Sailing World editor, Dave Reed, Zooms-in with professional sailor Andrew Campbell to discuss wing foiling, United States SailGP’s Foiling First Chicago initiative, and takes a deep dive into SailGP starting tactics.

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The summertime distance classics are about to get underway. For this week’s episode Peter Isler joins us from onboard the turbo-charged Volvo 70 Pyewacket on the delivery to the start to show how they plan to rig their reaching strut. Plus, Ed Baird recaps the 44Cup’s latest action in Sweden and his own plans for a quick trip to Mackinac onboard the Quantum 52.

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On a sun-kissed summer afternoon in Newport, Rhode Island, in June, three meticulously restored sailing yachts are tethered to New York YC’s Harbor Court landing. All are wooden, of course, and each a masterpiece of Captain Nathanael G. Herreshoff and the craftsmen of the eponymous manufacturing company in nearby Bristol. Representing different eras of one-design club racing at the New York YC are Amorita, a New York 30; Mar­ilee, a New York 40; and the strikingly maintained and heavily-raced New York 50 Spartan, soon bound for the Mediterranean in search of better competition.

The occasion to display these preserved icons of yacht racing is the Herreshoff Marine Museum & America’s Cup Hall of Fame’s Golden Jubilee, a summer-long celebration of wooden spars, white sails and buried rails. In a few hours, the bar will open and dinner will be served to 200 or so paying guests, but first it’s time for tours and the hushed admiration of these multimillion-dollar restorations. Spartan’s owners have restricted access to the deck, but even here there’s plenty to admire and quiz boat captain Judd Burman who’s delivered the boat from across the harbor.

On the western face of the dock is Marilee, the new acquisition of New York YC member Ken Colburn who recently sold his New York YC ClubSwan 42 and joined the classic yacht keepers club. He and his wife, he says, had been longing to own a wooden yacht of sorts and this one practically fell into his lap a few years ago. Texan Tim Rutter, Marilee’s previous owner, had poured more than $3 million into Marilee’s restoration before cleaning up on the classic yacht circuit in 2018 and then vanishing from the scene. Even Colburn, who I’m told bought the boat for a steal on auction, says he has never spoken to Rutter directly. But he sure is thankful Rutter got Marilee up to speed for the next 100 years.

“The joking comment is that there’s only one time to buy a boat and that’s after someone’s restored it,” Colburn says. “And that’s not to be rude, but restoring a boat is an unknown expense.”

So too is the upkeep.

This summer’s early-season races have been learning experiences for Colburn who has campaigned a J/105, the ClubSwan 42 and the New York YC’s latest fleet of IC37s by Melges. Colburn says coming to grips with Marilee has been rewarding for himself and his mostly amateur crew. His first step in preparing for the switch to Marilee’s big underwater appendages and sails, he says, was spending the offseason on a stationary rowing machine.

“She’s heavy,” Colburn says. “She’s wet [although less so for the bowman—Ed.] and has lots of weather helm. She’s a beautiful boat, but she is a workout.”

Colburn’s most noticeable addition to his area is a telescopic tiller extension, which allows him to see the telltales on his headsails. He also added a portable display box that houses chart plotter and boatspeed displays: “Telltales…speedo…telltales…speedo, that’s how I like to sail,” he says.

Marilee’s latest keeper is also learning the nuances of a unique sail plan that essentially requires filling the foretriangle with as much sail area as possible and balancing that against the big mainsail towering overhead from Marilee’s gleaming wooden spar. Sail changes don’t happen on the fly, says Colburn, so planning ahead and knowing the course angles is critical to establishing the right balance and heel angle—and not getting overpowered. “In the [New York YC] Annual [the wind] was high teens and it was a beast,” Colburn says, “but she has a sweet spot at 12 to 16 knots.”

Applying a similar ethos as he has with his previous one-designs, he says the learning process will be a gradual and methodical one, with the assistance of longtime sailmaker Jack Slattery. “It’s the same learning curve [as with any one-design]—get on a boat and try and tweak,” Colburn says. “I have not raced it enough to know [what is fast]. What I see in a race is 15 degrees either side of my headstay and the speedo, so we approach it like a dinghy.”

The appeal of the New York 40 class was that it could be raced by amateur crews and family teams, unlike the New York 50s that preceded them in the early 1900s. The New York 50s were a handful, and even today, racing Spartan requires a crew that knows what they’re doing, especially when the call comes to set or strike the jackyard topsail.

Burman, Spartan’s current boat captain of seven years, says New York 50s were raced with nine crewmembers in the class’s heydays on Long Island Sound, but today, Spartan gets around the racecourse with nearly twice that. “The boat was quite crew intensive for that period—they were a handful,” he says. “We race with 15, and in a breeze, it’s still a handful.”

Spartan’s current owners, according to Burman, joined the restoration while it was underway with the previous owner who started the restoration in the late 1980s, slowly picking away at the project as funding came available. The 72-footer was eventually moved from Connecticut to the Herreshoff Museum’s waterfront facilities in Bristol, where it sat on the hard for eight years or so.

The current owners, Burman says, fell in love with the boat at first sight. “They were fascinated by the gaff-rigged sloops of that era. And the fact that Spartan was designed by Herreshoff and built by Bristol—they’re both Americans—was quite enticing as well,” Burman says. “Plus, the fact that she needed to be saved.”

While the boat is now museum quality, Spartan’s owners have been racing it extensively, and they’re not afraid to press the boat to its limits, Burman says. “They want to race the boat and they want to go fast, but we do ask people to be respectful. If you can do it without trashing it…she’s a raceboat and that’s what she was built to do.”

Synthetic rigging has replaced wire in most applications and the sails are built using all the latest design suites, but the mainsail’s leather and bronze gaff saddle is still lubricated with good old-fashioned lanolin oil—which is good for the spar as well as the scalp.

The mainsail’s boom and gaff, which are hoisted 50 feet up the mainmast, creates the equivalent of a modern-day square-top, and secured on deck are Spartan’s jackyard topsail spars, which Burman says requires an orchestrated effort to get aloft. Once hoisted, it’s preferable to kept them there jackyard can capture the wind above the mainsail gaff itself, especially when racing in lighter conditions

“We do have a refined sail chart,” Burman says. “Mainsail only would be 18-knots plus, and in anything less than that we start thinking about the racecourse, possibly hoisting the jackyard.” There are five control lines to set this critical sail Burman explains: the halyard, the tack, the leader line that’s fed through a bronze ferrule at the top of the spar and then the two sheets associated with the club spar—an outer sheet and an inner sheet. “There’s a fair bit of unison that happens and a coordination of all five of them that takes a bit of practice,” he says. “If we’re going jackyard, it’s a decision for the day.”

From there, the team has at their disposal an assortment of headsails and spinnakers to work with, all in the quest for power, balance and heel angle. “It’s such a main-dominant powered boat,” Burman says, “so the main is being played constantly.” With such a short “J” measurement, and with having an inner and outer forestay, he adds, “everything gets paired up really close so all your leech profiles kind of land on top of each other.”

When the mainsail gets eased, therefore, the foresails must as well, which makes trimming on Spartan far more dynamic than one may think.

“It’s a lot of communication and developing a team that’s consistent,” Burman says. “A lot of the crew has been sailing for eight to nine years, and that’s huge. You can pull on the tiller as hard as you want, but until you ease the main, the boat is not turning at all. That being said, on powered up reaches we’ve had two people on the tiller, but generally we try to set it up so it’s balanced and we don’t put on the brakes.”

In other words, even after nearly a century of sailing, with Spartan it’s still about letting the ol’ girl run as fast as she can—a run certainly worthy of a celebration.

*Since its founding, the Herreshoff Marine Museum waterfront campus has grown dramatically, starting in 1971 when it had no home but instead consisted of a small fleet of Herreshoff boats, a literal “floating museum.” Today, the museum includes a number of original company buildings, the Herreshoff family homestead, and a modern exhibition building, the Isaac B. Merriman, Jr. Hall of Boats. Named for one of the museum’s earliest benefactors, this exhibit space displays more than 60 Herreshoff boats, steam engines, and an array of artifacts. The Nathanael G. Herreshoff Model Room & Workshop exhibit is a re-creation of Captain Nat’s own model room and workshop, and contains more than 500 original design models, tools and documents. Over the past five years, the museum has delivered STEM-focused experiential education programs to thousands of Rhode Island students. The museum is now partnering with the National Sailing Hall of Fame on an America’s Cup Hall of Fame exhibit at its new Sailing Museum in Newport, RI.

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The National Sailing Hall of Fame (NSHOF) announced today eleven sailors comprising its 11th class of inductees. The Class of 2021 includes: Alexander “Red” Bryan and Cortlandt “Bud” Heyniger – founders of Alcort, Inc. and designers and producers of the iconic Sunfish; William “Carl” Buchan – championship sailor, Olympic gold medal winner and 1988 defender of the America’s Cup; Agustin “Augie” Diaz – Rolex Yachtsman of the Year; Star, Snipe and Laser World Champion; and 505 North American Champion; Gilbert T. Gray – Olympic gold medalist in the Star Class debut Olympiad, race official and chief measurer; Lynne Jewell Shore – one of the first women to win an Olympic gold medal in sailing, Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year and former Executive Director of Sail Newport; Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce – the founder of the U.S. Naval War College (1884) and leading educator on seamanship and training for the Navy; Jane Wiswell Pegel – a three-time Martini & Rossi (now Rolex) Yachtswoman of the Year and winner of several National and North American Championships in sailing and iceboating; Dawn Riley – the first woman ever to manage an America’s Cup syndicate and the first American to sail in three America’s Cups and two Whitbread Round the World (now The Ocean Race) races; Richard “Dick” Rose – a thirty-year member of World Sailing’s Racing Rules of Sailing Committee, he is considered “the” international authority on the Racing Rules of Sailing. The Lifetime Achievement Award recipient for 2021 is Captain William D. “Bill” Pinkney, the first African American to solo-circumnavigate the world via the Capes.

“The remarkable achievements of this year’s class exemplify excellence and an unwavering dedication to our sport,” said Gus Carlson, president of the National Sailing Hall of Fame. “We are proud to honor the accomplishments of these extraordinary people and confident they will inspire future generations of sailors, innovators and contributors.”

The members of the Class of 2021 join 90 current Hall of Famers, all of whom will be featured in the Legends of Sailing exhibition at The Sailing Museum, which is scheduled to open in May of 2022. This year marks the eleventh year of annual induction to the National Sailing Hall of Fame. For more on the inductees (nshof.org/hall-of-fame).

The Class of 2021 will be formally celebrated on Saturday, October 16, 2021 with an Induction Ceremony in Newport, RI. The event will be held in the newly renovated Armory Building, former site of the international press corps during the 12 Metre America’s Cup era in Newport and future home of The Sailing Museum. The traditional Induction Ceremony will also honor members of the Class of 2020 who were honored in a virtual ceremony in 2020. The Induction Weekend has become notable as a reunion of sailing’s Who’s Who as previous inductees join the celebrations to welcome their peers into the Hall of Fame. Those expected include; Malin Burnham, Robbie Haines, Peter Harken, Gary Jobson, Bob Johnstone, Dave Perry, Mark Reynolds, John Rousmaniere, Tom Whidden and others.

The inductees were nominated by sailors from across the United States. Nominations were reviewed by a selection committee comprised of representatives from the NSHOF Board, previous inductees, the sailing media, the sailing industry, community sailing, a maritime museum, the cruising community and US Sailing. Nominations are accepted year-round at nshof.org/nominations. The deadline for Class of 2022 nominees is January 31.

Nominees must be American citizens, 55 years of age or older, who have made a sustained and significant impact on the growth and development of the sport in the United States at a national or international level in the following categories:

Sailing – Recognizing achievements made on the water as a sailboat racer, cruiser or offshore sailor.

Technical – Recognizing those who have significantly contributed to the technical aspects of sailing. Examples include designers, boat builders, sailmakers, etc.

Contributor – Recognizing those who have made other significant contributions to the American sailing experience. Examples include teachers, coaches, administrators, media (including authored works, TV, film, etc.), artists, musicians, promoters and organizers.

Nominees for the Lifetime Achievement Award must be American citizens, 55 years of age or older, who have achieved success in sailing and outside of sailing and have given back to the sport in some significant manner. Lifetime Achievement Award recipients are selected by the NSHOF Board of Directors.

2021 National Sailing Hall of Fame Inductees (alphabetical, with city of birth):

Alexander “Red” Bryan* (Waterbury, CT)

William “Carl” Buchan (Seattle, WA)

Agustin “Augie” Diaz (Havana, Cuba)

Gilbert T. Gray* (Ruston, LA)

Cortlandt “Bud” Heyniger* (Woodbury, CT)

Lynne Jewell Shore (Burbank, CA)

Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce*ǂ (Albany, NY)

Jane Wiswell Pegel (Williams Bay, WI)

Captain William D. “Bill” Pinkney (Chicago, IL)

Dawn Riley (Detroit, MI)

Richard “Dick” Rose (Port Washington, NY)

*Posthumous (ǂIndicates Historic Inductee who has been deceased 60 years or more)

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In this June 8 episode of Around the Sailing World, Peter Isler shares his story of a recent visit with designer Bruce Kirby (and past SW editor), which prompts the panel to wax on about the early days of the greatest singlehanded dinghy ever. Plus, we’ve got some preview chatter for the upcoming Helly Hansen NOOD Chicago.

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In this week’s Zoom-up Jonathan McKee and Ed Baird share their thoughts on the GL52 racing at the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta Chicago, and Gary Jobson reports back from the E-Scow Nationals and the ousting of the doublehanded offshore Olympic discipline.

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In this week’s Episode of Around The Sailing World, Editor and Host Dave Reed, checks in with Gary Jobson and Ed Baird and reports in from the J/24 North Americans in Sayville, New York.

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There is something about the silence of sailing. It’s the movement through water—be it slow and stately, or fast and frenetic—powered solely by the wind. The absence of a noisy engine hammering away is one of the attractions of the sport, or at least in theory it is. The farther we stray from the coast and the bigger the boat, the more reality diverges from the picture; power is essential to any long-distance cruising or racing boat.

These days the source might be solar panels, but the diesel generator or alternator is still a critical piece of equipment for many bluewater sailors. If the boat relies on desalination, there will be no fresh water without power. There will be no instrument or satnav systems, no autopilot, no satellite ­communications for weather forecasts, no radar or even navigation lights. The loss of these things isn’t necessarily a big deal—particularly in daylight, fair weather, and with the security of a harbor or marina just a short sail away—but there are times when it can be very, very serious.

“It was the last day of 2000, and when I started the engine the previous day, I had heard a bad noise, but I didn’t care. The day after, I wanted to start it again to charge the battery, and nothing happened when I switched on the contact and pushed on the start button…. So, my first job was to remove the starter to understand why it didn’t switch on. I removed it from the engine, and then I opened it, and I found out all the brushes are more or less dust, nothing repairable.”

The speaker was Michel Desjoyeaux. And on New Year’s Eve 2000, he was leading the Vendée Globe—the nonstop solo circumnavigation, arguably the planet’s toughest and biggest ocean race. If that weren’t bad enough, Desjoyeaux was deep in the Southern Ocean on his way to Cape Horn. “My press officer told me, ‘But you should have a spare for this, no?’ And I told him: ‘No. If I carry a spare part for this, then I carry two boats, which is not efficient,’” he continued.

The engine had been built by Yanmar, and Desjoyeaux had good contacts there, so his first act was to talk to them. “They told me: ‘Oh, we are very sorry. Something [like this] happens one time in a million maybe, and it’s a very low occurrence issue you have now, and we are very sorry, and we can’t help you because there is no solution.’”

The response must have seemed like the end. The rules are strict for the Vendée Globe race. Once started, there is absolutely no ­physical assistance allowed—so for Desjoyeaux, a stop anywhere to pick up spare parts would mean that he was out of the race. How could he possibly fix the starter without the parts? It would have been a harsh ending to what had been a brilliant performance to that point. However, Desjoyeaux was no ordinary sailor; there’s a reason he’s known as “Le Professeur.”

Desjoyeaux grew up in his parent’s shipyard in Concarneau in Brittany, and sailing was his life from the very beginning. “My home was attached to the yard, and the yard was our recreation when we were young. We didn’t need to go on holidays anywhere because…I mean, we didn’t want to go on holidays anywhere because we had everything we needed. I also did all my school lessons until I was 10 with my mother, who did the teaching at home.” It’s hard to imagine a better background for becoming familiar with boats and marine engineering.

He was just 20 when he competed in his first round-the-world race as crew for the legendary Eric Tabarly, and he’s followed that French icon into sailing history with a series of remarkable achievements. Few would argue against the assertion that Desjoyeaux is the most successful solo racer of all time, having won the Vendée Globe not once but twice. On the second occasion, he overcame a 40-hour deficit to win. (He restarted, after having to return to repair the boat.) He’s also won the less well-known (outside France anyway) but probably more competitive Solitaire du Figaro three times, along with two major trans-Atlantic races.

The man has had a great career, and one of the most extraordinary moments came after his discovery that he couldn’t start his engine in the Southern Ocean. “I switched off all the electronics that were not useful, only the [auto]pilot with the compass left—no displays, no computer, no satellite connection, no weather forecast, nothing. The minimum possible, no navigation lights, I was fully in the Southern Ocean, and I didn’t need lights because there is nobody. And I spent a lot of time at the helm to save energy, preferring to sleep during the day with the solar panel to help me. During those days, I tried to understand what I could do to try to find a good solution.

“I was a bit farther [east] than New Zealand, so it was too late to make a U-turn. This was very lucky for me because I think that if I would have been able to get to Australia or New Zealand, then certainly I would. I think that maybe I would postpone, stop the race…put the traffic indicator light on left and turn.” However, pulling out wasn’t an option, so Desjoyeaux had to find a way to repair the starter motor—or find a way to start the engine without it. It was a very long way to Chile without power, particularly without the desalinator (and no way to reconstitute freeze-dried food), the pilot or communications.

The state of the starter motor and lack of spares forced Desjoyeaux to look at the problem another way. Could he start the engine without it? The boat did have a second alternator. “There was a big additional pulley at the front of the engine, and the two alternators were horizontal, one each side. So my first idea was to remove one belt of one alternator, and drill a hole to be able to put a screw in and attach a padeye to the pulley.” The padeye would allow Desjoyeaux to attach a rope to the pulley. “Then maybe four or five turns [of a rope] around the pulley, then find a second block on the front of the boat, and go out from there to the cockpit and onto a winch.”

The rope (it was red) that Desjoyeaux had attached to the pulley would allow him to turn the engine over—just as a rope starts a lawn-mower engine or an outboard. Once it was led out from the interior of the boat onto the deck, he could try using the mechanical advantage of the boat’s winches to help him pull. “I turned the winch, and I understood directly that the load was not necessarily very big. I had the capacity to pull this load, but for sure, with just a winch, I would not be able to pull long enough and hard enough to make it start. It was cold, the temperature was more or less between zero and 5 degrees Celsius, so it’s not very easy for a diesel engine to start. And I didn’t have enough battery to preheat the engine.”

Still, Desjoyeaux could feel his excitement rising; back at the Yanmar offices, they had been able to start an identical engine manually.

“One of the things we asked them was to understand how much you can unscrew the injector.” Desjoyeaux’s engine didn’t have a decompression lever, fitted to older engines to allow them to be manually started using a hand-crank. They reduce the pressure in the engine so it’s easier to turn it over. Then once the rotation of the engine has begun and it has momentum, the pressure is reapplied, and the diesel explodes.

“I unscrewed each injector. I remembered it’s a three-­quarter turn on each screw to have the minimum pressure to make turning it over easy, but also the minimum pressure to make the explosion possible when the engine compresses the diesel. In the Yanmar factory, they were able to start the engine with three people pulling on the rope. I was confident,” he explained, “because I realized that the load to turn the engine and try to start it was not very big. We didn’t need tons, we just needed maybe 200 or 300 kilograms, but no more.” And Desjoyeaux, a master problem solver, knew exactly where he could find a force that would pull a rope with 200 or 300 kilograms of load.

“I tried to make a system to pull with the jib. It connected directly to the jib sheets.” The idea was that if he released control of the sail, the wind would pull the starter rope. “The problem is that when you ease a sheet, you get a very big load at the beginning, but when you start to ease the sheet, the sail collapses completely and you are not able to maintain power long enough to start the engine.”

Desjoyeaux realized that the jib wasn’t powerful enough. “I didn’t want to use a bigger sail or a sail that could break because I would need to do this operation every day. So my idea was to go to the mainsail.” Desjoyeaux pulled in the main as hard as he could onto the centerline and cleated the sheet. The red rope was then wrapped around the engine pulley at one end, with the other run out to the end of the boom, along it to the mast step and then cleated off on the deck. Once everything was in place, Desjoyeaux released the mainsheet. The load on the oversheeted sail pushed it out, transferring this force to the red rope all the way back to where it was wrapped around the ­pulley and, in his own words:

“So, my red line [attached with the turns around the engine pulley] went to a pulley at the back of the boat, up to the boom, back to the mast foot, the mast base, back to the cockpit. When I needed to start the engine, I prepared my rope in the boat and on the engine with the five turns. Then I trimmed in the mainsail more than needed for the performance, pulled on the red line, pulled on the winch very strong, removed the mainsail sheet from the winch, put the contact on the engine, and burned the diesel arriving at the injector with a small spark to heat it just before the injectors. And then I came to the cockpit, opened the clutch of the mainsail, and then it pushed the main out. The first time I tried this, the engine started. It was incredible because it meant that I was able to continue the race.”

The solution was quite breathtaking for its ingenuity. Desjoyeaux was able to finish the race without stopping for spares or help, and subsequently won his first Vendée Globe. It was an exemplary piece of problem-solving that has joined the canon of MacGyver solutions, being used again by Sébastien Destremau in 2016—and quite probably by others. When I heard the story the first time, I could not help but wonder how I might have fared in the same situation. Desjoyeaux mostly got to his answer via a series of logical steps, but there were two pieces of truly inspired thinking. First, taking the step to look for a way to start the engine without the starter motor, and second, realizing that he could use the sails to provide the force required on the starter rope.

It’s easy to think that only an exceptionally creative mind could have come up with a solution like this, but writers such as Edward de Bono, author of Lateral Thinking, or Michael Michalko, who penned the much more recent Thinkertoys, want us to understand that there are practical methods to improve creative thinking, and they can be learned. An example from Thinkertoys covers exactly the ground that Desjoyeaux traveled to get to the first part of his solution. Imagine, Michalko suggests, that you are in a room with two pieces of rope hanging from the roof. The challenge is to tie the loose ends of the ropes together. Unfortunately, they are sufficiently far apart that when you hold onto one, you cannot reach the dangling end of the other.

“Initially, you might state the problem as: ‘How can I get to the second string?’” Michalko writes. “However, you would then waste your energy trying to get to the second string, which is not possible. If, instead, you state the problem in a different way: ‘In what ways might the string and I get together?’ you will likely come up with a solution.” This is because a different range of solutions opens up with the reframing, like tying a weighty object to the loose end of one rope and setting it off in a pendulum motion that will swing it toward you while still holding the other rope.

What led Desjoyeaux to a solution initially was the way he framed the problem. He was focused on the real goal—­starting the engine—rather than getting distracted by the apparent problem, a broken starter motor. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and it may well be that Desjoyeaux was able to figure out a way to start his engine simply because he had no other options. The fact that the starter motor was completely beyond repair may have been what saved Desjoyeaux’s race; he had no choice but to look for other ways to start the engine.

A great deal of de Bono’s Lateral Thinking process is about reframing things, or at least escaping the obvious framing, because that’s often the route to an answer. When the problem is structured in the right way, the answer will come. After talking it through with him, I don’t think Desjoyeaux knows how he arrived at his solution. It’s trite to say that it just came to him, but that is the way it works sometimes. What de Bono, Michalko and other thinkers in this area want us to understand is that this moment of it “just coming to us” can be made more likely with the right techniques.

“The aim of lateral thinking is to look at things in different ways, to restructure patterns, to generate alternatives. The mere intention of generating alternatives is sometimes ­sufficient,” as de Bono puts it. For those of us not blessed with Desjoyeaux’s problem-solving superpower, there are well-established techniques to do this. Many are straightforward, for instance what Michalko calls slice and dice. “To stimulate new ideas, identify and list the various attributes of a problem and work on one attribute at a time,” he explains in Thinkertoys.

These are just the components of the problem, things such as materials, structure, the function and processes, cost and value, and so on. If we were to break down the diesel engine in this way, we might get a list something like this:

• Metal
• Precision engineering
• Burns diesel fuel to create mechanical energy
• Efficient method of converting fuel to energy
• Ignites through diesel mixing with highly compressed hot air
• Delivers power when an exploding gas expands and moves a piston to rotate an axle
• Starts when required pressure and temperature are achieved in a pre-combustion chamber so that the diesel will burn
• One of many ways of creating mechanical energy by burning carbon fuel

Everyone’s list will be different, but there’s a good chance that something in there will spark the right line of thought. In this case, it’s probably the notion that the starter motor isn’t doing anything that clever. All that’s required is sufficient force to compress the air and some warmth applied to the fuel. The problem then becomes one of applying the necessary force and warmth. And there’s sufficient force on a sailboat to move it through the ocean, so why can’t that be applied to starting the engine?

Understanding techniques like this—and there are many others—can be a boat saver, or even a lifesaver, when faced with a challenge a long way from help. If we’re going to put ourselves in situations where that’s possible or even likely, then doing the groundwork now and tuning up our problem-­solving skills will, at some point, pay a high rate of return on the investment.

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Sailing World’s Roundtable series brings you behind the scenes with your favorite sailing products, sailboat manufacturers, and more. Join the editors of Sailing World as they invite special guests for rousing discussions about topics important to sailors. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

In this installment of Sailing World Roundtable, we sat down with the folks at Storm Trysail Club (and a few other friendly faces) to discuss Block Island Race Week, scheduled for June 21 – 25, 2021.

Learn more at https://stormtrysail.org/.

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In this April 26 edition of Around the Sailing World, the gang tables the SailGP’s season starter in Bermuda, the Newport to Ensenda Race, a return to more racing for Ed Baird and the latest in the J/70 class ahead of its world championship.

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