Regattas

Jean-Pierre Dick and Damian Foxall completed their non-stop circumnavigation aboard their Open 60, Paprec-Virbac 2, to win the first edition of the Barcelona World Race, a non-stop, shorthanded (2 crew, total) round-the-world race. Initial speculation put the total time required for the race at around 80 days; the winning duo sent the course in a total of 92 days, 8 hours, 49 minuets, and

When Peter Craig took over management of Key West Race Week in 1994, the event featured one racing circle, 12 boats, and seven starts. Since then, Craig and Premiere Racing (his management company) have grown the competition to 261 boats—177 of which are racing one-design, with the rest racing either IRC or PHRF. This means that in 2008, roughly 30-percent of the fleet is racing handicap;

Last October, the nation’s top Olympic-class sailors put years of training and sacrifice on the line during the two-week U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Team Trials – Sailing. The cream rose to the top during this marathon event, in which winner takes all and earns a position on the U.S. Olympic Sailing Team and the U.S. Paralympic Sailing Team.A young team of mostly first-time Olympians

In sailing, numbers are ephemeral. One second, VMG is up; the next it’s down. Crews battle for gains that are won and lost in heartbeats: The New York Stock Exchange can be more stable (now) than the parade of numbers dancing across “the truth display” situated under the boom. But it’s these cycles of feast or famine that make sailing an intellectual game, and that’s why so many

By David SchmidtGetting here isn’t easy. For some, it involves a multi-leg prop-job hop from a major airport to a local airport to the tiny airstrip known as Key West. For me, it involved a hair-raising journey on a jet-powered CRJ that managed to land on a very short runway, one rear wheel in contact with Planet Earth before the side winds relented, full contact was made,

Volvo Ocean Race makes confirmed stopover in Indian city of KochiBy David SchmidtRickshaws, chai, incense, street vendors, sacred cows, sardhu’s, ashrams, and Volvo Open 70’s? Indeed, the world’s highest-tech monohulls might seem oddly juxtaposed with India’s more iconic symbols, but it is confirmed: The Indian city of Kochi (in the state of Kerala) will host the second

If you race sailboats in the U.S., you have no doubt witnessed a parade of rating-rule acronyms in the past decade: IMS, Americap, PHRF. Now there’s a new contender in the alphabet-soup rating-rule game. IRC has been used widely in the U.K. and Europe for years, but it was introduced in the U.S. only a couple of years ago. So far the transition has been fairly smooth, with almost 600 IRC

Watch video of the Avanti ripping it up at 19+ knots in Block Island Sound.(May take several minutes to download.) Clip 1 | Clip 2“Hey David, do you have a life-insurance policy?” Ken Read asks, poking his head through the companionway of the Volvo Open 70 Puma Avanti as we pound

The Portimo Global Ocean Race—the world’s first “Solo-Double” Race—has officially published their Notice of Race, the official document that governs next year’s solo/doublehanded round-the-world ocean race. “Publishing our Notice of Race is a defining moment for us and for our competitors who can now move their campaigns forward with the utmost confidence,” said Race Director Josh Hall. “The NOR

If you’ve ever tried to sail a beam-reach course with a kite up on standard spinnaker-pole rigged boat, you have undoubtedly had to deal with the difficulty of tight sheeting angles on the guy when the pole is eased forward to the forestay. Traditionally, this is alleviated with reaching struts. While these work well, they represent another spar that must be clipped in place (usually to either