee clubee yachtee."

They didn't even look up.

But that's not my story.

I sailed the race on Ed Perry's Ambush, a One Tonner (hot at the time) as the bow boy for both watches (think, less sleep, more fun).

This could lose me some friends, but I'll tell you a secret. I don't drink on boats. Not beer, not etc.

I was also the only member of the regular Ambush crew that was free to race to Acapulco, so Ed brought in a bunch of his fellow airline pilots. Sailing freaks all, including a couple with somewhat more of a yen for beer than I've expressed, if you get my drift.

Being heavy, the six-packs were loaded into the bilge along with (being heavy) the non-feathering propeller for the trip back up the coast.

Now, define "battery."

Salt water in the bilge plus aluminum plus a second metal agent, for example.

Halfway down Baja, the beers started coming out of the bilge suspiciously light. It was almost a moral issue.

Can you spell c-r-i-s-i-s?

Me? I just popped the new guy into the pole, every time we gybed. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it—Kimball

ADD NEWS: 18 FOOT SKIFF CHAMPIONSHIPS

Sunday, February 24. As reported by the Australian 18 Footers League:

The young Gotta Love It 7 crew of Seve Jarvin, Sam Newton and Robert Bell officially became the new world champions when they won the SLAM-Winning Appliances Giltinan International Championship, which concluded on Sydney Harbour today.

Photo by Christophe Favreau

Defending champions Michael Coxon, Aaron Links and Nathan Ellis brought Fiat home a narrow winner today to finish second overall behind Gotta Love It 7, while Hugh Stodart's Asko Appliances was third, just ahead of Omega Smeg (Trevor Barnabas).

Coxon and his team led all the way in today's race and looked likely to score an easy win but had to survive a brilliant finish by Kinder Caring Home Nursing (Brett Van Munster).

Fiat crossed the finish line just one second ahead of Kinder Caring while yesterday's Race 6 winner Rag & Famish Hotel (John Harris) finished another 1min 55secs back in third place.

Coxon and Van Munster elected to take their skiffs to the right hand side of the course on the first windward leg while Gotta Love It 7 and Club Marine (Adam Beashel) went to the left.

At the windward mark, Fiat led from Kinder Caring with Ssangyong Yandoo (John Winning) in third place.

Fiat was 15secs ahead at the wing mark and gradually increased the lead throughout the race.

At the second windward mark the lead was out to 1 minute from Kinder Caring while Ssangyong Yandoo and Gotta Love It 7 were battling hard for third place.

The Gotta Love It 7 crew worked their way into second place at the final windward mark with just the spinnaker run between Rose Bay and Clarke Island to the finish.

Fiat and Gotta Love It 7 were above the finish line and had to gybe twice near the mouth of Double Bay.

Kinder Caring had carried their spinnaker much lower than the others and were on a direct line to the finish.
Fiat completed her gybes but Gotta Love It 7 capsized as Kinder Caring came 'steaming' home.

The experienced Fiat crew were under terrific pressure but retained their composure to beat Kinder Caring home by a mere second in a wonderful finish.

By Australian 18 Footers League.

A final note: The skiffs are coming back to the USA this summer, to San Francisco Bay, and they're upping the number of boats. I like that.

A Racer's Legacy

2008-02-20T02:55:00.021-05:00

A side benefit of Jack Sutphen's book-signing party—Messing About in Boats for 80 Years—was the inspiration to visit Myron Spaulding's boat yard for the first time since it became the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center.

"Myron" was a one-name institution around San Francisco Bay, and he was sailing master of the Dorade (yes, that Dorade) when it won the 1936 Transpac and became the first boat ever to sweep first-to-finish and handicap honors in that race. Thus continued the hit parade that began with winning the Trans-Atlantic and then the Fastnet before Dorade came west.

Most of Myron's 95-year life and influence came after that Transpac, and in the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center, on the lively waterfront of Sausalito, lies an opportunity to preserve a time capsule that could never be recreated and, for many people, could not even be imagined without seeing to believe. This was, in its heyday, an epicenter of sailboat racing on the West Coast.

As sailor, designer, builder, fixer-upper and measurer, Myron cast a long shadow. I figure that Warwick "Commodore" Tompkins—now in New Zealand with his very racy cruiser, Flashgirl, was a prototypal professional sailor. Commodore calls Myron, "a second father," which is pretty much the tone of things with the raceboat designers and boatyard owners you find today on the shores of San Francisco Bay. One after another, Myron shaped'em up and sent'em out, not always with single-note emotions. Quoting Commodore again, Myron was, "a complicated man; a seat-of-the-pants scientist; a synthesizer of ideas, possessed of an exhaustive memory and a remarkable charm, which he chose to use occasionally."

Myron designed the 20-foot Clipper class (72 boats built) and the Spaulding 33 (10 built) and ocean racers including his 1949 masterpiece, Buoyant Girl, which won the Pacific Coast Championship with Myron on the helm. How it is that I tried repeatedly to interview Myron but never succeeded is a story that tells OK, but I don't think I could ever write it.

So there we were, and it was Jack Sutphen's day . . .

Jack told a number of the stories from the book, published through the Classic Yacht Foundation, including this one that explains why, in matters of the America's Cup, I never believe anything I see until race day. We enter the story as Jack recalls the time when Dennis Conner was cranking up the campaign that would lead to his walkover comeback win in Australia. First there was this exhibition race:

"The campaign started in San Diego with the delivery of Stars & Stripes 85 . . . The race was to be in the harbor off the Star of India and the Berkeley, San Diego Maritime Museum boats, and a big crowd. In five to six knots of breeze it quickly became apparent that Liberty was faster than the new boat. Malin [Burnham] and I were on Liberty and Malin at the helm cranked in some extra turns on the trim tab and we slowed Liberty down so Dennis could just nose us out to win the race. The good news was, as soon as we got to Hawaii with Stars & Stripes 85 and Liberty, in anything over ten knots, 85 was faster."

And, there was time to poke around the yard. The project of the moment is to restore little Freda, built in 1885 and the oldest surviving yacht on San Francisco Bay. I've known the Freda though successive restorations, but this was a shock, to see an all-new bottom in the works . . .

As explained: When a boat was built more than a hundred years ago with square, iron nails, you have to figure such a time will come . . .

So let's just nose around . . .

And that is my report of what's being done in this little corner of the world to preserve our wedge of sailing history. We are lucky to be starting with a site that is, itself, a living museum piece.

To copy a bit of the official language: The Center was built on the Sausalito waterfront in 1951 by Myron Spaulding, concert violinist, legendary sailor, and yacht designer and builder. In 2002, the Spauldings' generous gift turned this functional and historic boat yard into a non-profit charitable organization and living museum. SWBC plans to offer a range of public programs that allow public access to the historic boatyard and the waterfront, including classes, workshops, events and forums on subjects ranging from traditional boatbuilding skills to the preservation of the historic Sausalito waterfront.

Every vital sailing center has something of the sort going on, and I have an impulse to name a few, but then I'm slighting others, so zip my lips. My plan this week is to flip coasts, bundle up, and visit the Herreshoff Museum in Bistol, Rhode Island (closed for the winter, but there's a back door)and I'll name that one here because the Herreshoff Museum is truly iconic and also anchored in a name. When the name comes natural-like, that's a good thing.

Herreshoff is a much bigger name than Spaulding, to be sure. But I'm going to quote myself on the subject, because this I believe:

Myron? Well, he was Myron. Frisco Bay to the core. Aced the woodshop class at Polytechnic High ("By the time I had finished my bookends, that guy had built a boat." Prescott Sullivan). Damn fine first-fiddle with the symphony until he quit that for a 95-year-lucid life of designing, building, measuring, fixing, and sailing sailing sailing boats. Did he own one pair of wrinkled khakis or twenty pair identical? Kind of like a character in Faulkner: so individual that he carried all of the life of the galaxy inside him—Kimball

Vibratory Phenomena (CRACK!)

2008-02-17T15:15:00.028-05:00

This post is hardly dry, noting "vibratory phenomena" that cautioned the crew of Groupama 3 to moderate their pace, and now comes word that the leeward float broke and the crew have been airlifted off the capsized trimaran. The words below are actually more relevant now . . .

Into the Pacific now and bound for Cape Horn, Groupama 3 doglegged north over the weekend to dodge the worst of a 50-knot blow, sacrificing distance in favor of safety and still leading in its double race against time. There's (1) the fifty-day circumnavigation record that (nope, we know better now) Franck Cammas and crew can probably beat and (2) the likelihood that this is the last crack at a round-the-world record this boat will ever have (got that much right).

A bigger hammer is on the way.

(See below, but that's not the story of the moment.)

Reading between the lines, there is (was) nothing routine aboard Groupama 3, even though the communications express(ed) confidence of rounding the Horn in a week or so and covering the remaining 10,000 miles to Ushant at a pace that will (would have) advance(d) the record. There are suspicions in some quarters that the crew turned north, not because of the weather, but because they feared a breakup and wanted to be closer to land. They were only 80 miles off New Zealand when the leeward hull cracked. While cross-tracking north in twentyish-foot seas, crewman Franck Proffit wrote, "It's the first time we've encountered this type of wave. The boat handles well. She doesn't bury, though there are vibratory phenomena in the floats and beams requiring us to be careful."

Right.

And there was the broken number one batten, up at the headboard, that would have required dropping the main at the next opportunity (flatter seas), and aboard these monster trimarans, dropping and rehoisting the mainsail is a major, all-hands trial. But when you have a job in the record-breaking industry, these are the tests that come your way (including broken boats). Only hours before the breakup -- day 24 and about halfway around -- this was the upbeat take from the Groupama 3 web site: "We can expect some astounding average speeds at the start of the week. Although Orange II was pretty quick in the Pacific, it is now established that Groupama 3 can step up the pace and make up further ground as soon as the big westerly swell gets behind it."

Never happened. This shot was taken during the rescue and lift-off . . .

Crew were airlifted safely to Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island.

This read differently before the breakup, but let's pick up the story anyway:

THE BIGGER HAMMER

That would be Banque Populaire V, coming, "dès l'hiver 2008-2009 pour la conquête des records océaniques les plus mythiques autour de la planète, coming in the winter of 2008-2009 to conquer the most mythical oceanic records on the planet."

Mythical? Whatever.

Banque Populaire V is to be no less than 131 feet long. When the main hull left the builder's yard in Cherbourg last October, it was quite a sight, as snapped by Ivan Zedda . . .

Banque Populaire V is scheduled to launch this spring and then get serious about its work next winter, after the requisite teething. The parts are coming together now in Lorient, up a protected bight from the Bay of Biscay. Not too long ago, the parts looked like this . . .

This puppy is going to come out 29 feet longer than Groupama 3, with a lot more sail power. Scary? Bigger weapons usually are.

NY-SF ONE ROUTE DU RHUM AT A TIME

The Gitana 13 team on its way to a probable new record on the clipper ship/Cape Horn route continues to make time up the western coast of South America, though the crew sounds a bit frustrated that their distance through the water and distance made good don't match. As of Monday Gitana was crossing the line of 4 degrees south latitude.

The crews aboard these boats have their own way of measuring things. Thus we find Nicolas Reynaud writing from west of Ecuador, "Same wind direction, same changes in trajectory to stay in the good wind, same speed, and San Francisco is now only a Route du Rhum away."

As I write, the Gitana catamaran is 33 days into an attempt to beat Yves Parlier's 57-day record from the Big Apple to the Golden Gate. That mark has gone unchallenged through ten years of developing bigger hammers, and it sits there as a big, fat target for skipper Lionel Lemonchois, who crewed in each of the last two successful record shots.

MEDIA WATCH

Al Jazeera has denounced as a "risk to freedom" a code of journalism favored by 20 of 22 members of the Arab League, excepting Lebanon and (Al Jazeera's state sponsor) Qatar.

Quoting: Arab information ministers meeting in Cairo endorsed the charter, which allows host countries to annul or suspend the licence of any broadcaster found in violation of the rules it sets. The Cairo document stipulates that satellite channels "should not damage social harmony, national unity, public order or traditional values". It says that programming should also "conform with the religious and ethical values of Arab society and take account of its family structure".

I know, I know, that's not yachtie news, but I keep up with Al Jazeera. You might recall, Al Jazeera ran America's Cup reports in 2007, while sportsillusstrated.cnn.com did not.

And yes, the Volvo Race dropped its Mideast stop with quite a lack of fanfare, didn't it?

THERE'S GREAT SNOW IN THE SIERRA BUT

Not everybody in California went skiing last weekend. This was the pre-race scene at Corinthian Yacht Club's two-day Midwinter series. No, you didn't want to be part of the gangrounding of
R-12, but we'll save that nightmare for a different telling, and later this week we'll (re)visit the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center with Jack Sutphen—Kimball