My wife, Sarah, is my secret weapon for a lot of things, especially when it comes to mark roundings on Barnegat Bay, where she learned to sail. About 60 years later, she and I are racing our brand new Melges 15, and we’re in the hunt. We’re nearing the top mark somewhere between Marjorie’s Bar and Barrel Island, where locals know tide will be a factor.

“You’re going to want to ­overstand,” she says in a tone that means business.

The port tackers coming into the mark from the left are facing an adverse 2-knot ­current, and there’s a notable cluster developing where we don’t want to be. Summoning her years of local knowledge—learned in the pressure cooker of the Sneakbox fleet and passed down like the tablets from her illustrious forebears sailing E Scows—we hold high on the starboard layline (into the next ZIP code as far as I’m concerned), and pass elegantly around the hot, screaming mess to leeward.

This is when the fun really starts. In three tugs, she launches the asymmetric spinnaker out of the bow sock. We harden up and immediately rocket onto a plane. We manage the first jibe with a modicum of grace. But we’re quickly passed by Emily Haig and crew, father John, whose butt appears flush with the freeboard. (Note to self: As with proper grammar and holding the door for one’s lady, you cannot escape certain rules…including the need to hike.)

For the remainder of the day, Sarah is gracious enough to hold her tongue at the sloppy tacks, the cringe-inducing tactics and, well, let’s not mention the starts. But after every race in that July barnburner, we are relearning tacking, jibing, ­balance and tide sweep. We’re sailing fast and we’re laughing it up.

We are back in the game.

And that was precisely the point back in the plague-ridden winter of 2020 when we took a call from our friend Chris Fretz, a fellow traveler from Little Egg Harbor YC. He wanted us to pony up the money we weren’t spending on restaurants and buy into the sight-unseen idea of the Melges 15. Sarah and I had grown up sailing E Scows with our dads. In a more recent epoch, we crewed together on Doug Galloway’s LE-4 and rekindled our enthusiasm for the beloved boat of our upbringing.

I also discovered how much I loved sailing with Sarah—me on the jib, Sarah on the spinnaker, Rich Neff on the boards and uphauls, Doug tasked with getting us around the course unscathed. Excellent times. But then our friend Doug passed away from cancer—and the E Scow was just too much of a strain.

Enter the Melges 15.

Through the miracles of YouTube, I got a sense for the boat’s capabilities, fell madly in love with the kite, and sold my wife on the concept in about five seconds. Little did I realize, Sarah got the same email with the same YouTube link. She was in the next room putting together her pitch. We met in the kitchen and placed the order. Right then. Right there.

It came down to this: After the thrills of a performance experience like the E Scow, we were loath to retreat to a “retirement” boat with bench seating like the Lightning, the Flying Scot, or any of the well-regarded family of Marshall cats (insert apology to all loyal devotees here). We wanted our fannies to once again make contact with the gunwale. And like a lot of scow sailors (who’ve also had experience sailing iceboats), we are crazy for off-wind speed. Now Sarah and I are out there sharing the same adrenalin. In a big blow, with the kite up and the boat half out of the water, we are young again.

Bonus: We switch up the duties and both steer every other race, which gives the crewing party a chance to offer (mostly) sage, nurturing advice.

Builder Harry Melges III says that the design brief for the Melges 15 was challenging in its simplicity. It had to appeal to kids of all ages, like us.

“The classes with the best ability to incorporate the entire family are the ones that have generational success,” Melges says. “We really focused on making sure the M15 was fun, stable, durable, a great performer, comfortable for all ages to sail, and priced to be a great value.”

Apparently, we aren’t the only ones who’ve decided the Reichel/Pugh-designed M15 might be the “it” boat of our age. From a standing start this past spring, the class hosted its first three-regatta winter series in Sarasota, Florida, in January. The top-five finishers in the first regatta saw a mix of youth, experience and ­family togetherness. JJ Smith and Will Murray, of Palmetto, Florida—who were also top woman and top youth, respectively—won the first regatta, beating Finn Burdick and Melges president Andy Burdick, of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, with son skippering and dad crewing. There were Top Masters, Top Grandmasters, and what the heck, Top Mega Masters Ted Weihe and Joe Grabowski, of Sarasota.

What brought this 25-boat regatta together for the first winter series in a class that’s not even a year old? It might be something a little deeper than the “something for everyone” fallback. Someone, probably a Phoenician, said that a boat is a compromise. Strengths are offset by weaknesses. A gain here means giving up something over there. If there’s a compromise anywhere on this boat, we can’t find it. If anything, it’s built on this central premise: Make it fast and make it easy.

I see the Melges 15′s DNA in Reichel/Pugh’s big-boat ­offshore progenitors, like the record-smashing Wild Oats XI. A chop-cleaving plumb stem and narrower sections forward flare out to a maximum beam carried well aft. Flat sections from the midpoint translate ­farther aft to a wide transom that invites ready planing.

You see this design lineage in the Reichel/Pugh-designed Melges 24 and Melges 14. At every place the Melges 15 touches the water, the boat makes maximum use of the opportunity. That chop-­busting prow upwind transitions to a scowlike surf machine off the wind. With the kite up, the bow lifts out of the water all the way back to the chainplates. Even when we’re sliding down the front of a wave, the boat feels nicely balanced, with controls that fall effortlessly to hand, an easily driven sail plan, and spin-on-a-dime ­maneuverability. Sailing fast is stable, safe and fun.

So much for how the boat connects with the water; how does the crew connect with the boat? When I step aboard, I see that the rectangular cockpit is deep, and my knees offer thanks. The wraparound side tanks supply plenty of buoyancy either underway or just fiddling at the dock hoisting the sails. The pintles snap smartly into the gudgeons for the beefy alloy rudder. Likewise, the alloy daggerboard slots through a pair of trunk-protecting ABS plastic receivers.

The main and jib sheets lead into the crew positions amidships, and control main, jib and spinnaker. There are enough tweakable items such as the jib sheet leads and traveler to satisfy the confirmed tinkerer. The breakthrough vang design offers leech tension with a strut extending from above the gooseneck down to the boom, which makes traversing the cockpit a pleasure.

Our tour concludes at the bow, where the asymmetric kite emerges from a rugged bow sock affixed to the flat, elevated platform forward of the mast. The retractable sprit emerges, lancelike, when you pull the halyard, which is on a continuous circuit that leads out through the sock, through three grommets in the sail, ­culminating at the top. To strike, pop the halyard and pull on the douse line, which collapses the sail back into the sock and automatically retracts the ­bungee-enabled sprit.

So just what do we have here? It’s a quick-to-plane 15-foot doublehander weighing in at 230 pounds built around an easy-to-handle sail plan and a laugh-out-loud asym. Crew weight shouldn’t exceed 400 pounds. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. It’s a great boat for sailors with all kinds of different experience levels: emerging juniors, intercollegiate sailors, beginner and returning seniors, couples, moms, dads, and kids.

The racing is tight enough to offer close-quarters ­stimulation, and we’re always learning something new. The buy-in is manageable, and whole fleets are materializing out of the blue. If anything, the recent winter regatta series in Sarasota showed us that women intercollegiate sailors and other youngsters have an edge. But that’s always been the case, and returning alums (like Sarah and me) are just happy to be up there occasionally, where we can see the whites of their eyes.

When Sarah and I get off our Melges 15, the boat is the topic of conversation in the car, over dinner, and before the lights turn out at night. When we get off the boat, we want to get right back on.

Sarah calls her Dreamboat. It’s a perfect fit.

The post The Melges 15 Hits a Sweet Spot appeared first on Sailing World.

With the HH66 catamaran’s sharp reversed bows pointing into a light northerly, the electric halyard winch winds a square-headed mainsail swiftly skyward. A single crew member assists while standing atop the carbon boom while the rest of the sailing team stands elbow to elbow in the pit, observing the thick halyard tail snaking into its rope well beneath the mast. At their backs, watching through the catamaran’s large glass windshield, is the solitary helmsman, his hands resting upon the polished carbon steering wheel, anticipating the moment he can bear away, unfurl the Code Zero, and watch the boatspeed race to 10 knots in a blink.

The speed build is fluid and easy. There’s no chaos, no clamor of crew grinding the headsail home before scurrying to the rail. Instead, there’s a fine-tune button press or two, and when the Boat of the Year judges — Chuck Allen, Tom Rich and Greg Stewart — finally look up from all the controls and displays at their fingertips, the distant Chesapeake Bay shoreline is blurring past.

It’s said that a big boat dulls any sensation of speed, but with the H66, the judges are feeling quite the opposite.

“The boat immediately comes alive,” says Stewart, who eventually abandons the boat’s inside helm station and takes the best seat in the house: the white carbon helmsman’s chair mounted alongside the tiller. For experienced sailors, the short carbon tillers are perhaps the one simple and distinct detail that immediately separates the HH66 from other cruiser/racer catamarans of this ilk.

“When you’re racing, you’ll be out at the tiller,” says Stewart. “It makes a big difference being where you can better feel the wind and the heel angle. The sight lines through the window and under the jib are good.”

For long passages, or in bad weather, he adds, you can simply duck inside to the big, cushy leather chair.

Even with the inherent friction associated with having two tillers and two wheels connected to the steering system, the feel on the HH66 helm is light and engaging, says Stewart, and that’s partly due to a combination of hull shape and the boat’s deep C-shaped carbon daggerboards. The boat, says Stewart, drives like a well-balanced big boat, not a big rig.

Acknowledging the influence of pioneering Gunboat Catamarans of the past, designs that propelled the high-performance crossover catamaran genre to where it is today, yacht designer Gino Morrelli says the HH Catamarans line — which spans from 66 to a 48-footer in the pipeline — benefits from 15 years of make-and-break development. The HH66’s hull profile is full forward, flatter in the midsection, and bigger in the transoms, says Morrelli, which, when coupled with less rocker than his Gunboat designs, results in better handling in a seaway. Less pitching, he says, is fast.

“Daggerboards have changed dramatically over the years as well,” adds Morrelli. In the old days, boards were short, straight, wide and thick, but as owners and race teams added more horsepower to the sail plan, the boards and platforms weren’t up to increased loads.

“C-daggerboards increase vertical lift and lateral resistance, which dampens pitching,” says Morrelli, “which makes for better all-around performance.”

The HH66 is lightweight for its size, scale and complexity. Teak soles, deck hardware and everything including the galley sink, eventually tip the scale to 46,000 pounds. Weight savings, says Morrelli, is due to the lower cost for carbon today, and HH isn’t afraid to cook the black stuff into the boat wherever they can.

“We’re racing these boats on one hull now,” adds Morelli, “so when we started, we knew it had to be a full carbon boat. The glass windows too can now take the horsepower that’s being put into these platforms.”

It’s easy to become enamored with the luxury-level construction and cabinetry, but all the bells and whistles that will allow an owner to play off-grid are equally impressive. “This is the first boat we’ve seen in a long time where it was as good-looking at the dock as it sails,” says Rich, a custom race-boat builder himself who can spot a shortcut or shoddy workmanship with one eye closed. “With the construction of this boat, I couldn’t find a single thing to complain about,” he says. “It’s really impressive what they’ve done with so many man-hours.”

The judges agree that a boat of this size and complexity demands a full-time boat captain, ideally one that’s involved in the build, the sailing and the upkeep. To race it will also require a few paid hands to get it around the track, and eight to 10 experienced hands, especially for races involving overnight action.

“We’ve made sure this design is race-ready,” says Morrelli. “The 66 is for an owner who wants to race and cruise, but it’s a big boat, and unless an owner has significant experience, they will need a pro or two to help.”

At Stewart’s fingertips in the tiller seat are push-button controls that deliver instant adjustment to the traveler, sheets and daggerboards. Flash has the racing hardware package with upgraded winches, but there is also a turbo-rig version for those who desire ever more power in the sail plan. There’s no doubt about it, says Allen. “This boat is racy, and you feel it right away in the helm, even without the turbo package.”

While the HH66 carries an all-purpose A5 spinnaker, the judges deploy everything else in the fruit basket — a Code Zero, an inner jib and a J1 — as they zigzag up and down the bay. “Everything is on halyard locks, and it’s easy to get everything up and down,” says Allen. “The rigging and the leads are really clean.”

“Clean” and “sophisticated” are the two traits that come up most often in post-sailing discussions. There is sail-control redundancy throughout the boat and enough technology designed into the systems to keep an owner out of trouble, including Ocean Data System’s UpsideUp anti-capsize system, which monitors cap-shroud loads and automatically triggers an alarm, eases sheets or adjusts the autopilot to prevent the boat from exceeding preset parameters.

“I hear it all the time from guys who are sailing all these types of boats; they say it’s the way of the future,” says Rich. “I can see why because the performance is really there with this boat. It’s not just a step beyond what we’ve sailed in the past; it’s steps ahead. It’s going to be a great boat for long-distance point-to-point racing, where you’ve got four or five experienced guys, a navigator and a few passengers who aren’t sitting on the rail the whole time.”

With such sophistication, however, comes the $4 million price tag, but even that, the judges say, is a selling point. To build this same boat domestically, with the same man-hours, says Rich, it would easily be well over $6 million. You get a lot of boat per dollar, he adds, with the potential for a lot of miles and a lot of fast, fun sailing along the way.

At a Glance:

The post Best Multihull: HH 66 appeared first on Sailing World.

The post Introducing the Melges 14 appeared first on Sailing World.

Volvo 65

Nearly halfway through the recent Volvo Ocean Race, mast failures and disastrous hull damage for five of the six teams had given this ocean-racing classic a serious black eye. Race fans and supporters were apoplectic at the scale of carnage that had compromised the competition. The race’s CEO, Knut Frostad, agreed the failures were unprecedented, and while hull damage and dismastings were separate issues, they did, however, spotlight a much more significant problem with the race’s model. With dwindling participation, the cost of competing had to change—drastically.

A number of options were considered, including freezing the Volvo Open 70 rule and using the best elements of the current generation. Cost, however, remained the decisive issue. With a competitive team costing upward of $30 million per year, sparse sponsorship funding was preventing would-be teams from getting involved.

In May, Frostad announced that the next edition of the race will be sailed in a one-design, and it is now known that a canting-keel 65-footer from Farr Yacht Design will be the new face of the race.

“It’s both a fix and an improvement,” says Frostad. “We can be quite transparent that we’re trying to reduce costs. The cost of this last race was definitely reduced, but it’s still too much.”

The news was greeted with outcries from many quarters—that the race was abandoning its fundamental developmental component and was now little more than a professional version of the Clipper Round The World Race, an event where aspiring sailors purchase a crew position for some or all of the legs.

To ensure cost containment and the delivery of a fleet of at least eight new boats in time for the start of the next race in the fall of 2014, a consortium of boatyards around Europe will each build different elements of the new class to strict one-design limits (see Gaining Bearing, p. 20 in our September 2012 issue). Each boat will be built, fully equipped, and delivered with a full sail inventory to a team for less than $6 million. The maximum team budget is estimated to be between $14 million and $18 million. The boats will also be capable of competing in at least two editions of the race.

Moreover, the fleet will be commissioned by race organizers with all costs underwritten by the race’s owners, with the intention of selling each boat to the teams as they are completed. Frostad has secured the backing of $48 million in addition to his normal race organization costs.

While criticism has come from some stakeholders and past competitors keen to uphold the race’s traditions, support has also emerged from key players.

“This is a proper attempt to control costs, which in this environment has got to be top of the agenda,” says Emirates Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton. “The problem is so many people have other agendas. Crisis times need benevolent dictatorship. Knut has just taken it on; he’s listened, taken feedback, but he’s taken it on.”

Dalton has also lambasted those calling for the developmental element of the Volvo Ocean Race to be retained. “There is a crisis, and we live in a bubble,” he says. “Walk out on the street; people have no jobs, there is no money, and most people within the sport who would be critical—designers being one of them— don’t actually live in that world.”

Despite his support for the one-design concept, Dalton is unhappy with the “mafia” of interests in Europe colluding to exclude other potential suppliers to the new one-design project. “The mafia hold is pretty evident to us right now from the outside,” says Dalton. He, of course, would like to see a proven New Zealand firm like Southern Spars be included in the new project. However, the timescale for the construction and delivery of the new fleet means suppliers outside Europe are at a disadvantage unless expensive air-freight costs are introduced to the current budget.

Dalton is also outspoken about the current state of salaries, and says more needs to be done to reduce personnel costs. He estimates 60 percent of a team’s budget goes to payroll, and says reductions there will net bigger savings while still containing the boat costs. That said, he still expects salaries for key sailors to increase slightly as the winning edge in a one-design scenario will be found in talent once the technology edge goes away, and some sort of salary cap should be put into effect.

There’s more to the move to one-design than cost containment, says Frostad, there’s the bigger issue of participation.

“We believe that the boats have developed in a direction that limits who can sail them,” he says. Essentially, there is a finite pool of suitably experienced sailors to crew the current 70-footers. “There aren’t too many people at the top of the pyramid who can sail these boats. We want to be at a place on the pyramid where people who want to race these boats can race them. If you were a new team, a youth team, or an all-female team, you may as well forget about it. So that was also a driver to make the boats smaller.”

Scaling back the boat size may also address the problem that two-time race skipper Ian Walker and others discovered deep in the Southern Ocean: slowing down when prudent seamanship demands it. Continuously dropping off 30-foot waves at high speeds damages both boat and bodies, but depowering makes handling more difficult. In other words, it’s either flat out or not at all.

It’s a crude measure, but in the 2008-’09 edition of the race, Torben Grael’s Ericsson 4 established the 24-hour world monohull speed record at 598.6 nautical miles, a distance that stood untouched after this latest race in theoretically faster boats. Once the crews could see the potential for damage, they backed off in the worst conditions in favor of survival.

The fastest 24-hour runs in the race were in the penultimate leg crossing the Bay of Biscay to France when much was at stake, and the race was near coastal rescue units (see “Risk and Repercussions,” p. 34 of our September 2012 issue). But Frostad ignores the quest for records and considers them distractions from the purpose of the race, which is to go around the world rather than make isolated achievements.

“The only thing you achieve by making the boat bigger is that you are faster compared to some unknown factor such as the world speed record, but then you’re always going to want to build a bigger boat for that,” he says.

Race management expects that a smaller, lower-cost program will also create more diversity in the makeup of the teams. Discussions are already underway about a potential all-female entry.

“It’s not just about the size of the boat, it’s about the complexity of the current boat, and this is a barrier to good sailors,” says Frostad.

In the meantime, refinements to the design are ongoing, though production is scheduled to commence before the end of the year. Whatever tweaks and adjustments are to come, the scantlings won’t be much different to those announced.

The basic sums (assuming a $14 million maximum team budget) work as such: To fund a team, a principal sponsor would put in $3.5 million annually over three years. A residual value of $2.5 million in the boat and equipment following the race leaves around $1 million in program costs that can potentially be funded through supplier partnerships and endorsements.

That the change to one-design is momentous, few disagree. Whether the shift away from constant technological innovation is prudent is a point that will be debated for years to come. In a sport not known for harmony, little else would be a shock, but as real-world economics take hold, dissent is remarkably muted.

To read more about the Volvo Ocean Race, click here.

The post Volvo Ocean Race: Reigning in the Fleet appeared first on Sailing World.

McConaghy38

Christmas came a few days early for Rob Butler as his new McConaghy 38 arrived on a ship from China on December 22. I guess you could say it came early for me, as well, since I was part of the team tasked with prepping a new boat never before seen in the United States to debut at Quantum Key West Race Week, where new grand-prix boats are often put on trial.

We set out with two distinct goals. First: work on the rig tune and get the sail plan balanced over the foils. Second: get the crew organized so everyone knew their positions and what they needed to do during all of the key maneuvers.

Simple, right? In theory, maybe.

When you’re among the first to dial in a new boat, you don’t have the luxury of relying on a tested tuning guide. So we put the rig in the boat and went sailing with the aim of balancing the force generated by the sail plan with the resistance created by the keel and the rudder. If the sail plan is too far back, too much pressure is put on the rudder. If the sail plan is to far forward too much pressure is put on the keel. The goal is to find the right amount of pressure on the rudder that allows the rudder to provide lift, but not so much that the rudder must be kept at a drastic angle, relative to the centerline, and causes too much drag.

Unfortunately there is not an easy way to find the sweet spot. On our first trip upwind, we realized there was too much weather helm, which caused us to have to pull the tiller too much to windward to keep the boat going in a straight line. Most boats like weather helm, but too much can be as big a problem as too little.

The best measure of the amount of weather helm a boat is generating is the tiller angle required to keep it going in a straight line. We were not sure how much rudder angle there should be on the McConaghy 38, so we called designer Harry Dunning and asked him for the theoretical optimal rudder angle. He said 3 to 4 degrees of weather helm was optimal. So we marked the rudder head with a center line and then put two marks 4 degrees off centerline on each side of the rudder. Now we had a visual mark to provide us with a sense of how much weather helm we were having. After a few more adjustments on the forestay we were comfortable that we had the rig close to where we wanted it in the boat. Now it was time to move to our second goal of sailing the boat.

Sailing a new boat for the first time, putting it through its paces, is always exciting. Learning how to tack, jibe, and turn the corners is always the challenge. Luckily for the team on Carbonado we had three days of practice before the big event. The McConaghy 38 has an extremely large spinnaker for its size. Right away we identified that getting this sail up, and then down, without getting it too wet, was going to be our biggest hurdle.

To help out the crew, the boat comes with a takedown line system, which is a line that attaches to the center of the spinnaker and runs down the forward hatch and back to a block on the interior transom of the boat. In theory all you need to do is blow the sheet, tack line, and halyard; pull hard on the takedown line; and the chute disappears down the hatch. Our first attempt at a douse showed us just how difficult it is to make any sailing maneuver go according to plan the first time. Through the practice days and the event the takedown remained one of our most difficult maneuvers. Most of the problems came when we approached the leeward gate on starboard. On a port-jibe approach, the takedown system works great, pulling the chute over the forestay and then down the hatch. On starboard, the chute comes straight in over the rail, which puts it closer to the water. What we learned was that on the douse, the helmsmen had to make an aggressive turn toward dead downwind—a swaggle in some parlance—to put the boat under the chute before it could be dropped. When we started doing this, more of the chute fell on to the deck as it came down and less in the water. Of all the things that combined to allow us to win our division at Key West Race Week, this may have been the biggest. We avoided shrimping the spinnaker on the takedowns.

Racing a brand new boat for the first time can be tricky. Every boat has its quirks and learning them takes time. We tackled the possibly overwhelming learning curve by identifying a few key areas and focusing the team’s efforts on them. It’s hard to get the very best out of a boat all of the time. This is especially true when the boat is fresh off the ship and there’s little in the way of tuning or boathandling guides. Keep good notes and build a tuning guide to help retain the knowledge and avoid re-learning solutions to problems a second of third time.

The post McConaghy 38: Getting up to Speed, Quickly appeared first on Sailing World.