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The Clean Report Reflections: The 2006 Melges 24 Nationals
When I began thinking up ideas for a final report from the Melges 24 US National Championships in Jacksonville this past weekend, I realized that it had been almost a full year since I sent in my first ever report for Scot (Ed), that from the M24 Worlds at Key Largo. Since that day, my world has been turned upside down in almost every way possible, and my life has exploded with new possibilities, largely thanks to SA and the Melges 24 Class. The encouragement that the SA community gave me after Scot posted my Worlds Weary story gave me the confidence to keep up with my writing on SA and elsewhere, which has opened up new opportunities for me all over the globe. In the Melges 24 class, like in SA, I’ve made what I fully expect to be lifelong friends– both places are full of people who embrace everything I stand for: thrill-seeking, honesty, humor, intelligence, competition, speed, endurance, openness and hot women. Racing the 24 with Meredith in Key West, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her – If there was ever a litmus test for suitability as a wife, it’s got to be racing M24s in 8 foot waves and 30 knots of breeze without a woman folding – or better yet - with her hooting and hollering and coming back for more. I shared her growth as a racer with her, along with my own, and watched with pleasure as we both were so easily accepted by such a talented and tightly-knit group of sailors as the folks who own and campaign M24s. Joy Dunigan and Jack Jennings did a good job on the US Melges 24 Website with their basic race reports from Nationals. Thankfully, they got the word out of each race’s conditions and the other facts, which leaves me to focus on the more fun bits, or whatever the hell else I feel like. So, as usual, I’ll just ramble on about a fun weekend and a great kind of racing. Jacksonville showed off the anarchist spirit that I love about the M24 class. The usual tennis-gear encrusted clientele of the Florida Yacht Club were nowhere to be found during this amazing weekend. Organizer Pat Lamberty cleared them out of the club, and made everything available for the loud and obnoxious 47 teams of 4 or 5 sailors each who would be competing for the national title. I was surprised at how well-organized they were, especially considering the almost non-existent communication from the FYC prior to the event. I honestly was worried that we wouldn’t even have a crane. Pat admitted that he should have asked for help with electronic communications from someone who knew how to work a computer, but did he ever make up for it! I’d never been to Jacksonville before, let alone a major national regatta there, and I had no clue what to expect from it. My knowledge was limited to the fact that we’d be racing on a river near the Georgia border, and I couldn’t get the tune to Dueling Banjos from Deliverance out of my head. What I definitely did not expect was a gorgeous club, full of excessive amounts of free food every night, or the short but well-planned daily awards ceremonies, with lots of nice swag going out to lots of competitors who wouldn’t ordinarily get a chance to get any real prizes. I often forget that Florida is part of the South – and while South Beach may be worlds away from Dixie, Jacksonville is still firmly rooted in the “Suthun’ Hospitality” belt, and it shows. A great advantage of the semi-isolated location of the FYC is that it’s a good half hour from anything – the Club reserves a block of rooms at a nearby highway Holiday Inn and the fleet takes it over as only sailors can do. Coyote’s is pretty much the only bar to go to if you want to avoid a DUI, and within a few hours, Meredith (the other one) from layline.com’s racing team had forced the bar manager to find bottles of Mount Gay at a nearby liquor shop. For the next three nights, Melges sailors would keep this dive humming until last call and beyond, leaving a pile of abused and confused Orange Grove locals in their wakes. From my point of view, the Melges 24 class is probably the most enjoyable racing class in the US right now. It just seems to have the right combination of factors that make the racing and lifestyle perfect for me, and we all know that lifestyle is a massive part of the health of any class. The social aspects of the class are compelling for a specific group, and the boat is just not for the old or decrepit, or for those who like their brass buttons polished – it’s far too physical and competitive, and everyone on board has too much hard work to do for blue blazers-types to survive. The same personality traits that draw people to this level of pain, thrill-seeking, and intense competition also drive the serious party mentality that is evident at every Melges event. It’s rare that crews have a strict curfew enforced, and the podium finishers are usually out doing shots and shooting pool with the back markers. The 792-pound weight limit also means there are usually plenty of fit women in the mix - the male to female ratio still isn’t great (for the males), but there are lots of fun and smoking hot girls at every race, which always keeps things interesting. From a technical standpoint the boat is just plain sexy – the 12 year old design is still one of the quickest small boats out there without being overly complicated or relying on trapezes or movable ballast. Campaigning the boat certainly isn’t cheap, but very restrictive class rules and the fact that sails don’t need to be brand new to be fast means that the arms race doesn’t go nuclear. It’s very much within the financial range of the average racer - the same guy that might campaign a J/24 if he or she wasn’t an adrenaline junkie – yet the allure of the boat and class continues to attract some of the most talented professional sailors from every high-performance fleet in the world. There are no restrictions on pros aboard the boats, yet the Class Association spends time and money recognizing the Corinthian crews as the core of the class, and some of those Corinthians are more than capable of crossing the line in front of guys who do this for a living. The chance to sail against some of the top sailors in the world at a tiny fraction of TP52 or Farr 40 costs is a huge motivation for many of the racers. Just off the top of my head, the Nationals fleet counted at least one Laser World Champion, Two Farr 40 World Champion crews, A Tornado Olympic medalist, a coach of another Tornado medalist, the main trimmer off of the winning VX40, a Volvo 70 crew and holder of the monohull 24-hour record, a Mumm 30 European champion, a Volvo 60 racer, a couple of J/24 and J/22 world champions, one of the top college sailors of the past decade, and over a dozen national and regional dingy and scow champions, to mention nothing of the sailmakers, riggers, and boatspeed gurus who want to be part of the racing so much that they do it for a hotel room and free drinks. To give you an idea of the depth of the fleet, only a few of the above rock stars were even in the top 10 when the final results were tallied. For non-rock stars who are truly motivated to improve their sailing skills, there are few better ways than to sail with and against this calibre of one-design racer. I know, because the boat that I usually sail on is one of those “improvement” programs. In our local PHRF racing we are all amongst the best in our fleets, but racing M24 events we struggle to sail in the middle of the pack. That brings me around to the reason that this Nationals was especially interesting for me; I had a chance to sail with a guy who’s become a friend over the past year, and he’s also one of the top Melges drivers on the East Coast. Team Gill’s Simon Strauss has a real job, but he spends the vast majority of his spare time traveling to as many Melges regattas as possible, and who the hell can blame him? All of this competing, combined with a lifetime of dingy sailing, has given Simon mad skills, as he’s proven time and time again, most recently winning this year’s Chesapeake Cup and NE District Championship. I was excited to sail with Simon for the first time as I knew that I’d learn tons of new info, but more importantly I was stoked to understand the difference between a team that’s generally near the top of the fleet and a team that struggles to get to the middle. I was glad to learn that the differences are not profound at all. There is one thing that dictates whether you even have a chance to get to the top position in most races – and that’s the start. So many of these drivers and tacticians come from various college and Olympic dinghy and skiff classes, and many of them have had periods in their lives where they practiced literally hundreds of starts a week. If you are not aggressive, if you don’t protect your position, or if your timing is off by a second or two, you are going to be buried. Once stuck in the second row, the first beat is a struggle to keep from falling backward rather than a chance to find shifts and the fastest route to the mark. The biggest difference between the teams in the bottom 10 and the teams in the top 10 is that simple: good starts. Once you’re in the front row, you can worry less about lanes and more about using your leverage and boatspeed to pass the other guys who got off cleanly and quickly, and here’s where the next distinction between a top and not-so-top program shows up: It’s in the 10-foot losses. A guy like Simon is focused as hell when he’s driving upwind, and a clean tack will gain ten feet on the guy with a less than clean tack, as will an instant response with the trav or the sheet in a puff. Two of those 10-foot losses equals a cross, and there’s the leverage. I was working the front of the boat – a position I’ve only done when doublehanding the M24, and I was embarrassed to have contributed plenty of 10-foot losses on Team Gill on the first day. Simon’s reaction to my stupidity showed me another thing that really good drivers do – they keep their cool. It’s a lot easier to learn and adjust when the skipper is calm and gives clear direction than when he’s aggro and anxious. Simon’s patience helped us come together quickly, and our boathandling on the second and third days was fast and strong and helped us pass boats at most of the crowded roundings, even if we got caught on the wrong side of a couple of shifts. By the end of the regatta we felt that, although we didn’t perform to the skill level of the crew, we still had an acceptable result and an enjoyable time on the water. We hauled the boat and put her away, thinking that we had a ninth place, and that we had finished just ahead of the infamous POD. On our arrival to the final dinner and award ceremony we were shocked to find that we had been OCS in Race 8, and never heard it. This turned an 8th place into a 49th, which dropped us from 9th overall to 15th, and ensured that our drinking would begin with more vodka and less beer. Scott Nixon and his crew on one of the David Ford’s Lightwave crews had it worse – they had already read the press release on the Melges 24 website, proclaiming their team as the new National Champ, and had called their bosses and sponsors with the good news – but when the scorers tallied our OCS and Pod’s DSQ in the same race (for tacking too close), Chris Larson and Rosebud jumped ahead of both Lightwave and Jon Pollard’s Xcellent for the overall victory. I spoke to Pollard at the airport, while we stood outside and soaked up the last warm sun we’d both experience for awhile. He told me he made a truly basic mistake – he started a match race with Nixon/Ivey in the final race instead of just sailing fast and getting a top ten result, which would have guaranteed him the championship. He got so wound up with Nixon at the start that he ended up over early and got buried in the fleet. Pollard gave me some good advice, “If someone brings the game to you, fine – race them down and hurt them – otherwise, sail your own race and sail fast. I forgot that.” I hope to not forget the many lessons I learned last week, and over the course of this very intense first Melges season. Jacksonville was a perfect end to the year, and the competition and partying truly reinforced how freaking cool it is to race the Melges 24, and how little it resembles the kind of yacht racing that is dying a slow death in the US. Do yourselves a favor; if you haven’t sailed this boat yet, go find someone who needs crew. You’ll thank me, even if your liver doesn’t. Thanks to Simon Strauss, Dave Doucette, and Todd Jones a/k/a Saildry, for good juju and (mostly) good calls on the course. Special thanks to Gill North America for the great team gear, and to Thomas Hardware (Todd’s shop) for the fastest, best-built tapered sportboat sheets in the world and all the other go-fast goodies at better prices than anyone else. -Mr. Clean 27 November, 2006 |
