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SCUTTLEBUTT No. 844 - June 26 2001Scuttlebutt is a digest of yacht racing news of major significance; commentary, opinions, features and dock talk . . . with a North American emphasis. Corrections, contributions, press releases, constructive criticism and contrasting viewpoints are always welcome, but save your bashing and personal attacks for elsewhere.
GUEST EDITORIAL I don't know if things would have been different had the skipper been wearing a Sailing Safety Helmet, but I suspect that they might have been. I own a Mini boat and have experienced as I'm sure others have, the visits of my boom to my head. It often happens when solo sailing, because of the necessity of the sailor to perform multiple tasks while tacking and jibbing. During storms with high wind and wave conditions, it's easy to make mistakes. It is at these times, that protective head gear (Helmets) can prevent serious injury. Certainly, without a helmet, a blow to the head from a running backstay or an errant boom could be crippling or even life threatening. How many accidents will happen that can be prevented by a little common sense. Most sports require participants to wear protective head gear. Even young children and most adults, know to wear their helmets when they ride their bicycles. Skate Boarders wear them. Climbers of all types wear them. Automobile Racers and Skiers wear them. The list of sports and activities that require safety helmets is long. The time has come to demand that sailors and race organizers begin to initiate rules that make helmets part of the safety equipment required for sailing races. This is especially important for Mini/Solo Sailors who must rely upon themselves for safety and self-rescue. No one would suggest going to sea without life vests. Why not add Sailing Helmets to the safety gear inventory for the times when circumstances require their use. To continue to ignore the dangers of climbing a mast at a dock or at sea without wearing a helmet, is to deny the very real risk of suffering serious or even lethal head injury. How many sailors must be injured, or lost? How many yachts must be abandoned before responsible sailors and race organizers adopt or require protective headgear for all levels of yacht racing and cruising. - Jack Boye, www.sailsafety.com/msg1.htm
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EDS ATLANTIC CHALLENGE Carol Archer, 39, a Southern California native, will co-skipper the Alphagraphics yacht. She is a qualified nurse with a Fastnet trophy from 1991 and a 1,600-ton US Coastguard Master Ocean license. Suzette Smith, 37, navigator for the newly-formed syndicate, lives in San Francisco. She is a native of Hawaii and an America's Cup veteran who sailed with the all-female crew aboard America3 in 1995. This formidable team is nick-named 'The Alpha Girls' and also includes one of France's top female sailors, FrŽdŽrique BrulŽ, Polish-born offshore sailor Asia Pajkowska, and Philippa Richards from Great Britain. The EDS Atlantic Challenge starts from St. Malo, France on July 3rd and races to Cuxhaven, Germany and Portsmouth, England before setting off across the Atlantic for Baltimore on the east coast of the United States. ĘFrom there the fleet sails to Boston and then on to the finish in St. Malo with the first yachts expected to arrive between August 19 and August 22. - Meaghan Van Liew EDS website: www.eds.com.
UBIQUITOUS
OH MY
LETTERS TO THE CURMUDGEON * Joe Sircely: I couldn't agree more with Fred Shroth ('Butt 842) in his article about Bruce Mahoney from the University of Texas. It's a shame that the committee fails to see the kind of hard work that goes into running and sailing for a club sport program. Bruce spends more of his valuable practice time not practicing for his own benefit, but running the practices so that his team can improve. I have never met a more dedicated, organized and talented sailor who sacrificed more for the benefit of his program, not himself. And above all this, he goes out and wins the Singlehanded Championships. Like Mr. Shroth, I was amazed and saddened to see the committee failed to recognize this. In my mind, Bruce Mahoney exemplifies the All American, far more than those sailors that sail for a program that is well funded, well coached and "set up" for success. * From Kevin Taugher: Fred Scroth touched on something that has bothered me and a lot of other current/past collegiate sailors that I know. That is the obvious unfairness of the collegiate all-american selection process. It is my understanding that two east coast college coaches and one west coast coach vote for and select the all-American teams after the collegiate nationals from a list of nominees. It doesn't seem that all the college districts can be fairly represented with this system. As Fred states: "How did the current collegiate singlehanded champion get insulted as honorable mention?" I don't know Bruce Mahoney, but it sure seems like he got a raw deal to me. As long as I can remember, winning any of the collegiate national championship (sloops, singlehanded, team race or dinghies) was a guaranteed all-American spot (not honorable mention). During my collegiate sailing tenure I saw this sort of thing happen a few times. I remember one individual in particular who never beat me in a regatta get awarded all-American status. Incidentally his coach was one of the three voters. It comes down to who knows you, who you know and if you're up for an all American spot against a guy who's coach has a vote - you can forget it. It really cheapens the value of all-American status. It's about time the ICYRA thinks about changing their selection process. * From Mike Martin: In support of Bruce Mahoney I would like to add that I was awarded All American Status for winning the 88-89 Single-handed champs and I did not even sail in the spring. I would like to urge the committee to reassess their decision and give Bruce the recognition that every National Champion deserves. Congrats to Bruce on his Single-handed' victory. In the eyes of your peers - including every past single-handed winner - you ARE an All American. That's more important than what the committee decides. * From Antony Barran: I recently read with interest Ms. McKormick's comments about Dawn Riley and the seeming disparity in endorsements between Dawn and other athletes like Tiger Woods. I also lament the lack of advertising dollars being invested by national brands in sailing. But if Dawn and Tiger were walking down the street to whom would everyone flock? And flocks generally drive the advertising dollars. The goal of advertising is to create awareness for a product or service and then leverage that awareness into sales. The challenge is to do this as cost-effectively as possible. If you decrease the cost of making a sale, the profit derived from it should increase and for a corporate executive it's all about profit. Media Planning, the methodology of making advertising decisions, is focused on finding opportunities with the lowest cost and highest return. In the US, sailing is so small and fragmented that media planners completely overlook it. Why spend a lot of time and effort on a small (by comparison) sailboat campaign or a multi-day racing event with a few thousand people? The sport simply does not have the critical mass to capture a national brand's attention. US Sailing should endeavor to answer the significant need that exists to train professional sailors and event organizers how to win in this competitive arena. * From Corky Aucreman: There are many reasons for USA's lack of support for sailing in comparison to other countries, some are: 1. Perception of sailing as an elitist activity. In Europe especially, it is an everyman sport. Local yacht clubs may only cost $25 to join, yet there is intense "Little League"-like activity almost every day in summer. 2. A motor head culture in the USA. If its more complicated than turning a key and pressing the accelerator. it is too much effort. 3. No organized gambling as in other sports and other countries (Thank goodness) 4. And very important, the sheer size of the USA. In smaller European countries it is easy for the top sailors to race against each other on a regular basis. Here, most Olympic and other top sailors practice alone and have few opportunities to sail against top competition every weekend. As my own experience attests, flying across country every other weekend to practice or race is not easy. Our US Paralympic Team in Sonar was made up of crew from So Cal, Rochester, and Boston and most of our sailing was done in St. Petersburg. * From Ralph Taylor: ISAF seems to have painted itself into a corner on the advertising issue. The idea of writing completely separate rules for charity regattas, though possible, must seem daunting to event organizers. I guess charity regattas will now be limited to PHRF classes, meaning they won't be viable in places where one-design racing predominates. Apparently, one-designer sailors who race in charity regattas to support a worthy cause have three choices: (1) Contribute all the money yourself (expensive) or (2) Solicit essentially anonymous donations (difficult) or (3) Promise public recognition through advertising on the hull or sails (now illegal.) It's one thing to keep sailboat racing non-commercial (as if that were possible.) It's another to keep sailors from performing a community service.
INDUSTRY NEWS * UBS is to be a principal marketing partner of the Nautor Challenge syndicate for the Volvo Ocean Race. UBS is sponsoring two yachts in the race which will be skippered by Grant Dalton of and Lisa Charles-McDonald. * Onne van der Wal has opened a gallery in Newport RI to showcase his marine photography - 209 Goddard Row. Brick Market Place.
QUOTE / UNQUOTE - Terry Harper "ISAF has tried constantly to do good things for the sport internationally that sometimes don't translate well in a given country. Some of the decisions ISAF has made over the last two or three years and even before that have been unpopular with some of the American sailing public -- and we seem to get the calls or the e-mails." "The most difficult thing for the American sailor to understand is that the United States has one vote, just as any other country has one vote. The rest of the world doesn't always agree with us. Try as hard as we can to explain how something may effect sailing in the United States, ISAF's concern is international. We don't always win the ones we'd like to, but our record is pretty good." - Terry Harper
BERMUDA ONE-TWO
BT GLOBAL CHALLENGE
GORI
MATCH RACING * This year's Governor's Cup - Balboa Yacht Club's match racing regatta for young men and women under twenty years of age - will feature the following teams: Rochester Yacht Club, Rochester, NY; Nantucket Yacht Club, Nantucket, MA; Fort Worth Boat Club, Fort Worth, TX; Balboa Yacht Club, Corona del Mar, CA; King Harbor Yacht Club, Redondo Beach, CA; Mission Bay Yacht Club, San Diego, CA; Newport Harbor Yacht Club, Newport Beach, CA; Richmond Yacht Club, Richmond, CA; St. Francis, Yacht Club, San Francisco, CA; Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, Auckland, New Zealand; Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Sydney, Australia; Royal Yachting Association, Seaford, East Sussex, United Kingdom. The 1st alternate is the San Francisco YC, Belvedere, CA. The event will be sailed in Santana 20s July 16-21.
FOR THE RECORD For Langman it all ads up to frustration. Outside his office his red-hulled racing boat, Grundig Xena, sits ready to go, ready to have a crack at the world 24-hour distance record for a single-hulled yacht. Everything is in place, except the weather. For the past five days the Grundig Xena crew has watched the development of what meteorologist Roger Badham thought might be a perfect weather system for the record attempt, a strong southwesterly. Right up until yesterday the front had Sydney in its sights. Then, after sweeping across the southern half of the continent, it all but dissolved over night. So the waiting game continues. And current indications are that the 25-35 knot winds that Grundig Xena needs to have any chance of bettering the current mark of 467.7 miles won't be on the horizon for at least a week. Last week Langman and his six-man crew did grab the opportunity to test their boat in a very short-lived and soft front that moved across Sydney for a few hours. They drove the boat hard on a 50-mile sprint off the coast and proved yet again that this turbo-charged Open 60 has what it takes to break the record. With their largest blood-red gennaker set they averaged 22 knots during a 24-knot gust. The run also proved that the big new gennaker was a little too powerful for the yacht's bowsprit. It broke and has now been replaced with a much stronger one. - Rob Mundle www.sail-world.com/xena
TRANSPAC Jim Warmington's Pedrick 75 Shanakee II from Balboa, Calif., was first to pass the west end of Santa Catalina Island - the only mark of the 2,225-nautical mile course - 3 hours 45 minutes after the start. Racing divisions III and IV will start Saturday, followed Sunday by the larger Division I and II boats, all at 1 p.m. In all, 33 boats will be challenging the 2,225 nautical miles to the Diamond Head finish line. - Rich Roberts, www.transpacificyc.org
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