Sailing World

It’s a Monday morning in late April, and students are pouring into Austin YC’s one-room schoolhouse, packed with banquet tables and folding chairs to seat about 100 sailors and coaches participating in the first longhorn edition of North U’s Performance Race Week, the immersive boot camp for keen amateur sailors. Bill Gladstone, the wizard of this whole operation, assembles his coaches for the first morning brief. I’m one of them, and we’ll each be paired with our charges in a few minutes, speed-dating style. For the 54 students, this week is all about getting better at sailboat racing. Attendees get Gladstone’s textbooks on boat-speed and tactics, as well as five days of 9-to-5 instruction, a season’s worth of starts, and a bunch of new and likeminded friends. They will be drilled,…

It’s blowing 25 knots off the land from the northeast. Thick, dark clouds block the sun and bring the cold to the Trofeo Princesa Sofía regatta in Spain, the first European event of our 2022 Olympic calendar. My cheeks and hands are freezing, and my 4/3 wetsuit is soaked. I haven’t been in a wetsuit this thick in years, so moving around the boat is difficult. The wind is crazy puffy and shifty, and it feels like survival conditions at times. I have some nervous and excited butterflies in my stomach knowing that the racing is going to be intense. I have no idea what to expect from ourselves or the fleet. Welcome to Palma, I think to myself. Damn, it’s cold out here. My teammate, Maggie Shea, and I call…

For Bob Morton, a seasoned racing sailor based in Newport, Rhode Island, who has owned more yachts named Brigadoon than you have toes on your feet, there’s one definitive moment in time that crystallized and confirmed everything he knew and loved about offshore competition with a crew of trusted mates in brisk winds and deep-blue water. That moment is the third afternoon of the 1982 Newport Bermuda Race aboard his Sparkman & Stephens-designed 56-foot Brigadoon III. “It just all came together,” he says. “Just a beautiful sunny day. Whitecaps on every wave. Reaching along just great. The boat in perfect sync and trim.” And that single passage of time and miles was affirmed in unforgettable style several hours later when Brigadoon III charged across the finish line as the ’82 race’s overall…

When Emirates Team New Zealand arrived in Bermuda in 2017 for the 35th America’s Cup, they spectacularly wrong-footed their rivals when they unveiled a mini peloton of four “cyclors” pumping away on a row of fixed bikes instead of a traditional grinding team. Using legs rather than arms to power the hydraulic systems aboard the AC50 catamaran turned out to be a game-changing move. With a steady supply of oil pressure, the New Zealand crew could execute any maneuver they chose and twist their wingsail into speed-enhancing configurations that other teams could not match. Cyclors were prohibited aboard the AC75s introduced by the New Zealanders for their defense at the 36th America’s Cup in Auckland, but they could be back on board for the 37th edition in Barcelona, Spain, in 2024.…

“There was a long oily swell and very little wind,” Harold Cudmore recalled more than 40 years later. “We realized there was bad weather coming. So, we had the last supper because we weren’t going to eat again. We headed into nightfall… We were going to get a beating. The glass was falling something like three millibars an hour.” It was mid-August 1979, and an unsuspecting fleet of more than 300 hundred boats was headed for the Fastnet Rock off the southern tip of Ireland. They were all racing in the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s biennial classic, the Fastnet Race. In the space of the next 24 hours, 24 crews would abandon ship, battered by 60-knot winds and 40-foot breaking waves. Eighteen lives were lost among those who were competing and…

Stan Joines has been racing in the St. Thomas International Regatta for almost three decades, winning the Performance Cruising class a number of times, most recently in his J/36, Paladin. But it’s not so much his participation or his wins that make his story interesting. Since the early 1990s, Joines has been bringing teenagers along with him from his native St. Croix, teaching them to sail, race and simply enjoy being on the water. By his count, he’s exposed 200 to 300 kids to sailing. That’s with no organization, no funding—just Joines giving the kids of Croix a slice of the good sailing life. “When I first arrived here 32 years ago from Georgia to teach music at St. Croix Central High School, I had never sailed before. But I wanted…