Chicken or the Egg

Sprit boats and race course selection. Do you have an opinion? The sprit boat aspect invariably surfaces when suggesting there should be more reach legs offered to augment the current steady diet of Windward-Leeward courses.

While the relevance of this aspect is negligible in one design racing, the opinions get stronger when mixed boats - symmetrical spinnakers and asymmetrical spinnakers - meet in a handicap event.

But what came first: the sprit boats or the focus on windward-leeward race courses? Since the J/105 is considered the first production boat featuring a retractable bowsprit - allowing for an asymmetric spinnaker to be flown - Scuttlebutt contacted J Boats President Jeff Johnstone for some insight into this situation:

"The development of the J/105 in 1991 really had little to do with the style of courses being sailed at the time, and much more to do with finding new ways to sail faster with fewer crew. One-design keelboat racing was already many years into the W/L focused courses, especially in the international classes like the J/22, J/24 and Etchells. Handicap racing at top Race Weeks like Block Island and Key West in the early 90s were mostly on W/L courses. I remember racing on the last triangle course at Key West in 1994. It was a surprise to see it posted on the RC since we had sailed W/L all week. We were in a J/80 and it was blowing 20-25. It was an incredible ride, the highlight of the week, and Onne van der Wal happened to capture it in a picture that's still on the website 16 years later.

"In the more local and regional venues in the 90s, there was still plenty of triangle racing and it's probably a fair statement that the emergence of sprit boats alongside conventional boats probably helped encourage committees to "equalize" the set-up by going with more W/L. It was otherwise hard to establish handicap deltas for a W/L course that would hold up for a triangle course, and vice-versa. Of course, it wasn't long before A-sail shapes quickly evolved to the point where sprit boats were going downhill very well, so for handicap fleets the focus then became more on grouping boats of similar configuration (bowsprit vs. non sprit) as well as similar DSPL/L ratios (planing vs. non-planing) in order to get the fairest racing.

"Reaching is the most fun point of sail there is, so I'd welcome seeing more of it worked back into the RC course options. Besides a lot of us could use one leg in the race where we can just go fast without thinking and then be mentally refreshed to tackle that next beat and run."

COMMENT: In the past 30 months, Scuttlebutt has twice polled its readership on the subject of race course selection. In both polls, when asked if they would prefer more courses signaled that had reach legs, over 70% of the respondents said yes.

2009 poll: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/polls/09/0131/
2010 poll: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/polls/10/1130/

The Beauty of Waste

The sport of sailing is lucky to have so many passionate people eager to share their experiences. And sometimes, in between these sailing experiences, they share their observations... which occassionally appear a bit random. This report comes from Lia Ditton (words) and Christophe Launay (photos).

Bahrain, officially the Kingdom of Bahrain - Mamlakat al Baḥrayn (The Kingdom of Two Seas), is a small island state near the western shores of the Persian Gulf.

Arid, desert-like; the beaches bare the same dusty hues of the wind-swept plains. Yet all the same, nestled in the sand is the debris of careless modern living: trash. At times, colourful, patterned, (often enchanting once the sea and test of time has had it’s way with it,) Christophe Launay documents the offerings of Al Jazayer Beach.

More than simple portraits of forgotten objects, the images set the scene of untold stories. The beach seems barren and unpopulated, yet dug into the water’s edge is a brilliant crimson cloth, a woman’s garment. Caught among the rocks is a bust flip-flop, abandoned at the scene where it was probably broken. Then beside a white plastic spoon are a child’s set of plastic sea creatures – the absence of play and the people they belong to, quietly poignant. Cultural references abound – the “Hi-Tea” bag, flung onto the sand; the toilet for “disabled people only;” the empty children’s park and the family unit under the concrete pavilion, shot compassionately at a distance.

At the end of the day, the sea will cart off the remains – an assortment of shoes so varied and plentiful it begins to verge on funny, but it is the large stretches of plastic that are saddening. The enormous white tarpaulin with Arabic writing beached like a dying whale and the lasting vestige of what could have been a bag, simultaneously horrifying for it’s time at sea and beautiful for its frail viscosity.

He who has the gold makes the rules

This report comes from the “can’t we all get along” department.

Ever since Oracle Racing became the defender of the America’s Cup, they’ve been working tirelessly to re-invent the 34th edition into an entertainment vehicle to grow fan and sponsor interest. Not exactly what George Schuyler had in mind when he deeded the event, but let’s not go there.

Among Oracle’s plans to build fan interest prior to the 2013 Match is to launch the America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) this summer. The inaugural event of the ACWS will be in Caiscais, Portugal on August 6-14. What is less clear is why the first event got put on that date.

The prominent conflict is with the nine event Extreme Sailing Series (ESS), which is now in its fifth year of providing a professional league with stadium type racing in forty foot catamarans. Sound familiar? For the ACWS to put their event directly on top of the fifth ESS event in Cowes, UK is more than an ‘oops.” It’s more like a ‘we’re coming after your audience’.

But that’s not the only conflict. The timing of the ESS event is to coincide with Cowes Week, which has been a key part of the British sporting summer calendar since 1826. One might think that the ACWS would give the largest annual multi-class inshore regatta in the world a little space, but apparently not.

And then there is another little event called the Olympics. Well, not exactly the Olympics, but the London 2012 Olympic Test Event (July 31-August 13, 2011) which is designed to replicate the Games atmosphere and will host 460 sailors representing 66 nations. This would seem to be of interest to some people.

But maybe the date scheduling was for the ACWS to avoid a conflict with the 2011 RC44 class Championship Tour, which has their next event in Marstrand, Sweden on August 17-21. In this Russell Coutts inspired class, the America’s Cup Defender and Challenger of Record hold three of the top five positions in the Tour standings.

It’s good to be king!

Scewed without a kiss

Providing attribution is critical in the media. For online news, providing links is also standard. How closely a website follows these basic tents is the difference between a reputable organization and one that is less so.

When Sailing Anarchy is critical of other news sites that ‘cut and paste’, yet when they do the exact same thing...without proper attribution...frequently... an occasional bullshit needs to be called.

Today they posted what appeared to be an original report that Mike Sanderson wrote about sailing with Hap Fauth and the Bella Mente team during their winning Transpac race. Except Mike wrote the report for his website, and SA lifted the whole thing without any link to direct online traffic back to his website.

Screwed without a kiss.

Is this true?

From the July 2011 issue of Latitude 38, that prominent monthly magazine distributed along the western U.S.:

“The 2011 Etchells World Championship regatta was supposed to be a nine-race series, but San Diego’s Bill Hardesty with crew Steve Hunt, Mandi Markee, and Craig Leweck needed only eight races to take the title. ...The win also marked the first time a full-time sailing journalist - Leweck edits the popular Scuttlebutt website - has ever won a legitimate world championship.”

Is this true? Am I the first full-time sailing journalist to win a legitimate world championship?