With its long history producing good-looking fast cruisers, in recent years, Nautor Swan has consolidated its performance yachts into its ClubSwan range, spanning the giant 125-foot Skorpios and the 80-footer My Song to their fleets of ClubSwan 36s and 50s. All designs by Juan Kouyoumdjian, the latter saw 11 and 15 compete in their respective five-event annual championships (Nations Cup) in 2023 and are set to be joined by the ClubSwan 43 this year. But Nautor Swan has another new development: While its smallest boats have been the ClubSwan 36 (plus the original Swan 36 back in 1967), its latest launch is its smallest ever, the ClubSwan 28.

This new model is not surprising given that Swan is sailing’s most prolific premium brand, with more large performance sailing yachts in existence than any other manufacturer. Its range firmly extends into the superyacht stratosphere, so why not lure new owners into the fold, earlier, with a modest offering? Federico Michetti, head of sports activities and product manager at Nautor Swan, explains, “The concept of the 28 is to have an entry-level Swan that allows owners to enjoy the journey with Nautor and our events.” He expects that the 28 will entice younger sailors, even those new to sailing, into the ClubSwan realm.

Among race boats today, 28 to 30 feet is the cusp between sportboat and yacht, and the ClubSwan 28 is more the former, given its light weight (displacing sub-1,200 kg versus 1,600 kg and 1,800 for the more yachtlike Farr 280 and Cape 31, respectively); outboard engine rather than inboard; and low freeboard and minimal interior, accessed via the foredeck hatch. The ClubSwan 28 is neither an excessively high-end carbon race boat nor a high-­volume J/70, but rather somewhere between. “Our aim for it is to race well in 6 knots or 20. It is a powerful boat but not extreme,” Michetti says. 

Kouyoumdjian adds: “We incorporated everything that modern boats have to perform very well but didn’t go extreme on any of them.”

Fundamental to the boat’s ethos is simplicity, and for it to be fun to sail, but as Michetti puts it, “at the same time being safe, a boat that can fit the needs of everyone from ­beginner to expert.”

Aside from its performance, the best demonstration of this is that while most sportboat crews must hike and hike hard (it being so vital to stability on boats of this size), the 28 is a “legs-in” boat.

“We would like to avoid a ­hiking contest. It is much more social too; sailors can enjoy what is happening around them,” Michetti says. Everything is optimized for this—the sheerline and cockpit arrangement to make maximum use of the weight of the inward-facing crew, while keel draft and ballast make up righting moment lost due to no hiking and crew not moving fore and aft.

Compared with the ClubSwan 36’s advanced hull shape and fixed-keel/C-foil combination, the 28 is far more conservative. The hull has a low wetted surface area and rocker aft to minimize bow burying. Its modest 8-foot beam means it can be towed legally throughout Europe without having to be inclined. It also allows the boat and trailer combined to fit into a 40HQ container for shipping farther afield.

The hull shape is quite ­complex, with flared topsides at the stern, above a substantial chine. Going forward, the topsides turn vertical and then evolve into a deck chamfer ­forward of the mast. The bow has a slight reverse sheer and a retractable sprit.

The rig breaks new ground, but again, simplicity is the focus. Developed between Kouyoumdjian, Southern Spars’ Steve Wilson and mast-builder Axxon Composites, it is skifflike, with no backstay or runners, and with swept-back spreaders and a GNAV (inverted vang) to keep the cockpit clear. “Imagine a 49er rig that is set up by the headstay,” Kouyoumdjian says. “The prebend and the tension you have in that kind of rig usually comes from presetting the headstay and then you deal with it with the vang and cunningham. But we wanted something variable that could simulate what you could otherwise do with the runners.”

The solution is to have a ­permanently attached mast ­ram that can be operated while ­racing via a pump in the pit area. “It brings a lot of things together—not only the tension on the headstay, but also the tension on the rig,” Kouyoumdjian adds. “And when you tension the rig, you bend the mast.”

Therefore, powering up the rig comes with just two or three pumps and an inch of movement of the ram. “Everything on the rig is simple and has been done before many times successfully,” Kouyoumdjian says. “We added the mast up-and-down function. I imagine crews using it on medium-light days: When you get into a luff and you’d ease the runner, instead you’d drop the mast, or anticipating a puff, you’d pump it up. As soon as the wind gets to 10 to 12 knots, then you’d be maxed up, like you would be at ­maximum runner on a typical boat.”

The ClubSwan 28 will be a strict one-design class. Like the ClubSwan 36, it is being built in Cartagena, Spain, by Sinergia Racing Group. Tooling for the 28 is CNC milled to fine tolerances, and like most other boats in this size, it is a glass boat, built with vinylester resin, although naturally its mast, bowsprit and rudder are full carbon. The keel fin is stainless steel.

What appears to be a 1990s retro feature is the 28’s L-configuration keel, as featured on many vintage 1990 one-­designs and early VO60s. Aside from positioning bulb weight aft, this lengthens the keel’s leading edge by 15 to 20 percent, increasing its efficiency and improving, for example, lift to windward. Kouyoumdjian is enthusiastic about this and says that he would readily recommend L-keels on other race boats, but warns that the shape of the bulb’s front must be correct. To enable easy trailering, the keel can be raised, and the rudder assembly lifts out within its own box. A full derig, from water to motorway, is expected to take around three hours.

Production for the ClubSwan 28 will be modest, initially at least, with the yard in Cartagena expected to roll out two per month, with the ready-to-sail price forecast to be around 200,000 euros. The aim is to have international fleets, with boats built by local yards. After Europe, Michetti says, its focus will be the United States, although as yet there is no time frame for this. At the time of this writing, six 28s had been sold, with the first boat due for launch in late May, with all six expected to compete at the Rolex Swan Cup in Porto Cervo in September.

The advantage of the 28 is that the owner is buying into the ClubSwan world, with its established circuit, Michetti says. “If you are building a new class, people need to trust you. You need to create momentum, you need to have sponsors and find locations and organize regattas,” which the ClubSwan management already has, with its comprehensive circuit, mixing established regattas and ClubSwan’s own in the Med, UK, Baltic and US. Aside from enticing new sailors and teams into the ClubSwan family, Michetti also imagines that some teams with larger race boats might acquire a 28 for crew training.

There is currently no class crew-weight limit, which risks enticing larger muscle-bound types on board, but Michetti explains: “We want to avoid this crazy ‘saunas before the regatta’ thing” (in other classes, crews typically duck just below maximum weight at weigh-in). ClubSwan 28 crews will ­comprise four or five with a World Sailing Group 1 (amateur) owner-­driver and probably one mandatory female or youth crewmember.

For the 28 this year, there are a number of events, including a kick-off event from Nautor Swan’s base in Scarlino, Italy, in July, plus September’s Rolex Swan Cup and the Nations League 2024-ClubSwan 28 Invitational Sardinia Challenge, taking place in Villasimius, Sardinia, in early November. Given its trailerability, the ­likelihood is that the 28 will also race inland, for example, on Italy’s famous Lake Garda. Naturally, as numbers grow, there will also be the opportunity for the ClubSwan 28 to get its own start in the world’s top ­multiclass regattas.

The post Sporty and Simple is the ClubSwan 28 appeared first on Sailing World.

I’d love to look around and enjoy the scenery, but I can’t take my eyes off the leeward bow that’s slicing through the Caribbean at 20 knots. I’d been advised earlier: The fine line between full-tilt and pitchpole is somewhere right around the chine on the wave-piercing bow. The warning also came with a caveat: “The faster we go, the safer we go.”

That’s the wisdom of Pierre Altiere, a master of the Diam 24 trimaran, with whom I’ve scored a ride for the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta. The point of the exercise is to experience firsthand the hottest one-design fleet in the Caribbean. Altiere’s boat is named Cry Baby, which I may eventually come to understand, but right here, right now, all I can think about is the gust breathing down my neck.

I ease the gennaker sheet in my hand and watch the bow submerge. Oh, sh-t, I think. Here we go. I’ve seen pictures of Diams tumbleweeding, but the bow porpoises. A ball of seawater smacks the forward beam and explodes into a cloud of sunlight sparkles and foam.

With a jab of the tiller bar, Altiere redirects the boat and reloads the sails. The daggerboard hums a few octaves higher as we skim across the shallow blue flats of Phillipsburg Bay. It’s thrilling and a little terrifying, and thankfully, we’re just getting started.

It’s an early March morning on St. Maarten’s Kim Sha Beach, on the bustling Dutch coast where six identical 24-foot trimarans sit under palm trees, surrounded by umbrellas, chaise lounges and rental kayaks. Four other Diams swing on their anchors a doggie-paddle’s distance from the beach. This is the homegrown Diam 24 One Design fleet, which in a few short years has multiplied from three to 10. Soon enough, Altiere promises, if his Diam dream scheme pans out, we will be looking at as many as 20.

Altiere, I’m told, is the spark, the one who started it all, and judging by the parade of sailors seeking him out for advice, parts, assistance and you name it, it’s obvious that not much happens without Altiere. As we rig our own boat, interrupted by phone calls and favors, he gives me a quick lowdown on the Diam, which was created by Vianney Ancelin, a French multihull sailor and boatbuilder. Ancelin’s vision was a recreational multihull that average sailors could handle—sporty but not lethal, high-tech but not overpriced. That was the idea before the Tour de France a Voile—a multistage regatta—adopted the Diam as its official one-design. Pro race teams with million-dollar budgets promptly priced amateurs out the class, and then the pandemic put a fork in the Tour. The builder, ADH Inotec, stopped production at just north of 100 boats. With the Tour on hold, however, there was suddenly a pile of secondhand race-ready boats, many with containers full of unused spares, most fetching $20,000 to $30,000.

Enter Altiere, the tall, jovial and hard-charging Frenchman who taught at a sailing school as a young man and then opened his own in Tahiti before landing in St. Maarten, where he operates a thriving private catamaran charter business. As a top-level F18 catamaran sailor not far back in the day, a friend once invited him to race a Diam in France. He knew little to nothing about the boat at the time. “As an F18 sailor, I knew what I was doing,” he says. “I hadn’t raced [in Brittany] in 20 years, but we somehow made it onto the podium, everyone applauded us, and I enjoyed it so much that the next day we started talking about becoming an agent for North America.”

He did, but the big continent was impossible to crack, so he pivoted to a better plan: bring potential buyers to the boat and give them a taste. Step 1: Establish a Diam base at home in St. Maarten and show off the boats. Step 2: Enter them into the region’s big-draw regattas: the Heineken and Les Voiles de St. Barth.

“There’s nothing better than an easy flight to St. Maarten, throwing your bag in the hotel, and jumping onto a Diam that same day,” Altiere says. “Just like me, I was offered a chance, I had a great experience, and right after that, I bought a boat. That’s the easy-regatta concept here: Fly in, race, celebrate, fly out.”

And that’s how “sort-of” New Yorker Adam Holmes and his buddies Ben Ferraro and Bob Young were lured to Kim Sha in late March for the Heineken Regatta. Holmes, an advertising executive and Long Island-based racing sailor, had heard about the Diam fleet through a friend in St. Maarten, who connected him with Altiere, who had one charter boat available for the Heineken Regatta.

How much for a good time?

Five-grand—tops—according to Holmes’ mental math, and that was with a top-shelf condo, on the water, for a week. Altiere’s charter fee, which included four days of racing and two days of practice, was only $3,700—worth every penny on the speed-to-dollar scale. For months, the three of them exchanged Diam sailing videos that they found online. “That was like the start of the adrenaline rush,” Young says, and when they jumped on board for their first figure-it-out-yourself session in St. Maarten, the real thing was a real rush.

“We didn’t get a very detailed briefing before our first sail,” Holmes says. “At one point on the first practice day, we were sending it at like 19 knots, and the hull was so far underwater. Bob had the kite strapped in hard and we were just flying…like really, really on the edge. The Diam guys following us in the RIB and yelling at us in French were freaking out because we hadn’t yet signed any paperwork.”

“At the time,” Ferraro adds with a laugh, “we had no idea we were on the edge—we didn’t know any better.”

But with a few more hours of practice and less than 30 minutes of one-on-one with Altiere, they were ready enough to throw themselves straight into the races. Ferraro was nominated to drive, Holmes got the back-breaking main trimmer’s spot, and Young took on the busy end at the front of the cockpit. 

On the first morning, the breeze is up to 15 knots, and even though the start is in 90 minutes, the vibe on Kim Sha is bizarrely relaxed. Beach attendants rake the sand for the inbound tourists while sailors wander about in farmer-john wetsuits, surf trunks and rash guards, most of them conversing in fast-paced French and tinkering with their boats.

Among them is Erick Clement, one of the originals. He is a master of the Caribbean multihull racing scene and enjoying his retirement from F18 catamaran racing. Daily yoga, and healthy eating keep him young and in Diam-worthy shape.

“The speed is good and the boat is not complicated, but you have to get a feeling for it,” he tells me in his best broken English. “When everything is right, the steering is balanced perfectly, and you listen for the noise of the daggerboard—that helps you know when it is right.”

As a simple three-crew boat, the roles are straightforward. Whoever has the pleasure of helm also gets the traveler—the capsize preventer. The middle crew manhandles the insanely loaded mainsheet, trims the gennaker, and assists with dousing it. The forward crew is responsible for the self-tacking jib sheet, sail controls (outhaul, cunningham, mast rotator), gennaker hoisting and the daggerboard. Between calling tactics and jibing angles, housekeeping the trampoline, and watching for traffic, it’s an active boat for all involved, especially when big-breeze buoy racing in St. Maarten.

“All crew are super-important,” Clement adds. “If one is not playing the game, you can’t do anything. You have to have a good balance with each other.”

That will be a problem for us on Altiere’s Cry Baby because we are rotating new teammates every day. With us for the first day is a strapping young Frenchman named Corentin, who goes by Coco. He’s one of Altiere’s charter boat captains and has some Diam racing experience, which is good because we’re straight into the first start without a lick of practice. It’s a chaotic five minutes of weaving through rush-hour traffic: big custom raceboats, cruisers, bareboats and two 100-footers, all pinging the starting line.

The Diam will go from zero to 15 rapidly, but it’s not the kind of boat you can luff-and-hover on the start. Full speed is Altiere’s preferred approach, and with 45 seconds remaining in the opening sequence, he is stalking next to the committee boat, mentally calculating the layline and time to kill. But the other boats are stacking up at the starboard end, making what looks to be an impossible entry. But, hey, Altiere is the man and the defending champ. This is his domain. Who am I to doubt?

At 30 seconds, he booms, “OK. We go!”

And go we do, bearing away to full hum, straight toward the big catamaran committee boat. Just when it looks like he is going to pull off a high-speed barging start, Holmes and his crew tack in front of us and stuff the boat into irons—three sun-creamed deer in our headlights.

It’s either them or the committee boat, but Altiere pulls the hand break, and we coast to a near stop. The bow of our center hull disappears beneath the catamaran’s bridge deck, and the starboard bow just clears the cat’s starboard transom. I run forward and push off, and Altiere apologizes while cursing the New Yorkers for their erratic driving.

“I mean…it was our first race, and we were still trying to figure out how to tack the damn thing,” Young says. “That was a little nutty.”

“OK, let’s go,” Altiere shouts once again. More trim!” And with that, we’re chasing down the fleet. I pull the mainsheet as hard as I humanly can. The sail is board-flat and the telltales are streaming.

“More trim!” he shouts again. “We do it together.”

He reaches forward with his big right arm, grabs hold of the sheet with one hand, and together we grunt another 2 feet. The weather hull rises higher, and then the center hull breaks the surface. I’m staring at the line that Altiere had drawn on the bow with a Sharpie. That’s my fine-line guide for the week.

“More speed,” he says. “We will get them.”

I pull but get only another inch. He reaches in and gets another 6, finds his gear, and lets it rip.

The collective opinion on Kim Sha is that Altiere is the best sailor in the fleet, and I can see why. He effortlessly threads the trimaran around oncoming traffic, across big waves, and through giant puffs that pin other boats on their ear. He will dive to leeward of another boat and sail right through its lee. Downwind, he sits inside the center hull, hunched, with his hand behind him on the tiller bar, laser-focused. He senses every subtlety of the boat and knows what it will do before it does it. And more than once, when we sail into a lull and our speed drops, he puts his hand up in the air and says, “Bwaah…come on, wind, what is wrong with you?”

He’s seriously annoyed with the breeze for denying him his speed.

The first race is a windward/leeward blur, and we somehow manage a midfleet finish. Same for the others that follow, but our mishaps reflect our thrown-togetherness. We’re fast in a straight line thanks to Altiere’s skills, but every slip-up is a dozen boatlengths lost—and that’s no lie.

Back on Kim Sha, there’s a beach bar 10 feet from the boats. It’s got reggae, cold beer and cheeseburgers in paradise. The fellas from New York are happy to be back on the beach with their recovery juices in hand.

“That was kind of devastating,” Ferraro says. “We were miles behind on all the races, like it was not even close. We weren’t going to drink, but then all of sudden, we’re standing there with a drink in our hand and were like, ‘What just happened?’”

Young isn’t bothered at all about the results. He’s whipped, but it’s worth it: “All I remember was thinking, I’ve never gone that fast on a sailboat. I think our top speed was 20.7. The sound of the boat and that hum going at that speed was just like, holy sh-t. Let’s just hold on.”

With the wind forecast to peak into the mid-20s, the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta’s legendary around-the-island race is next on the to-do list. Big island, big breeze and it’ll be big-time fun, Altiere promises me when we meet at the beach and introduces me to Camille, another of his charter boat captains. She’s petite, and Altiere confesses he had miscalculated the wind forecast when lining up crew for the regatta.

“We will struggle a bit upwind because weight is very important,” he says, slapping a big hand on my shoulder and cracking a big smile. “But we will be very, very fast on the reaches.”

And he isn’t kidding.

To start our circumnavigation, the race committee dispatches us on a short upwind leg. Once we turn downwind and deploy the gennaker, we’ve got many miles of open-ocean high-speed tropical send. In these conditions, Altiere is in his element and sails right up to and past boats that got ahead of us on the upwind leg. Our top speed, according to my watch, is 22.9.

But every downhill has uphill, and way too soon we’re furling the gennaker, lashing it to the trampoline, rounding an orange tetrahedron, and pointing three bows into steep, wind-whipped waves.

“More trim!” is all I hear for the next hour, or “More speed!”

Each time, I pull with everything I’ve got, the rope shredding the palms of my cheap gloves. With only the leeward bow in the water, Cry Baby kisses wavetops, making this upwind slugfest that much more enjoyable as we short-tack the island’s coastline. After one final tack to port at the top of the island, Altiere gives us the command we’ve been waiting for: “Go gennaker, now!”

The moment that sucker fills, the daggerboard is singing, water is exploding through holes in the trampoline mesh, and we’re cruising at 20 knots. Altiere carves up and down following seas and reels in the boat to leeward of us as if it’s dragging a drogue. The three of us are pinned to the aft beam, weight back as far as it can possibly go. There will be no pitchpoling today. Lush green island to starboard, sparkling blue sea all the way to the finish. It’s heart-racing tropical sailing the likes of which I’ve never experienced.

Later, as I shuffle to a hotel shower, I get a pop-up alert on my Garmin watch that I’ve never seen before: “Recovery Time Delayed. A high level of activity today slowed your recovery.”

As if I need reminding.

The New Yorkers had a heck of time getting around, unaware of water pouring into an unsealed cockpit hatch, enough to have their Torquedo floating inside the hull. “We were hanging with everyone until we got to the top of the island,” Ferraro says. “But once we got around the top of the island, everyone just peeled away from us. We had no idea why.”

Hundreds of pounds of water sloshing around the center hull will do that to you.

Regatta organizers serve up a feast for the next day, with a full menu that includes a 20-mile distance race to Marigot Bay on the French side of the island, a windward-leeward race in the bay, and a return distance race. Our new crew for the day is 13-year-old local Optimist champ Sarah Micheaux, tiny and timid, but seemingly game for her first Diam outing. She speaks only French, so Altiere explains the ropes.

Before we even strike the line on a high-speed gennaker reaching start, Micheaux is shivering, puking, and white-knuckling Altiere’s leg. While redlining at 20 knots, he pats her on the back like a tender father, assuring her that all is well.

We round the reach mark with Micheaux out of commission, so he hands the tiller to me so he can go forward and rotate the mast by hand. It’s my first go at driving, and my tendency is to drive it like a monohull—oversteering through waves and feathering through the big gusts. Altiere corrects me and keeps goading me: “More speed. Even more speed. Good.”

All I have to do is bear away a few degrees, get the center hull unstuck, and the boat levitates with only the leeward bow punching through the waves.

“See?” he says. “Speed. Always more speed.”

After the ensuing and harried one-lap windward-leeward race in the bay, we’re lining up for the 12-mile return sprint, which is another shot-out-of-a-cannon gennaker start. Thankfully, this race has zero upwind sailing. This one’s a reach-fest, and this is why we reach through life.

“The sail back from Marigot was just epic,” Holmes says. “Just screaming. Unbelievably fun. We were finally starting to get a handle on the boat.”

On the fourth and final day, we’re back to buoy racing, and while there’s more tears than cheers on Cry Baby, the sort-of New Yorkers are feeling their mojo.

“We were in the mix,” Holmes says. “We had good starts, and we were with the group upwind. There are some cool photos of us kind of like leading the bulk of the fleet around the course—at least that’s what it looks like.”

Ferraro agrees that they were sharp upwind, “but downwind, we just couldn’t find the low and fast mode. We couldn’t figure that out.”

That’ll be next year’s challenge.

 “I’m looking into buying one,” Holmes says, weeks later, back in the office and scheming with Young to go in on it with him. “It’s easy to get to St. Maarten, and from what I’ve seen, they have these cool regattas and beach parties, the sailing is amazing, and it all looks like so much fun. I think about that boat every day, so I definitely have to get back on it.”

Ferraro is hooked as well. “I can honestly say that after all the stuff that went on during the week, good and bad and stuff like that, even with all the chaos and stuff. That was still the most fun sailing I’ve had in a really long time.”

When, and if, they do get their hands on a Diam, there’s only one place they plan on putting it. “If you’re going to do it right, you gotta keep it in St. Maarten,” Young says.

And that’s how Altiere and his St. Maarten crew will get to 20 boats soon enough. If space on Kim Sha becomes an issue, no problem, he says. There are plenty of beaches on St. Maarten to spread the fun around.

“We’ll figure it out,” Altiere says. “I know we can make this work. The dream is real, and there is room for this kind of full-service experience. It’s a gateway to a sailing vacation.”

Sold. More speed coming my way.

The post The Caribbean’s Hot One-Design Fleet appeared first on Sailing World.

We’re only three races into the regatta, with plenty more to come at the inaugural RS Fest in Miami, but Michiel Geerling is already tallying points in his head to determine where we sit in the results. He’s got us tied for first in the five-boat RS21 fleet, and third is only one point back. “Not that the results matter,” Geerling says with a sheepish grin. “Because we’re here to have fun, right?”

Right, but it’s obvious that Geerling, whom I met only hours earlier, has real intentions of winning the regatta he’s hosting—even if that means beating customers. Racing is racing, and all is fair on Miami’s sparkling Biscayne Bay on this early spring weekend where sailors young and old and from far and wide have gathered to race under the sun and the hot-­magenta banners of RS Sailing.

As the world’s biggest manufacturer of sailing dinghies, with headquarters in southern England, RS has long enjoyed a global cult following, but while they’ve been selling boats into the States for a long time, they’ve never enjoyed the full and warm embrace of the American racing scene. Thus, the inaugural RS Fest Miami—their first go at an annual family reunion of sorts. This gathering is relatively small, at 49 boats, but it’s a start.

“This is the beginning of something more—the start of a tradition,” Geerling says. “RS Sailing was born out of a desire to use the latest technology to build racing classes, to simplify life for the sailors to be racing and create these sailing communities.”

Employing a playbook of focus-on-the-fun racing and hip social events, they’ve grown a plethora of one-design classes in Europe, and Geerling’s intent is to do the same in the US: “This is what I want to build [with the Fest], and I believe we’re onto something here.”

Geerling joined RS after breaking out of his self-­described “golden cage” in the international coffee trade, he tells me. The money was good, but the sailing lifestyle was not. Before adulthood landed him in his cage, he once bandied about Europe as a strapping lad from Amsterdam with a collection of RS dinghies attached to his van. Those were happy years of high-performance sailing and living, he tells me, and that’s why he now sits in the commercial director’s chair at RS. He’s far more content selling what he loves, and what he loves most is the dinghy sailing life. That’s also true of most other RS C-suite occupiers—all middle-aged ­dinghy-sailing fanatics.

The four-day festival, which is staged out of Miami’s Regatta Park and hosted by the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, has four of RS’s most popular racing classes: the tyke-friendly roto-molded singlehander known as the Tera; the doublehanded and RS Feva, which I’m told is the world’s largest doublehanded racing class; the all-glass-and-carbon RS Aero singlehander; and the RS21, their flagship keelboat. It’s lightweight, sporty and simple, and that’s what I’m sailing on for the RS Fest, managing the front of the boat while Geerling drives. We have a rotating cast of first-time crews, including Katherine Fry. She’s a J/70 sailor and a ­high-powered lawyer from London. Her husband, Alistair, a big-time doctor, is racing in the Aero division. And more importantly, their two young daughters, Trinny and Alexa, are teamed up in a Feva.

“We were trying to plan an Easter holiday and learned about this regatta,” she says. “And we thought, Why not? It’s Miami—somewhere we’ve never been to and that’s easy to get to from London—and everyone gets to sail. It’s lovely, really.”

Once, as we loiter near the starting line shared by all the fleets, she points out her husband, who’s checking in with the girls. She hastily extracts an iPhone from her PFD, snaps a picture and beams with happiness, adoring this family postcard moment. Later, when we just so happen to be near the Feva’s leeward gate mark, she spots her daughters again. They have a commanding lead and a tidy drop of the little asymmetric spinnaker, which quickly ­disappears in its deck sock.

“Great job, girls!” she shouts aloud with glee and a golf clap.

They’re too preoccupied with the douse to acknowledge her praise, or thinking, Geez, Mum, please. You’re embarrassing us. Still, the moment is poignant: mother, father, daughters—all out playing on the same racecourses on a warm spring day in Miami.

This is also the case for Peter Cozzolino, of Milford, Connecticut. He’s driven the family’s GMC Sierra 2500 from Connecticut with plans to race, and then take two brand-new Fevas back north and start a local movement at Milford YC. He’s paired up with nephew Evan Davies, while his son Peter is sailing with Cozzolino’s other nephew, Grayson Davies. Though he originally planned on leaving Miami with two boats, he ends up filling the empty rack in his triple-stack trailer with a charter boat to seed in Milford [Which has since grown to more than a half-dozen Fevas at Milford YC, Cozzolino says—Ed].

Cozzolino, who co-chairs Milford YC’s junior sailing program, had rented a Feva last summer for the sole purpose of keeping his son and nephew interested in sailing, but he discovered how much fun it was to be in the boat with the kids himself. “My son had sized out of the Opti, and Peter wasn’t happy being by himself in the Laser,” Cozzolino says. “When I sailed with both of them in the Feva, they loved it, and the bigger Opti kids wanted to sail it too.”   

That was enough to ­convince him to buy two boats from RS, and the deal was he’d take delivery at RS Fest Miami. “They were the ones who suggested we come to the regatta, and I’m glad we did,” Cozzolino says. “It was the first time where I, as a parent, was able to sail in an open class with the kids.”

Granted, he was the sole 42-year-old among teens and preteens, but he plans on doing it again in Miami next year with his 9-year-old son, James. “Sailing together, parent and child, is a game-changer,” he says. “This was the kids’ first travel event, and they thought it was so cool to have the other kids, the giveaways, the games, and having the Aeros and the 21s around them. It gave them the excitement to see what’s next and to stay in the sport, which as a parent, I love.”

The unpretentious Coconut Grove Sailing Club off Bayshore Boulevard is where the sailors and families gather nightly after racing, enjoying the buffet, music and games. International flags for the regatta visiting sailors (India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Britain, etc.) line the seawall for an Olympic-esque touch, and the club’s Astroturf lawn is partially covered by neon magenta shag carpeting, white tables and chairs, pingpong tables erected from shipping pallets and plywood, and two aluminum-framed hiking benches for the RS Fest Hiking Challenge. And here, at the final awards, Geerling extends his gratitude to the sailors and promises that the RS Fest will be an ongoing thing somewhere and sometime in the near future.

He invites all in attendance to come again, and Dan Falk, the towering, white-bearded Aero sailor from Seattle, shouts, “Only if it’s Miami!” The crowd cheers in agreement, and with this show of support, planning is ostensibly underway.

The post RS Fest Miami Gets the Tribe Together appeared first on Sailing World.

during a walk along the Annapolis shoreline a few years ago, I noticed a fleet of boats racing on the harbor. From a distance, it looked well-organized and plenty competitive. And as I watched them go around the usual channel buoys that they were using as race marks in an orderly fashion, I wondered who it was who had been responsible for getting this fleet started from scratch. We all know that it can be difficult to run a local racing fleet, never mind to start one, but we also know that behind every successful fleet, there’s usually a spark plug or two, the heroes of our local fleets, and as expected, the fleet that I observed that day on my shoreline stroll has theirs.

As one of the more successful and newer fleets to take hold in Annapolis, the Harbor 20s sailors make up the tightknit community of Fleet 5. Initially, there were a handful of Harbor 20s that raced PHRF back in 2005, but in 2011, local yacht broker Garth Hichens sold a group of sailors on the idea of creating a one-design class in Annapolis. The Harbor 20, built by WD Schock in California, is best-suited for either two or three crew, and the class has strong pockets in the US, especially venues with protected harbors for which the boat was designed. It’s meant to be a simplistic daysailer, so Hichens and the group agreed to make it a nonspinnaker class. Its self-tacking jib-boom makes things even easier on the crew.

Fleet 5’s early adopters comprised novice racers to skilled veterans, and fleet ­members made sure that the social aspect was a priority. The endeavor quickly encouraged more local sailors to acquire boats, and as a result, the fleet grew rapidly. But it also needed structure to ensure fairness and long-term viability, and two successive fleet captains have provided the leadership and resolve to maintain governance of the fleet, organize racing logistics, and work to improve the competitive level of the ­racing and to grow the fleet.

Enter Annapolitan Bell Carty, who comes from a racing family and was named fleet captain just as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping across the country. She says that it took quite a bit of work to get the fleet organized. “I inherited a fleet that was thriving, but there was little structure,” Carty says. “We had a lawsuit to deal with, and we needed insurance and a better way to communicate.”

Retired attorney John Heintz, who was one of the early Harbor 20 owners in Annapolis, stepped forward to help resolve the lawsuit with the builder in California, and he worked on an insurance policy for the class and the sailors themselves. “After the dispute was eventually  resolved, we incorporated our local fleet and secured appropriate insurance for both the class and the fleet for the first time.” 

Then came the communication challenges, which Carty says was a result of too many means of outreach to fleet members. “We created a website and pushed all our messaging through the site,” she says. “If something happens, it’s important to keep in touch to reduce any tensions that might arise. We make sure to communicate with everyone, not just the fast sailors, so no one is left out. We also make sure that everything we are running is fun.”

Heintz is keen on the fleet’s regularly scheduled Thursday coffee-and-breakfast gatherings at Annapolis YC, which follow each Wednesday-night race during the summer. The topics vary, and open discussions help resolve contentious issues, which, if left to fester, can create more headaches later on. “People can express their views in a thoughtful way,” Heintz says. “We are a group of friends trying to keep it that way. If necessary, we consult with people outside the class.”

Carty adds that it was important for the fleet to write a set of bylaws and determine an appropriate owner-driver fleet policy. They also designated that higher-level regattas would mandate that the boat owner be at the helm when racing. It’s also important for the fleet to vary the style of races, she says, so not all of them are windward-­leeward. Sometimes they’ll simply have an informal race to someone’s house on the water.

While Heintz spent his early years practicing law, he cruised his C&C 39 for 14 years with his brother, and then his Saga 43 with his wife for 15 years, mostly transiting between the Chesapeake Bay and Maine. “I got into racing late in my career,” he says. “As the fleet grew around me, others came along to challenge me. I’ve learned from watching.”

The Harbor 20s sail very close to each other on short courses, he says, so it’s easy to measure one’s performance against others. “Everyone in the fleet will give you pointers or sail with you,” he says. “We recently had a seminar with two of Annapolis’ best sailors, Jonathan Bartlett and Will Keyworth, who shared images of our boats so that we could analyze sail trim and talk about tactics.”

There are currently 34 boats registered in the Annapolis Harbor 20 fleet, and Heintz says that there is a spike of interest in the boat of late. “Recently we had two top local sailors join, J/24 champion Tony Parker and Etchells standout Jose Fuentes-Afostini,” he says. There are only two limitations to growth: “finding available boats and then finding a place to put them.”

The fleet is working with the Annapolis YC to juggle more space in its dry sail storage lot to accommodate additional Harbor 20s on trailers. Carty says that the fleet runs races about 80 days per year, usually for one-day regattas, so as not to burn out fleet members. “We go out about three days per week,” Carty says. “One-day regattas are the most popular in our fleet. It is a real challenge to sell a two-day regatta, but they are good practice for multiday events like the East-West Challenge or the National Championship.” 

The annual East-West Challenge is a highlight for the more-competitive Harbor 20 devotees in the US—a fleet-race championship that pits teams from the East Coast Harbor 20 enclaves of Annapolis; Hilton Head, North Carolina; and Charlotte Harbor, Florida; against those from the west, including Santa Barbara and Newport Beach’s Fleet 1. 

One of the most difficult challenges for one-design-fleet spark plugs anywhere can be measurement compliance, especially when the vibe is meant to be low-key but also fair. Heintz says that Annapolis’ fleet has been smooth sailing since the beginning. “We haven’t had any issues with measurement or compliance,” he says. “People came from other one-design fleets that are more contentious. Now they want a boat that is simpler and fun to race. They are at that point in their lives.”

Hichens, he adds, has been instrumental in leading fleet-boat maintenance and issues with keels and rigs. “We hosted the nationals and followed the class regulations,” Heintz says. “All 25 boats were weighed and measured, and we set limits for adjustments.”

Several of the Annapolis-based Harbor 20s are owned by partners who alternate turns at the helm, which helps keep as many boats on the water as possible. The Wednesday-night summer-series starting line has become so crowded, however, that the fleet decided to parse into two divisions. Their solution for dealing with overcrowded starting lines and racecourses might serve as an example for other clubs looking to take the stress out of their more-casual racing series.

 Fleet 5’s summer season, for example, is divided into three different series of five-week intervals. The roster of each of the fleets is drawn out of a hat for the first set of the series. The divisions then switch for the second series, with the odd-numbered finishing boats switching fleets. The third series is made up of the top-half finishers of the first two series racing together for the championship.

This protocol allows teams who regularly finish in the bottom half of the fleet to compete against boats of the same caliber and have a chance at finishing in the top tier. The experiment during summer 2023 was very successful and will continue during the Wednesday-night series this summer.

The combination of competitive but relaxed racing and popular fleet social events attracts many sailors who are not regulars on the grand-prix circuit. Crews include many couples or parents with children. Carty, for example, often races with her 84-year-old father, George Hughes. Her son, also named George, just finished his first year at the United States Naval Academy and races when he gets leave from his midshipman obligations. Keeping with the fun theme of the fleet, she says, “Carty is for party, with a C.”

The post The Rise of Harbor 20s In Annapolis appeared first on Sailing World.

At the water’s edge on a ­bayside beach in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, a vibrant orange Windmill sits in its dolly. Crisp white sails hang limp from the spars, but invisible puffs excite cassette-tape strands attached to the shrouds, foretelling what’s out yonder on Tampa Bay, a placid vastness stretching into the hazy blue horizon.

I step back and admire the angular little yacht and think, Now that’s one sweet Windmill.

The hull is polished and radiates in the morning sunshine. A closer look inside the boat reveals high-tech ropes meticulously spliced and led through micro blocks with a no-grams-spared level of perfection. Two-hundred pounds all-up, narrow, slab-sided and hard-chined, I’m told, this Windmill is an old-school reaching rocket.

This is one of eight Windmill dinghies rigged up and waiting for wind at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in St. Pete. Loitering under nearby palms is a tightknit clan of devotees, led by local sailor Lon Ethington. As past Windmill class president, he volunteers to give me a Windmill 101.

“It’s a planing dinghy,” he says, with a beam of smile framed by a tight white beard. “It’s just plane fun!”

Get it? And yes, that is the class motto.

Surrounding the visiting Windmills in the boat park are techie A Class Catamarans and Melges 15s, modern marvels of small-craft one-design racing. The majority of them are the same-old white look-alikes. But not the Windmills.

“Everyone has a unique color,” Ethington says. “Windmills bring the color.”

He’s been “Windmilling” for about two decades and has had a hand in dragging this ol’ one-design class into the modern age. He is both a student and professor of the boat and its improvements, and frankly, he says, there’s really nothing else to be done to make it better.

Designed by Clark Mills, creator of the Optimist Dinghy, the original plywood kit-build Windmill was envisioned to be the transition dinghy for aged-out Opti kids. But Mills missed the mark on this one. It was too much for the tykes, Ethington says, “so the adults took over.”

A change to fiberglass came soon enough, and through multiple builders over 60 years, roughly 700 Windmills have been built, 13 of them in the past five years. Class rules have been updated accordingly, Ethington says. A redesigned daggerboard and rudder make them more responsive. Full-length top battens and more-durable cloth allow Windmillers to get more seasons out of their Dacron sails.

“Because it’s quick to accelerate, the boat doesn’t wear out your equipment,” Ethington says. “Your sails last for several years because the boat is so light.”

Having the Melges 15s and Windmills in the dinghy park is a stark example of the evolution of doublehanded dinghy racing. Their shapes alone—the wide and shallow surfboardlike 15 against the narrow and tall Windmill—make them different, but the vibe is the same: The people are the energy that keeps these antique one-design classes going. To know them is to be one of them.

Ethington raced a J/24 for two decades, and when he started racing Windmills, he was struck by the friendly and easygoing culture of the class. Way more laid-back, it fit his style. “It’s the most civilized class I’ve sailed in,” he says. “I’ve done more than 20 [Windmill] national championships, and we’ve had two protests go to the room.”

The orange boat on the beach belongs to Pat Huntley, the 58-year-old class measurer, who hails from Pennsylvania. It is as dialed in as a Windmill can be, legally. “The dynamic in the Windmill class is that it is a really friendly group,” he says. “They don’t take themselves as seriously, but they’re tremendously good sailors.”

In fact, way back when, it was the people, not the boat, that drew him into racing Windmills. It’s a story he loves to share. Ten years ago or so, he was dating his now-wife, Janet, and they were visiting her family in Florida, where he happened upon a Windmill. “I see this goofy little boat on the front lawn of the Clearwater Sailing Center and start asking about it,” Huntley says. Long story short, the Windmills had just wrapped their Midwinters, and further inquiry led to Ethington, a longtime friend, who extended an invitation to the national championship in Columbus, Ohio.

Janet, at the time, wasn’t a sailor, but Huntley convinced her to crew for him at nationals. “I said: ‘Come on, baby. It’ll be fun.’”

She said yes, and it was all good until the wind shut down. “Janet had quickly made friends with all the girls and all the wives, and one day we’re all sitting around and waiting for the wind. She looks at me and says, ‘Hey, we’re all gonna go shopping at the mall,’ And I’m like, ‘It’s nationals—you can’t just leave. And the girls were like, ‘Yeah…we don’t really care.’ After that, she said, ‘We should buy one. These people are fun.’ And so that’s what we did right there and then.”

Ethington’s appreciation for the Windmill is its acceleration and tendency to plane easily downwind with the jib pole extended. Most of the time, the class races windward-­leeward courses, but at 12 knots or more, the sailors prefer triangles. “Reaching through life…we like that,” he says with a grin, recounting his most thrilling Windmill experience.

“Once, we were sailing on the back end of a hurricane up in Long Island,” he says, “and I have no idea how fast we were going, but I was sitting on the transom of the boat, and my crew was behind the seat trying to keep the boat up. We were skipping over the top of the waves, and it was the most exhilarating feeling I’ve ever had on a sailboat.”

When he became a dues-paying member of the class, Huntley took over as measurer, mostly because “there was a lot of monkeying around with the boats.” Battling to preserve the one-design integrity meant reining in top sailors and stalwarts such as Ethan Bixby, a professional sailmaker and perennial class champion. “He’s a brilliantly fast sailor, but he’s also an International 505 guy, and those guys love to tweak. I’ve tried to keep the Windmills the other way—tight and right—so you can take my boat and go just as fast as I can.”

Working through a ­handful of builders over the years, some better than others, the official class molds now sit at Tartan Yachts in Painesville, Ohio, where boatbuilding icon Tim Jackett has agreed to build Windmills on demand—or rather, three boats at a time. “He has sailed mine probably four or five times,” Huntley says, “and he enjoyed the boat so much that he built one for himself.”

A race-ready used boat fetches anywhere from $5,000 to $6,000, and a brand new one checks out at $12,000. “We’re doing our best to make sure all the boats—new and old, glass or wood—are still competitive,” says class president Ralph Sponer, who started racing Windmills in 2009. 

“We’ve tried to maintain with a builder that, yeah, we can use carbon, and we can do a lot of things to make it advance, but when we build a new boat, we have to make sure we don’t make the other half obsolete. We see in a lot of classes where there’s maybe 1,000 boats, but only 10 to 15 can really race competitively.”

Without a spinnaker, they’re plenty quick, and one key trait, Huntley says, is that the boat teaches a lot about apparent-­wind sailing. The Windmill is about 100 pounds lighter than a Snipe, he says, and “while we have a similar rig as a Snipe, we basically weigh more than 100 pounds less. With that in mind, we’re sailing a lot at higher apparent-wind angles, not ­plowing downwind.”

With roughly five regional championships in the US, the big event is always nationals, hosted this year by the Rock Hall, Maryland, Windmill contingent. They’re aiming for 25 to 30 boats, which is the high norm these days, and this is where the class’s rock stars shine. “The competition level here is pretty high across the board,” Sponer says, but the class faces the same challenges of countless antique one-design classes. 

“The biggest thing is just ­trying to find another generation of sailors out there,” Sponer says. “One thing we do have going for us is that we were once kind of ahead of our time, with the boat being so narrow and quick to plane.”

With roughly 90 active class members, there’s an urgency for the class to grow its ranks, which Sponer says has been the recurring challenge since taking the president’s chair nearly 10 years ago. Still, for this year’s nationals, he hopes to draw 30 boats or so. And while they now have trophies for the top 10, they also have trophies for the class’s septuagenarians, born the same year as the Windmill itself. The octogenarian trophy is forthcoming, and as far as Sponer is concerned, that’s OK. 

“When I see a 70- or 80-year-old successfully sailing in all conditions, out in a narrow boat like Windmill, I have a lot of respect for that person,” he says. Because remember: “It’s just plane fun,” regardless of one’s age.

The post Windmills Plane and Simple appeared first on Sailing World.

The 65-boat fleet at the 2023 Melges 15 Winter Series was an impressive turnout for a one-design class that’s only three years old. But that was nothing. This year, 90 boats showed up at each of the three series’ events in over three months in Jensen Beach, Florida. The class has subscoring categories for women, youth, master, grand master, mega master, and even a “couples” division, but this year’s winter series was won by a pair of recent college-sailing alumni. The transferable dinghy skills and emphasis on strong sailing fundamentals from college sailing paid off for skipper Luke Arnone and crew Cameron Giblin, from Mantoloking YC, New Jersey. The pair won two of three events, including the final Midwinter Championship, to earn the series title.

What was your strategy for winning the 90-boat Midwinter Championship?

Cameron Giblin: Consistency is really important, especially in the big fleet. You can see people put up some big numbers. We got off to a bit of a slow start ourselves, with a 14 and a 20. The racing was pretty tricky early on, but when we got settled on the second day, ­rattling off a couple of top-five finishes helped settle the score line. Sometimes you’d rather be chasing than being chased, so it was nice going into the last day with something to fight for.

Three of the races were windy, and four were light; what’s the key to being competitive in either condition?

Giblin: We really like the range because we think we’re a good combined weight and a really dynamic pair, so a lot of people are really consistent in windy or light air, but if we get three different days with three different conditions, we think we have a good combination of smarts and speed in the boat to where we can really capitalize on it.

When you guys are ­preparing for your races, what is your ­discussion around strategy?

Luke Arnone: I feel like the game plan is always changing, especially at a venue like Jensen Beach, where we’ve gotten a little more comfortable with the conditions and we started noticing more trends. For example, really digging into the pressure instead of letting it come to you consistently paid off. It’s also a venue where the wind winds a certain direction instead of going back and forth, so digging into pressure and getting that slow shift is what has been paying off for us.

Giblin: Luke and I try to keep everything pretty light in the boat. You know, after some bad races, you can get pretty down, but that’s definitely what causes things to snowball. So we try to reset after races and just hang out, drink water, and not think about racing for a bit. Then, as soon as the Vakaros shows the countdown to a new start [Ed. Note: Vakaros electronics and its companion RaceSense race management software were used by all teams], we start looking upwind, make sure we are all good, and get the water out of the boat. Having a process where we do the same thing again and again produces repeated full results and being consistent. This is super-important over the series of events where there’s a lot of competition and variable conditions. We pretty much try to keep it as simple as possible. We’re a fast boat and we know that, so we try to stay out of the way and get in that front pack early, and then play the game from there.

You were in the top five over the course of the regatta, but you weren’t winning. Did you know you were in contention going into the last race?

Arnone: I never thought we were out of contention at any point in the regatta. We definitely took a good look at the scores [before the final day], and I even had to factor in that the fellas in first place were dropping an 8, meaning only 8 additional points would get added to their score should they have a worse race. That was something good to have in the back of our minds, but we really just wanted to get top threes. That’s all we could do, and that’s what we did.

With 12 to 18 knots for the last two races of the regatta, what was your top speed?

Arnone: We hit 16.5 knots on the final downwind on the layline into the finish when this huge puff took us down angling below the finish line. For a moment we weren’t sure if we were going to make it, coming in at such a hot angle, because if we headed up in that puff, we were going straight over. But we made it around, and that was a blast. I can’t really remember the last time I went as fast in a sailboat.

How did the use of the Vakaros and RaceSense software affect your series?

Giblin: The Vakaros is super-nice, because on the start, we get instant feedback if we’re over or not. So, as the crew, I’d yell, “Green” as soon as I saw from the device that we weren’t over, and then it’d be full speed ahead. We were over in one of the first races on the final day and it blinked “OCS,” but we were able to clear ourselves, and once it tells you that you’ve cleared, it’s super-nice. It was our first time experiencing the OCS technology, and we didn’t have any trouble with it.

I also think it changes your strategy a bit because in big-fleet regattas, when the pack
to windward is over, you can hide your sail number. But with the Vakaros, there’s no ­hiding. So you really have to know where the line is, and you can’t rely on determining your position based on the boats around you knowing where the line is. You have to trust yourself, because with 90 boats, who knows if other people know where the line is.

What have you observed about the evolution of the Melges 15 fleet and your competitors?

Giblin: The top end of the fleet got a lot bigger. It seemed like at every event that there were a few more people in the top end of the fleet, and anyone could win a race by the end of the regatta. There are 20 teams who could finish the regatta in the top five, and it makes it much more interesting and the points more interesting. It’s cool to see everyone figuring it out week by week, as we are. Everyone is getting better. It’s been great seeing a lot of people from college sailing; many of them are in the different age divisions. A lot of skills from college sailing translate.

Speaking of the parallels of Melges 15s and college sailing, you both recently graduated. Cameron, you graduated from Tulane, and Luke, you graduated from Yale. How does Melges 15 racing compare with college sailing?

Arnone: The Melges 15 is a lot faster than college dinghies, and with the asymmetric spinnaker, the downwind legs are definitely the most fun part about this boat, especially when it’s breezy. With the kite up, we play the angles and sail the lowest path we have while managing waves and our speed.

Giblin: I can see some parallels with the M15 fleet and the college-sailing community. College sailing has a really good community where people respect each other and know we’re going to see each other week in and week out. And that’s kind of being created with the Melges 15 class as well. There are not a lot of protests; there are a lot of class-initiated group debriefs and people asking questions. There really is a sense of the class getting better rather than individuals getting better, which is awesome to see.

The post Winners Debrief: Melges 15 Winter Champs appeared first on Sailing World.

It never changes—that ­sinking feeling when you cross the line first but don’t get the horn. Dang, I guess we were over early. I knew it was close….

This is my reality after the second race of the 2024 Tasar Australian Nationals. All the pre-regatta anxieties came to the fore. Did I prepare enough? Am I good enough? Am I fit enough? Am I too old? Or was it just an error of execution that could be easily corrected? Going into a major event, it is normal to wonder how it is going to go. There’s always more preparation we could have done, and the fear that maybe we are not that good after all is never far away. I have found that one of the keys to calming these doubting voices is to build a playbook that suggests specific ways to prepare and sail for the venue. Some of these rules are derived from the venue itself, some from the nature of the competition, and some from our state of mind.

That OCS ends our first day of Tasar competition in Melbourne, Australia. My partner, Libby, and I had a bad first race going, but we managed a good comeback to finish eighth. It was a little shaky, but we dodged a bullet. Now we add an OCS to the score line. But luckily for Libby and me, this is only the pre-regatta and not the World Championship. As this reality sinks in while sailing back to the beach, I see more clearly that we can use the next few days of racing and training to get to Worlds form, and that’s exactly what we do.

In the first race of the Nationals, we had started toward the (favored) right side of the fleet, then tacked right toward what I thought was more wind. This was a disastrous strategy, and we were in the 30s approaching the top mark. This was Golden Rule No. 1: Understand the venue. In this case, the shore is to the left, causing the wind to bend and often increase. So, it pays to go left upwind unless the wind is definitely going right. This also means avoiding the temptation to tack back early. We used this basic approach for the rest of our time in Melbourne. It didn’t work every time, but it formed an effective tactical framework.

Being way behind in Race 1 of the Nationals (which I am calling the pre-regatta), at the start of the run, I am somewhat desperate. I jibe onto port shortly after the mark, find a clear lane, and carry on all the way to the port layline, plus a little bit more. We then jibe and come in fast to the left gate, passing 20 boats. Golden Rule No. 2: The run is where we can make huge gains, so find space and go fast, and approach the gate from an edge.

In the second race, we ­execute a risky start toward the favored left side and sail a good beat to round in the lead. We then sail defensively to hold on for the win, until the non-horn. But we’ve learned another great lesson, which brings us to Golden Rule No. 3: The starts are pivotal. With more than 100 boats and an 800-meter line, we can’t do well without good starts. And we can’t afford to be Black Flag or OCS.

At this point in the regatta, we have raced for only one day, and we already have three powerful lessons that can set the groundwork for our regatta strategy. Even though our score line looks erratic, I can start to feel a plan coming together.

The second day of the Pre-Worlds (Australian Nationals) brings good breeze and three great races. We have decent scores, but we have two key breakthroughs. First, we get very systematic with our pre-start routine, including regularly checking the wind direction, doing multiple practice starts, and moving to different parts of the start box. Enter Golden Rule No. 4: Win with superior preparation and rigor before the start.

On this day, we have mixed success downwind, both passing and getting passed, but we figure out a fairly reliable way to position ourselves downwind relative to boats around. Building on Rule No. 2, we sail in clear air downwind and try to find space to rip but defend on the tighter reaches.

Day 3 of Nationals is canceled because it’s blowing 25 and the waves are steep and huge. It’s a bit of a disappointment, but it’s clearly the right call to preserve the fleet for the upcoming Worlds. But we have not sailed in those conditions for a long time (maybe never?), so we (I) decide to go for a brief sail after racing is called for the day. A couple of other US boats venture out on Port Phillip Bay as well. We have a little session, and it is indeed pretty exciting. We make it back to shore without mishap, so we achieve our goal of becoming familiar with extreme conditions. If we have similar conditions during the Worlds, I feel as if we could at least get around the track, which brings us to Golden Rule No. 5: Be mentally prepared for any condition.

We ended the pre-regatta in fifth place overall. Not bad for a warm-up regatta, but there were clearly other teams that were going to be hard to beat, including the three Aussies and one American team that had beaten us, as well as a few others who didn’t beat us but were fast. The stage is now set. Can we eliminate unforced errors and apply the golden rules we’ve ­developed during the Nationals?

In the three days between the Nationals and the Worlds, we mostly rest. But we also spend a day trying to get a little faster upwind because we all know that a little upwind speed can make the whole race a lot easier. Because of the rough sea state, we try adjusting our diamond shrouds a little tighter than normal. We also try using a bit of vang upwind to improve our footing in overpowered conditions. In the end, we are consistently among the fastest boats upwind, measurably improving during the week. That gets us to Golden Rule No. 6: Never stop trying to get faster.

As the regatta unfolds, it looks as if our little rule book is working. There are lots of Black Flags, OCS penalties, and other high scores in the first three days of racing. The conditions are mostly medium air, but the beats are tricky, with both sides sometimes paying off huge. Somehow, we manage to get good starts and pick the right way most of the time, and we benefit from a couple of good comebacks. This gives us top-eight scores going into the lay day, with five more races scheduled. We have a slight lead and a good discard, but a few good boats are still well within range. Can we keep our composure? Would the rules keep working?

The lay day promises a late leisurely breakfast but also a change in the weather. It gets rainy, cold and windy, which means no beach day for us, but the next day is also too windy to sail. The suspense is really building now—in my head, at least. But I’m trying to stay relaxed….

Three races are scheduled for the final day of the regatta, with an early start and 10 to 16 knots in the forecast. With the second discard coming into play after nine races, the math gets somewhat dizzying. I try to tell myself, Just go out and sail well. It’s not a golden rule, but it’s a good thing to do anyway.

For the first start, we line up just to weather of the midline boat, have a killer acceleration, and tack after a minute when we get a little header, easily crossing the fleet. This is going really well, I tell myself. But a few minutes later, the wind keeps shifting left. Now we’re on the outside of a left shift. We round the first mark in the 30s, get back to around 20th at the gate, and finished 13th. It’s a good comeback, but we’ve also eaten a discard with two races still to be sailed. The pressure is mounting. We need two more error-free races.

With the second discard coming into play after nine races, the math gets somewhat dizzying. I try to tell myself, Just go out and sail well.

In the next race, we again get a really good start, and we are fast. We are near the top, but we cover the wrong boat for a while. In the end, we get through to third, with our closest competitor just ahead of us. If my math is correct, we are 1 point ahead of Chris Dance and Peter Hackett going into the last race, losing the tie-breaker. So, it’s now who-beats-who. I think we have locked second overall, but I’m not 100 percent sure about that. Anyway, we are playing for first!

OK, so what’s the plan for the last race? “Oh yeah, stick to the rules.” Do the practice starts, check the wind, confirm the ­settings, remember to breathe.

Again, we get a good start in the middle and hold on starboard. Near the layline, Libby sees Dance and Hackett coming across on port, three lengths behind. We cover them once. They tack, so we tack, then we tack onto their air a second time, and that was it for their race. We round the first mark sixth and finish third, which is good enough for the win—earning a big sigh of relief.

Sometimes we prepare well, we get lucky breaks, and it all just happens. But for the Tasar World Championship, having our Golden Rules keeps our heads clear and free from the mental clutter of all the things that can go wrong. The rules give Libby and me a positive mental framework that promotes good sailing and, most importantly, clear heads.

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One of the greatest attributes about racing sailboats is the opportunity to learn and relearn techniques that help us perform better on the racecourse. When I was invited to participate in San Diego YC’s most recent International Masters Regatta, I was excited to give it another try. In my first attempt, I finished fourth. I was fourth again the next time, and then fifth in my third go at it. Suffice to say, masters racing is tough, especially considering the collective wisdom shared across each of the teams. I was the second-­youngest skipper when I first raced this regatta in 2014, but at the most recent edition, I was the second oldest. Let’s just say that my goal this time around was to finish on the podium, because I am, of course, not getting any younger.

The first step I took when accepting the invitation was to recruit a strong crew. The roster of my celebrity squad included former National E Scow Champion Bill Campbell; last year’s Lightning Class World Champion, David Starck; Sailing Scuttlebutt editor and Etchells World Champion crew, Craig Leweck; retired three-star admiral and one-time All-American at the US Naval Academy, Dixon Smith; and San Diego-based J/105 veteran Sam Paterson. It was an all-star crew, and I quietly hoped that I would be worthy of sailing with such an experienced group. To qualify as a master, each ­crewmember must be at least 45 years old. The helmsman must be no younger than 60. I easily qualified at 73. Twelve skippers are invited each year, and the races are run in donated J/105s, which are tuned to be as equal as possible. Still, some boats were clearly different in speed. I know…excuses, excuses. 

I had spent the summer of 2023 racing as a tactician aboard a 50-footer and occasionally with the Harbor 20 fleet in Annapolis. My only regatta at the helm was aboard an 8-Metre on the New York YC Cruise and at Nantucket Race Week. All of that didn’t quite prepare me for the masters. I’ve been a longtime advocate that practice is important, but unfortunately, we had a only few hours to tune up the day before the first race. No one was allowed to use any electronic instruments, which for me was a refreshing change from racing on boats with endless streams of data that tend to overwhelm the art of decision-making.

In the regatta’s opening race, we got off to a fast start on the right side of the line and took the lead, but the wind shifted, and the race committee abandoned the race. We used the same tactic for the restart, only to watch the wind shift 30 degrees to the left. Positioning ourselves way out on the right side of the racecourse was doom. It was simply humiliating to round the first mark in last place. Race No. 2 was better with a fourth-place finish. I learned many years ago that the key to winning regattas is to maintain a good, consistent average. To achieve this, I had to discipline myself to concentrate on sailing fast and to avoid looking around. From that point on, Campbell and Starck kept their heads out of the boat while I dutifully listened to their wise counsel.

In Race No. 3, however, we finished a dismal 10th. After three races, we were in last place. Now what? I asked myself.

The strength of a veteran crew is the ability to promptly identify weaknesses and immediately apply solutions. Happily, no one got upset, and there was no finger pointing when we returned to the dock. We simply needed to sail better. The first idea was to keep things simple. Don’t try to win the start; just get off the line with a clear lane, and head for the favored side of the course. The second priority was to reduce the number of tacks and jibes. Third was to be more aware of keeping our air clear. In the tight 12-boat fleet, it was easy to get into match-race-style skirmishes with other boats. We had to avoid that as best we could.

The racecourse on the second day of racing had two windward legs. Campbell and Starck carefully watched the wind trends, and with each race, we consistently improved our position on the second windward leg. We religiously stayed clear of packs of boats, so our finishes improved dramatically
—we even won a race and posted two third-place finishes. At the end of day, with three races remaining in the series, we had worked our way up to third overall in the standings. The podium was in reach. 

Over nine races, nine different teams had won a race, and everyone had also finished ninth and often worse, which is to be expected given the impressive résumés of my fellow skippers. Among them were Olympians, America’s Cup sailors and world champions. As competitive as the racing was on the water, the atmosphere was collegial around the waterfront. There was considerable mutual respect among all the competitors. In a good way, the International Masters keeps veteran sailors relevant when so much emphasis these days centers on high-level racing for younger people. 

The San Diego YC has run this regatta since 2012. It was first held in 1979 on San Francisco Bay, organized by great Laser sailor Don Trask. He sailed in the masters in 2019 at the age of 86, which gives me hope for the rest of us, although we are aging faster than anyone might admit. On Saturday evening of the regatta, each skipper gave a short speech that ranged from good-natured barbs to soaring admiration for everyone on the water. I sat there listening and feeling good about being a part of this elite group of elders.

In a good way, the International Masters keeps veteran sailors relevant when so much emphasis these days centers on ­high-level racing for younger people. 

The race committee operation for this regatta is impressive too. The committee anchors a set of floating docks near the starting area for boat rotations that take place with great efficiency after every race. There is no wasted time as everyone hustles to pack spinnakers, straighten lines, swallow a sandwich, and get ready for the next warning signal. 

On-the-water umpires kept us honest. It seemed that Green Flag (no foul) calls prevailed most of the time, while the boats that fouled (including us) ­completed penalty turns immediately after an incident. There was very little yelling on the water because I think that everyone was conserving their energy but, as with any major regatta, controlling emotions is part of a winning mindset. It takes work to recover from a bad race and get ready to restart within a few minutes, and it always makes me realize how hard it must be for professional athletes to shake off a bad play and keep going. Emotions use energy too. Once I realized that every boat was having its share of good and bad races, my emotions leveled out and our scores improved. It reminded me, once again, that a positive attitude usually nets positive results.

The effort by the San Diego YC and its many volunteers serves as an example of how to host a signature regatta of this caliber. There were many logistical challenges, which included inviting the ­skippers and crews, arranging for a fleet of matched boats, providing insurance, ­running the race committee, and orchestrating the boat rotation. A busy repair crew worked diligently to keep the races rolling; club members sourced ­housing for out-of-town competitors and race officials, and hosted social events, all while working with a modest budget. The reward for the club is having top sailors become ambassadors for the event and giving local sailors an opportunity to race against top sailors from afar. 

The San Diego YC hosted a similar regatta one week later called the Lipton Cup, which has no age restrictions. And, as you might expect, it is a mighty competitive regatta. Interestingly, Scott Harris, who won the masters with a ­4.5-point average, finished fourth in the Lipton Cup with a 5.5-point average. Based on Harris’ performance, I surmise that the masters fleet was not too far off the pace of the younger sailors in the Lipton Cup. Tad Lacey, from San Francisco, was the ­runner-up master, and both he and Harris have raced in the masters many times over the years. Cory Sertl was third, and we finished…fourth. I guess I’ll have to give it another shot.

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Allan Terhune Jr., of Annapolis, Maryland, finally found himself among the illustrious short-listers of the 2023 Rolex Yachtsman of the Year award. As a sailmaker 15 years and counting, Terhune has won plenty of regattas as both skipper and crew, but 2023 was especially good, putting up big wins in the MC Scow Class, securing his first 6-Metre World Championship title as ­tactician, and then wrapping up the year with a gold medal in the Lightning Class at the Pan American Games in Chile. One could say he’s getting faster with age, but he’d say, he’s ­simply having more fun.

Why was 2023 such an especially productive year?

A bunch of things came together, but I think what made a difference was that I started doing a few more projects that I wanted to do. The MC Scow changed my perspective on the sport. The class is growing, especially in New Jersey, where I grew up, and a bunch of my friends bought MCs. There is something refreshing about throwing the boat on the car by myself, meeting my buddies somewhere, and just going sailing. There’s no client to manage, and I don’t need to find a crew. It’s just me alone in the boat again, so it kind of reinvigorated everything.

What about it changed your perspective?

The MC Scow really brought me back to the basics, and rekindled everything that made me fall in love with sailing in the first place. It reminded me to have fun. Obviously, I do it for work and it’s a job, but no ­matter how much any of us love our line of work, sometimes we need that reminder of why we fell in love. It’s about sailing with my friends from junior sailing or college and having fun. Every time I get a little grouchy, [my wife] Cate tells me that I need to pull the MC out of the garage and go sailing. 

The 6-Metre sailing was just super fun, and it was a great opportunity to sail such a cool and classic boat with an amazing history. To do it with friends that I’d won the J/24 Worlds with [in 2022] added to the fun factor. It was all new and something I was fired up about. Same thing with the Lightning. The effort was more about what I wanted to do rather than what I had to do.

Is the MC Scow a totally new class for you?

I’d sailed MCs at the Championship of Champions 15 years or so ago, and that was fun. When I got my first boat, I was at a regatta in Florida, and I was sailing around and having fun, but then I started thinking, I’m kind of hungry. And then I was like, Oh, man, now I’m the one who has to bring the food. And the radio. And everything else. It was a good reminder about being self-sufficient and doing it myself. That’s been really good for me in a lot of ways.

What have been the steps to getting up to speed in ­new-to-you classes?

Doing basic stuff, which means just tacking and jibing well. I did a lot of stuff where I would video myself with a GoPro, just to see where hiccups were—like the hand-to-tiller transfer. I went to a regatta with a couple of guys, and we had sort of a coach—not a professional coach, but just someone to point out ­differences to us. The MC is a funny little boat because it has to be heeled, which is contrary to everything else we do. And that was kind of the hardest part, but once I figured that out, it was all good.

With the 6-Metre [owned by Newport, Rhode Island’s Jamie Hilton], most of us were new to it, and we had three weeks to figure it out. We committed to keeping it basic, and it was amazing. As soon as we started deviating to rig tuning or finer parts of the boat, we ended up taking a step backward. As soon as we went right back to tacking better and getting the sails up and down better, everything improved. It was also good to be more open-minded to learning things and talking to people and seeing what they can tell us and seeing if it works. I think that was the good part, a reminder that sailing isn’t as black-and-white as we all think or people say.

Give us an example.

With the 6-Metre, it was something as simple as how we sat on the boat. Everyone was telling us that we have to sit below the deck to get the waterline down, and we were like, that makes no sense. On every other boat we sail, we sit on the rail. So, we said we’re going to sit on the rail, and everyone’s still telling us we’re wrong. But, hey, we’re winning a lot of races and going pretty fast, and halfway through the regatta, we see other boats with people sitting on the side. It wasn’t that we are smarter or anything; it was that we weren’t shackled to the norms.

You tried before to earn a berth for the Pan American  Games and came up short, but this time you got your berth with your crew, Sarah Chin and Madeline Baldridge. Why are the Pan Am games so ­important to you?

It’s just a really ­amazing experience. I’ve sailed in the Lightning class for more than 20 years, and I’ve always known that I would never be on an Olympic path, so for me, this was the closest I would get. The games are a very big deal, especially for other sports, and when you’re there, it’s pretty close to a real Olympic experience. Seeing how the US team works from the inside, and being part of that team, was fun and inspiring.

We have a great group of athletes and leaders, and seeing it from the inside was special. It’s an experience that I don’t think you can really replicate because you’re there not just for yourself. You’re also there for your own country. It’s just so different and has a ­completely different vibe to it.

In all that you do as a pro sailor and sailmaker, how do you keep the enjoyment aspect in focus? 

I think it’s just about being more relaxed about it all and realizing that if I don’t win the next race, it’s not the end of the world—move on to the next. Someone once told me: “You can sail well and not win, or you can sail really crappy and win. Which way is better?” And that’s so true. It’s about wrapping your head around the fact that sometimes we sail really well, but there’s still someone who beat us. It’s OK. It’s about finding ways to play the game better, or to your abilities, or whatever it is, and being happy with that. It’s more about the process than the result, and I kind of hate that saying, but it’s actually true.

Sounds like you’re ­getting older and wiser; is that changing how you race?

Oh, yeah. Honestly, 15 years ago, I think everything was forced, where it was always like a panic or a need to force good things to happen. Maybe I’m more relaxed, I don’t know, but I have much more of a patient outlook, kind of letting things develop and trying to think it through. Also, remembering that the rules are there to keep boats apart, not as a tactical weapon to win races. I think about all the situations a little bit differently and how you actually get better at it when you realize that the purpose of the rules is to keep us apart. So, maybe it’s just old age, or being wiser about it and not being so hyped up and forcing things like I did before.

With all that wisdom now, how do you approach starts?

I don’t like how everyone says that the safest thing to do is start in the middle or go for the low-density start—it’s not that easy when everybody’s trying to do the same thing. The biggest thing that I took away recently was getting onto starboard tack for the final approach, and understanding how to speed up and slow down—maintaining that ability to instantaneously speed up when you need to. A coach once explained it to me like this: In your car, it’s a lot easier to go from 30 to 60 than it is from zero to 60. It’s the same thing on a boat. You can approach the line with a controlled pace, and when you need to go, it’s a lot easier than if you are head-to-wind and luffing. I think it’s actually harder to start now than it was 20 years ago because people are much more refined and the electronics have made it even tougher because everyone knows where the line is.

How about the first beat: What are Terhune’s top tips?

The first part of the race is really about getting off the line and getting away as clean and as fast as you can. In the early and middle half of the beat, you should be sailing the windshifts and really owning the side that you picked.

The last quarter of the leg should be all about traffic management. One of the things we talked about on the Lightning when we were doing the North Americans is shifting from ­pressure-and-windshift mode to traffic mode. In the last minute of a beat, a little windshift is not going to make a huge difference, but your positioning will.

And how about downwind rules of thumb?

I think downwind, you have to be by yourself. When boats are together, they inherently go slower, so you have to find your own space. The other one is being really comfortable with your modes. The worst thing you can do is be stuck somewhere between a high mode and a low mode. If you want to soak low, just do it. If you want to go high and go faster, don’t hesitate. It’s about knowing when to and how to, and a lot of that is just time spent sailing your boat. There’s this belief that your practice time has to be with other boats and ­having a coach and doing drills, but you can learn a lot by sailing your boat alone and just going for a ride to know how it feels. Grab your friends, fill the cooler, and go sailing.

Best practices for a crowded leeward gate?

My default is to round the left gate because, when or if you have to tack, you are tacking onto starboard and you have right-of-way, whereas, if you round the right gate and something goes wrong, you have to tack and cross people on port, which makes it even more precarious.

Finish the race for us.

With upwind finishes, it’s much like starting, ­meaning there will be a favorite end. Never finish in the middle of the line because you’re giving distance one way or the other. If you pick the wrong end, so be it, but finishing in the middle is just crazy.

With downwind finishes, the easy trap to fall into is treating it like a gate. You don’t want to end up in that middle zone, where you are kind of between two packs and you never actually get through. So, on the downwind side, at some point, you just have to get to an end, and like basketball, stay between your man and the hoop.

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the simplicity of putting your equipment in the back of the car, driving to a local sailing ­center or beach, and getting on the water to rip around with friends at high speeds with minimal fuss is appealing to people of all ages and ability levels, which is why the emergent sport of wingfoiling has taken off. One-design racing is the next frontier.

Naturally, when a sport is new, its pioneers push limits to see what is possible, and it has been absolutely crazy—in a good way—to witness what’s been happening in the wingfoil world. Two years ago, a backflip on wingfoil equipment was practically unimaginable, but tricks today are far more complex, and racing speeds are at near scary levels. But landing ­mind-bending tricks and doing 40 knots on wingfoil equipment represents only the top of the wingfoiling pyramid, not the masses. 

In order to promote wingfoiling as an inclusive windsport, Starboard, an international watersports company based in Thailand, is focused on building a pathway for individuals and families to sail together, improve, compete, and participate in wingfoil events with limited barriers to entry. Starboard’s X-15 is the first such purpose-built package for one-design wingfoil racing.

The concept behind the X-15 Class is to have wingfoilers sail on the exact same equipment—which provides fun, safe and fair racing—while also building pathways for the development of young athletes and the nascent sport of wingfoil racing as a whole. To make it feasible for an adult weighing 180 pounds to sail on the same equipment as a youth sailor, the X-15, developed by Starboard, a manufacturer of windsurfing and wing gear, will have different equipment standards for the age divisions of U13, U15, U17, U19, and Senior. Every X-15 set includes the same FreeWing, an X-15 board, and the same Martin Fischer-designed Starboard foil. There is an option to purchase two additional Starboard foil front wings to accommodate sailors of different sizes and for varying weather conditions.

Initially, sailors will be allowed to race in different age groups, but they must use the equipment of the age class in which they are sailing. And, in order to ensure that wingfoilers can foil in very light conditions and continue racing with their same wing in windy conditions, FreeWing, the wing developer of X-15, has created an innovative reefing technology that removes the trailing edge of the wing to reduce the overall size by about 1 square meter.

The materials used in the larger FreeWing X-15 wings are built with the new material, built for strength, anti-stretch, and light weight to support the wing bladder. The FreeWing’s canopy is built with newly developed materials to make the wing durable and to prevent stretching. The smaller wings are built with Dacron in the leading edge, a move to keep costs lower for developing youth classes.

The complete X-15 ­package for a U13 sailor—with a 4.5-square-meter wing and an 82-liter board—is priced at around $4,214, and the Senior package, with a 6.5-square-­meter wing and 95-liter board, is priced at around $5,601. With an expected high demand this spring, equipment packages will be allocated to key ­development markets first.

Exhibition X-15 Class races were staged in Europe in 2023 and at the World Sailing Youth World Championships in Brazil, and the class’s focus in 2024 is to first develop regattas exclusively for youth sailors. The priority is on creating a fun and inclusive racing environment. The first international youth events are slated for June 2024, and as the class continues to grow, senior divisions will be added to certain events.

Fiona Wylde, of Hood River, Oregon—a windsurf, stand-up paddleboard and wing world champion—serves as the X-15’s first class manager and is founder of Wylde Wind & Water, a nonprofit focused on youth watersports safety and development.

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