So if you’ve spoken with me lately you’ve probably heard me say how happy I am to be out of politics. Glad I’m not on Capitol Hill or working on a campaign. That doesn’t mean I am not still political, paying attention, mad as hell, or worried about the issues. I am. I am just enjoying being an advocate rather than a professional advocate.
My love of the natural world, conservation, and conservation politics is behind my desire to run Gale Force. I want to see how business can contribute to conservation, and with a business so tied to the natural world it is a clear and present priority for me and my business. Therefore I hope it is for you too.
So here’s the pitch…
In 2000, the U.S. government enacted the Shark Finning Prohibition Act, intending to make shark finning illegal. But the law only applied to fishing vessels, not all vessels - a loophole that has been grossly exploited.
On April 9, the Shark Conservation Act of 2008 was introduced, which would close the loophole and goes one step further for shark protection: it requires that all sharks be landed with their fins.
This bill to amend the High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to improve the conservation of sharks; was referred to the Committee on Natural Resources (Congressional Record: April 9, 2008 [House], Page H2149) and is a vital step in ensuring protection for global shark populations.
You can take action on this and other important ocean conservation issues at the Oceana take action site, here!
This past weekend I was fortunate enough to give a sail trim presentation to a wonderful Chesapeake Bay sailing club.
The Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to making the thrill of sailing a reality for physically and/or developmentally-challenged individuals and for those individuals whose financial circumstances preclude their participation in recreation on the waters of Chesapeake Bay.
This is a great club that is all about getting more people sailing and they are obviously committed to getting more people sailing well. The lecture was all about how to sail boats better, faster, and safer. With an eye to the racing scene, we discussed the finer points of mainsail and jib trim, the three elements of sail power, the importance of sail and body weight balance, and some helming techniques. I look forward to returning on May 18th to follow up with a racing strategy and tactics lecture.
Crab is a non-profit organization that has to work very hard to raise the funds necessary to support its programs. They are hosting a great fundraising event on May 10th and I highly recommend everyone attend to support this fantastic sailing program and have a ton of fun. In addition to great food Them Eastport Oyster Boys (who’s sock burning poem I recently featured) and Caryl Weiss will be playing some great music. Click on Caryl’s name to link to her site where you can listen to some really good music and learn about her incredible musical bio.
Angus Phillips of the Washington Post is one of my favorite outdoor writers. This week he’s been fired up to write some great stuff about sailing, and below is an article about the upcoming Volvo Ocean Race. You can find the full article on the Washington Post.
With all the dreary news in international sailing these days — the interminable America’s Cup onshore wrangling and the usual pre-Olympic legal intrigues — there’s an upbeat development, as well. The Volvo Ocean Race is back, replete with peril and derring-do plus a competitive new U.S. entry.
Sometime this month, Rhode Island skipper Ken Read will splash his rakishly fast new 70-footer in Boston Harbor and begin training a team of 10 in Newport, R.I., for the start of the world’s most challenging round-the-world race this fall. The boat is called Puma, after the athletic gear manufacturer sponsoring it.
Seven Volvo 70s leave Alicante, Spain, on Oct. 8, bound for South Africa, India, Singapore, China, Brazil, Boston, Ireland, Sweden and Russia. The fifth leg, from Qingdao, China, to Rio de Janeiro, will test offshore racers as they rarely are tested. It’s 12,300 nautical miles, up to 40 days at sea, deep into the frigid Southern Ocean to round the world’s scariest headland, Cape Horn, as fast as humanly possible.
Why would anyone embrace such danger and discomfort? “In a lifetime,” says Read, 46, a veteran helmsman with three America’s Cups and countless inshore regattas on his résumé, “there’s just so many ’round-the-buoys races you can do before you go insane. Then, all of a sudden you’re racing around the world in a boat that can do the speed of a car without even trying.
“The boats are magical,” said Read, who got his introduction by signing onto the Swedish entry Ericsson for the last legs of the 2005-06 Volvo, starting in Baltimore. “Sometimes a design trips over a combination of displacement, length and sail area that’s magic. These boats are on plane all the time. They just go.”
He likes the people, too. “The mentality is different. You’re sailing short-handed, four or five people on deck on a big, powerful boat going 25 knots at night. These are tough, hard guys.
“I tell you,” Read sad, “I’ve revamped my career. I never was on a boat where I drove less. The skipper mostly works down below with the navigator, strategizing. Everything has to be thought through. Everything has to be done slower, the mechanics and physics are different. You’re doing the same things with less people on a Formula One racer at full speed.”
It’s not as if Read hasn’t seen the game at its harshest. Ericsson was hit with 40-knot headwinds when it reached the ocean after leaving Baltimore last time. Then a crewman was lost off rival ABN-Amro II on the transatlantic passage, the first fatality since 1989 in the round-the-world race. Then Spanish entry Movistar broke down and sank in mid-Atlantic, with all hands rescued.
“While those terrible things were happening, we were sailing Ericsson’s best leg of the race, a second-place finish. But you can’t celebrate surrounded by tragedy. You’re just trying to pick yourself up off the mat.”
Read spoke last week amid the hubbub of a big boat in the rushed last stages of construction. Carbon-fiber dust flew and sanders shrieked in a cordoned-off section of the Goetz boatbuilding sheds here. Up until now, Puma’s design and construction features have been tightly guarded secrets, but with launch just days away, Read agreed to host a tour. “You’re the first,” he said.
Even to the unpracticed eye, Puma looks fast — sharp at the bow and broad at the stern, a stiff, 70-foot-long dart made of featherlight carbon fiber. Every ounce of weight saved from the hull and rigging is a competitive advantage, Read said, “so there isn’t a milligram or millimeter that hasn’t been thought out for strength and durability.”
Ten workmen scampered around the deck, tools in hand, as we poked along. “That’s the same as my whole race crew,” Read said, counting heads and shaking his own with worry. “Oops, here comes number 11. That’s an extra guy.”
The hull design, by Spaniard Marcel Botin and South African Sean Carkeek, looks roughly similar to ABN Amro I, runaway winner last time, with a cantilevered, swinging keel, two lifting daggerboards up forward and twin rudders under the broad, powerful stern. But Read said refinements in design rules will make all the boats more powerful and faster than the last generation.
“We have a masthead jib [headsail] this time that’s as big as Warwick, R.I.,” he said with a chuckle. “With all that sail area, there’s no such thing as light winds anymore.”
Puma will announce the full race crew soon, but Read was willing to name a couple of key members, including the bowman, doubtless the most dangerous job on the boat. It’s the bowman who gets hoisted 100 feet up the mast when things go wrong at the top, no matter how hard the wind is blowing, and who works at the heaving, half-submerged pointy end no matter how tumultuous the seas. Who’s the pick?
“We’re taking Jerry Kirby,” Read said, naming the oldest bowman still working the grand prix circuit. At 52, Kirby would be better off at home, running his real estate construction firm, but Read said his fellow Rhode Islander, who worked the bow on Pirates of the Caribbean in the last Volvo, “Told me if I left the dock without him, he’d hunt me down wherever I was and kill me.”
Read also named Briton Andrew Cape, a Volvo veteran, as navigator and Australian Chris Nicholson as watch captain. Nicholson, a world champion dinghy racer, “is the fastest driver I’ve ever seen,” said Read, who was Dennis Conner’s pick to helm Stars & Stripes in the 2000 and 2003 America’s Cups. Overall, the Puma crew will have sailors from six nations.
The six other boats in the fleet include four from programs that are building and entering two boats each. Swedish Ericsson has five-time Olympic medalist Torben Grael at the helm of its top boat, which is designed by the last winning designer, Argentine Juan Kouyoumdjian. Spanish Alicante has veteran Bouwe Bekking, skipper on Movistar when it sank, running its “A” boat and Annapolis-based designer Bruce Farr drawing the lines.
As always, the Volvo will be about hull design, sail shapes, risk management, crew dynamics, luck, weather, courage and skill. With live reports pouring in via satellite communications, sailors around the world will be able to sit at their computers and share vicariously the exigencies of life on the knife at the far edges of the earth.
It’s a sailing race for a change about boats and men, wild winds and open ocean. How refreshing!
As I mentioned in an earlier post there are plenty of rules that govern sail boat racing. This past weekend while coaching a high school racing regatta I was reminded of this as I heard many a protest. As a racer you are governed by the Racing Rules of Sailing 2005-2008 (RRS), the prescriptions of US Sailing, the high school sailors are governed by the ISSA Procedural Rules, and we all have to refer to the event Notice of Race (NOR) and sailing instructions (SI’s).At a regatta on Saturday I was asked to hear several (FOUR!) protests and it made me think quite a bit about our understanding of the fundamental rules, and how to deal with situations on the water as well as how to conduct ourselves when we are protested or if we do protest.
For better or worse protests are a part of racing. We self police so we have to both call protests, and be prepared to be protested. That said, if you really want to have fun and focus on your racing stay out of protests whenever you can.
First of all, sail faster than your competitors and protests will become something you hear about rather than deal with because few other boats will be near you on the course.
Second, know the fundamental rules and sail by them.
Third, if you break a rule - do your turns and get a witness. And always do your turns. If you hit the mark and you are already two minutes behind everyone else…it doesn’t matter - do your turns. The small penalty of a 720 is almost always better than a disqualification of a (DSQ).
Fourth, be smart about your use of protests. If you are fouled and it impacts your race then you should protest. If the protest is a minor infraction that has little to no impact on your strategy execution move on.
Fifth, know the rules. I know I already said that, but know your rules and know where to find the rules when you do go to the protest. Understand that the racing rules are focused on PAIRS of boats. Meaning if you are forced to break a rule, and you are protested, to win that protest you must protest the boat that forced you to break the rule in order to be exonerated.
Additionally, you must make sure if you are going to protest someone you do so correctly.
Sixth, know your facts. What happened, how did it happen, how long did it take, how fast were you traveling, what actions did you and your crew take, what sort of hail did you make. Write it down. Diagram it. Get a witness. Make sure you and your crew agree, and then stick to it.
Protests are part of the game. Knowing how to do it correctly and how to deal with it when you get protested will make sailing that much better.
If you want to test your rules knowledge I HIGHLY recommend you check out the rules quiz at the UK Halsey site.
Sailboat racing is a fairly rules intensive endeavor. Those rules can confound some, but if boiled down to the basics anyone can learn them, and go racing. The International Sailing Federation (ISAF) has published a simplified version of the Racing Rules of Sailing that is a good way to get started and possibly a good way to govern smaller club races. Continue reading ‘Simplified Racing Rules’
The Sailing Club of Washington, a nifty little sailing club at the Washington Sailing Marina, is offering several racing oriented lectures over the next few weeks as a primer to the upcoming sailing season. Gale Force Sailing is fortunate enough to be one of the invited lecturers for this group.
I love working with these sailors who run the entire range from newbies to old salts. They are a great interactive audience with great questions and real enthusiasm. As promised I am going to publish my lecture outline from last night’s Racing Strategy lecture.
The notes for that lecture are expansive and to simply publish the notes is not enough. So in addition to the notes I am going to begin publishing on this blog expanded explanations of the concepts covered in each section of the Racing Strategy lecture.
Next week we will discuss the strategy, tactics, and rules for the start. And I will again publish the notes as well as do an expanded explanation of the concepts. So stay tuned, please comments, and make sure you join us next week at the SCOW lecture series.
Twist is a sail shaping concept that seems to confound new sailors and old salts alike. It is important to understand what twist is, how it is induced or reduced, when or why we might change twist in our sails, and of course how.
Simply put twist is the leeward fall off of the leech of our sail from the clew to the head. Mains, jibs, genoas, and spinnakers all have twist. Look at this photo of the super cat Gitana. The mainsail is showing quite a bit of twist, and you can see it as the upper leech is well to leeward of the lower leech - hence it is twisting off or an open shape.
How are sails twisted? Well, through the use of our sail controls. For the mainsail we principally use the mainsheet to control twist upwind and the vang to control twist whenever we are sailing downwind and reaching or running. By pulling DOWN on the boom the twist of the leech is controlled. Jib and genoa twist is also controlled through sheet tension, but those sails’ also control twist with sheet lead position. Move the lead forward and trim the sheet and you close the leech by (again) pulling more down on the clew than aft. Move the lead aft or ease sheets and the leech opens or twists. So when do we want more or less twist?
Generally speaking we want more twist in very light air and very heavy air, and less twist - or no twist in moderate breezes. But why? In light air there is often a big difference in the wind speed and apparent wind angle from the deck level to the masthead. This is known as wind gradient and is often called sheer. This is due in part because the air at the masthead is experiencing less friction and therefore moves faster. This difference in speed and angle results in a necessary twisting of the sail from bottom to top in order to be properly trimmed from bottom to top. In heavy air and in waves, twist allows the sail to spill wind at the top - so as not to overpower the boat, and to allow the boat to heel and yaw through the waves and keep some portion of the sail working at all times. In moderate breeze we can set up our sails up for maximum power and maximum pointing. By reducing twist - tightening or closing our leeches - we can generate maximum power and sail as close to wind as our sail plan allows. Ideal.
So we adjust sail twist to manage power (open for less, closed for more), adjust for wind gradient, and also for sea state. There’s a lot to twist and the best sailors know what twist is needed for their boat in every condition. It is fun and easy to experiment with different twist configurations and it is easy to see on other boats especially those that are ahead of you. So if you are behind - make sure your twist looks like the folks that are ahead of you.
The picture I’ve shown to showcase twist is of the super cat Gitana that is currently racing from San Francisco to Japan in an effort to break several Pacific records. Since setting out from San Francisco on Saturday night (UT),Lionel Lemonchois and his ten crew have been experiencing a diversity of weather, characteristic of this east to west crossing of the North Pacific. On starboard tack heading of 241, the team prepares to encounter her next system: there is good cloud cover dropping down from the NW with 30 knots of wind forecast.
As a result, the wet atmosphere is still par for the course for Gitana Team for the next 24 hours.
By Tuesday morning, Lionel Lemonchois and his crew had a 371 mile lead over the reference time currently held by Olivier de Kersauson and his giant trimaran Geronimo, with the 110-foot maxi-catamaran Gitana 13 maintaining an average pace of over 20 knots, and now collecting over 500 miles in a 2 hour period. — http://www.gitana-team.com/en/gitana/index.asp
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This past weekend I was fortunate enough to give a sail trim presentation to a wonderful Chesapeake Bay sailing club. 
Sailboat racing is a fairly rules intensive endeavor. Those rules can confound some, but if boiled down to the basics anyone can learn them, and go racing. The International Sailing Federation 
Twist is a sail shaping concept that seems to confound new sailors and old salts alike. It is important to understand what twist is, how it is induced or reduced, when or why we might change twist in our sails, and of course how.