Quiet revolution still demands respect

by Stuart Greenfield, Yacht Racing Performance Coach
Rhode Island, 1983 America’s Cup. I’m the mast man — sewer rat in the language of the foredeck — aboard the 12-Metre Victory, and my morning prep list reads: sunscreen, boots, gloves, and a fat roll of duck tape. That tape wasn’t optional kit. It was armour.

Every day I’d rip through a pair of sailing gloves. The reason was simple and brutal: halyards, jib sheets and guys were all wire or wire-tailed, and wire burrs were a constant. They didn’t wear through your gloves — they cut through them, and through the skin underneath, without warning. So you wrapped duck tape over your gloves, double-layered your hands, and got on with it. Harold Cudmore was at the back of the boat making sure you did it right, so there was no complaining and no excuses.

We were deep in the testing of a new generation of Kevlar sails — dramatically stronger than the Dacron they were replacing — and that strength had a consequence nobody fully anticipated. Load the rig harder and you simply migrate the failure point down the chain. Every evening, the wire-tailed sheets had ground fresh grooves into the winch drums, and the end-of-day ritual was emery cloth and elbow grease, polishing them out before a jammed wire turned a bad day into a genuinely dangerous one.

Four decades on, I still marvel at how far we’ve come. But here’s the thing — we’re all still wearing gloves. Because the Dyneema we run today is so fine in diameter that it’ll take the skin off your palms just as efficiently as that old wire ever did. The technology changes. The foredeck does not forgive. – Full report