Sailing World

running with the dogs

Gary Breder travels interstate to frostbite in Wickford, Rhode Island. He’s a fanatic with his older-school Sea Dog. (PHOTO: DAVE REED)■ Frostbite racing in the Northeast has been going on for ages, especially in Wickford Harbor, Rhode Island, where the Sea Dogs have romped every Sunday since the 1960s. Chuck Allen, Wickford YC’s past commodore, had been raving to me about them, so I recently texted him on a whim and asked if there was spare boat I could race with them for a day.“Yes,” he replied. “First race is at 1, but people start showing up at noon.”Anxious to rig, source a few pointers, and get a handle on the boat before the first race, I pull into Wickford YC’s clamshell parking lot early on a Sunday morning in…

a true legend

Van Den Heede eschews references to “old man and the sea” and said after finishing, “I feel more like a 73-year-old man.” (PHOTO: COURTESY GGR)■ Frenchman Jean-Luc Van Den Heede had wine onboard. He also stowed a dozen books or so, in case he was ever got bored with only a VHF for company and a satellite phone for emergency communications. As it turns out, he hardly had time to read as he completed his solo circumnavigation without a GPS to win the 2018 Golden Globe Race in 211 days. And he did not have time to sip wine in the cockpit of his Rustler 36 Matmut.Instead, every waking moment was spent repairing breakages, taking sextant readings and mustering the mental and physical stamina on minuteslong sleep cycles to find…

sowing the seeds

■ Eddie Cox has been on the road a lot lately. His Chevy Silverado and covered trailer, each emblazoned with the blue-and-red Melges Boatworks logo, is part of a travelling road show of sorts. With five of the company’s new dinghy, the Melges 14, filling the trailer, he’s been preaching the gospel of Melges to the faithful and, like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, planting one new dinghy fleet at a time. In the early days he hit up more than 20 yacht clubs across a dozen states. Wherever he pitches his tent, so to speak, new faces approach with piqued curiosity.“I go down with a full load of boats and hopefully come back empty,” says Cox, a slender, energetic 20-something.Early on, one of those stops was at Lake Lanier Sailing…

drawn to the watch

■ The Rolex Fastnet Race started early again this year, kicking off at midday on a cold and gloomy January Monday. This start wasn’t on a crowded Solet, but rather at the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s offices in London when the online entry portal opened for business. There were 340 places available in the IRC fleet, and they were all gone in 4 minutes and 37 seconds — a mere 13 seconds outside the record achieved in 2017. The reserve list has a hundred boats on it.The record sign-up runs counter to all the things we read about modern life — attention spans are dropping; no one wants to do anything for more than a couple of hours; the multiplicity of entertainment now on offer is diluting participation generally; and…

a sustained effort

The award-winning Corpus Christi YC’s Green Team set the bar for event sustainability at the 2018 Youth Sailing World Championship. Its plan connected the venue, the community and partners, reducing consumption and waste. (PHOTOS: JAMES TOMLINSON/WORLD SAILING)■ Professional sailor and full-time sailing coach Elizabeth Kratzig has a reputation for going all in on everything she does. Her drive is what got her to the top of the International 470 and Women’s Match Race disciplines, but over the past few years, she’s been applying that same determination to implement sustainable practices across the sport.As the Green Team Chair of the 2018 Youth Sailing World Championships, Kratzig and a team of volunteers at Corpus Christi YC and Texas Sailing Association set into motion an ambitious plan to attain Sailors for the Sea…

the tyvek union

■ Buck Frost and Andy Aleicho complete each other’s sentences. For 32 years now, they’ve been partners in Itchiban Yacht Painters. With a nod or a glance, they each know what the other is thinking, and when we meet in late December 2018, they’re either thinking about the next boat scheduled to roll into their paint shed or whether the New England Patriots would make another Super Bowl appearance.It was Zane Oller who actually started their yacht-painting business in 1985, and one of the early yachts he painted was in Japan. After reviewing his work, many of the Japanese workers said to him, “You are ichiban painter!”In Japanese, the word “ichiban” means number one, or the very best. Oller liked the sound of that, so he adopted the name, but…