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New Sponsor Announced: Go Raise Green
May 4th, 2010 in Travel, Training, General.
After a serious amount of European driving I made it to Lake Garda Monday with the boat and met our two other American boats, our training partners. Brad and I made it out for a shakedown sail today after spending the morning rigging in steady rain. When we drove in yesterday there was no wind at all, but we woke up this morning to 25 knots and chilly weather. We sailed in 15-18 knots for about an hour to stretch in the new rig. This is a fantastic place for boat racing. Even in the chilly rain the lake surpasses all expectations I had for it. I’m looking forward to a week of training here.
This week also marks the announcement of a new partnership with Go Raise Green (www.goraisegreen.com), a company that supports fundraising efforts and event promotion through sustainable products. Look out for these guys at fundraisers and regattas in the future, I’m really psyched to be involved with Go Raise Green. I’m confident that their focus on sustainability can make an imact on how regatta, clinic, and sailing program organizers approach their outreach and event planning.
More to come from Lake Garda at www.CampbellSailing.com.
Two days to go…
January 13th, 2010 in Training.
Brazil is living up to its summer-time reputation, hot, humid and great sailing. Yesterday was a phenomenal day of sailing outside of Rio. 10-15 knots and some fun wave action made for good tuning conditions and the most fun downwind sailing we’ve seen down here.
Measurement is today’s big effort. The Star worlds is a lesson in patience when it comes to measurement. You take your mast down, check in all your safety gear, weigh the boat (871 kilos), weigh your masts tip-weight, lay your sails out for stamping, put your mast back up and measure the boom length, all in 100 degree heat (well 96 if you trust the heat index). The reward is being able to have rides like in the video below. We had our practice kit up for yesterday’s blast. Looking forward to breaking out the good stuff for the regatta. Racing starts Saturday:
Training for Worlds in Rio
January 10th, 2010 in Training.
We’ve had a couple of days of race-training inside the bay here in Rio. We’re right under the of Sugar Loaf and the massive statue of Christ atop the highest promontory in town, but the only shade in town is under the boat when we’re polishing. Temperatures reach 90+ degrees almost daily this time of year. Luckily the seabreeze fills around 1pm so there is some relief once we get sailing, but if the wind is still light, then the downwind legs can be painfully hot. The next week will be critical to acclimatize as well as tune the boat for the big show. Racing starts next Saturday.Stay in touch at the new www.CampbellSailing.com(photo by Brad)
Practice Race in Rio today
November 25th, 2009 in Travel, Training, Regattas.
We sailed the practice race today before the South American Championships starts tomorrow sailed out of the ICRJ (Iate Clube do Rio de Janeiro). Brad and I put up the new jib today to make sure it was all set to go. The distance to the race course sails literally in the shadow of Sugar Loaf mountain towering a thousand feet above the bay. Once we get through the massive wind shadows, we turn right out the harbor entrance into six foot ground swell and a funneled 15 knots of breeze. The next 3 miles upwind to the racing area the wind dissipates and steadies to an average 6-10 knots, loading and unloading as the swells pick us up and put us down.
We tuned on the way out to the course to day with Robert Scheidt and Mark Mendelblatt. Brad and I are slowly working the kinks out of the P Star, but were certainly happy with the speed around the course. We started the practice race three boats up from the pin and unfortunately led around the first windward mark and the first leeward before we turned back to the harbor (it is, after all, bad luck to win the practice race). The sail in and out
First race starts tomorrow at 1330. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Delta Lloyd Regatta Wrap-up
June 2nd, 2009 in Training, Regattas, Monday Morning Tactician.
What a week it turned out to be in Holland! The sun was out and the breeze was on for the last four days of the regatta, a phenomenon that does not often happen in northern Europe. We were treated to some great racing from the Dutch organizers and race committees who are legendary for running on-time races and never letting a boat over early slip past them.
Sunday’s medal race was no different. We watched the Finn and Men’s 470 races from the coach boat, but the course was set up less than 100 yards from the shoreline, so a crowd of locals and sailors alike stood and watched the action. The courses were windward-leeward three times around the smaller than average track for a target time of around 30 minutes, instead of the regular hour and fifteen minute races we had been having all week. The intensity ramps up for these short sprints and you would be amazed at the stuff that happens. We were cheering on the radials during their race on Saturday night and Paige Railey flipped near the top mark after leading the first leg, then the local dutch girl behind her sailed to the finish after only two laps while the fleet rounded the marks to head upwind for the last lap. Ed Wright from England in the Finn class re-started after being over the line and even with the light air, he battled back to be second in the race. His competition Giles Scott was top 5 most of the way around the course and was given a rule 42 penalty near the finish.
Our race was no exception to the fact that wild things can happen. The breeze came up in a big way before our race building to 15 knots and paralleling the Medemblik shoreline only a few hundred feet to the left. Brad and I wanted to start to windward of the group and lined up a bit too early for the committee boat end. Hamish Pepper from New Zealand stuck us head-to-wind for the final thirty seconds or so and pushed us to where we thought we were probably over the line. When we got up to speed and the gun went, we heard the X-flag go up and immediately turned back to clear ourselves. We cleared and the flag still did not go down, meaning somebody else in the fleet was over. At the time we didn’t know it was our American cohorts Mark Mendelblatt and Mark Strube, but the photos don’t lie: 
After clearing ourselves we had to fight to get back into the race. Luckily, there are enough mark roundings during these short races that boats ahead go slow quite often. We knew we had to finish right next to the Croatian boat to beat them overall, and Mark was winning the race so we couldn’t worry about him. We finally caught the fleet at the second leeward marks. The German team tied for the lead rounded just ahead of us on starboard. They didn’t see us so close behind and tacked to port fouling us and were forced to take a penalty after some coaxing from the jury. We were able to catch our New Zealander buddies from the start because Hamish and Craig had broken their jib downhaul and couldn’t get proper jib trim. That left only one boat between us and the Croatians. Regatta leaders Robert Schiedt and Bruno Prada were the only boat to the left, and would prove to be a tough boat to catch on the final run to the finish. Instead of putting out effort into catching Robert and Bruno, we hounded the Croatian team to ensure that the Brazilians passed them. By covering the breeze of the Croatians, Robert was able to sail right around them to take fourth in the race leaving us to take 6th right behind the Croatians and defend our position in the standings. When we crossed the finish line and saw Mark’s number on the board we knew that we had moved up the leaderboard to take 5th overall in the regatta! After clawing back from being on the course side of the line at the start, we couldn’t have been happier with the result and it just goes to show that you can never give up in tough situations. We really did create our own luck in this week’s medal race.
Next on the agenda for Brad and me is to plan out and go to Kiel regatta in the star boat. This transition into the new class has gone much better than either of us could have imagined. I had high expectations, and am very pleased with how the progress is going. We need to sort out some upwind boatspeed, our downwind speed is where we’re really making our gains. But without help from some continued and new sponsorships, we wouldn’t be able to continue. With support from US Sailing Team Alphagraphics and our continued relationships with Sperry Top-sider, Kaenon Polarized and now Z-blok, as well as a number of private donors, we have been able to make a strong push into a new realm in the sport.
Full results at: deltalloydregatta.org
You can follow the medal race track here taken from the GPS systems on board for the final day.
Photos and more from: deltalloydregatta.org/2009
Memo from Medemblik: May 26, Back to Normal Holland Conditions
May 26th, 2009 in Travel, Training, Regattas.
Conditions deteriorated, and returned to normal here in Holland. Lighting, thunder, and rain lasted through the night and today we were greeted by the elements we expected from Spa regattas past. Wind, rain, and more wind are in the forecast for this week, starting today. We had 15-25 knots as rain squalls went overhead for our final tuneup before racing starts tomorrow. Here’s what a half-hour of practice can do:
Before:
After a few practice gybes:
Registration is a bureaucratic mess as usual. Every regatta has its tricks. Some events measure sails, others just stamp them, some don’t even bother. Some events check for proof of insurance, others couldn’t care less. The trick at Holland regatta is that you can’t pay the entry fee by credit card, only with cash in hand on the morning before the regatta starts. For the starboat sailors we have to weigh in at some point before the event, but the trick in Holland is that we can only check weight between 7-8 pm the night before the regatta or 8-9 am on the morning of. Let’s just say that there are plenty of grumpy star teams going without lunch today waiting for that evening weigh-in.
Regatta Website: deltalloydregatta.org/2009
More CampbellSailing.com Videos: YouTube.com/campbellsailing
Memo from Medemblik
May 24th, 2009 in Travel, Training, Regattas.
There are few other experiences like loading boats in a strange country after walking off an airplane after a sleepless redeye. The eight hour flight between Washington and Amsterdam was shortened by a tailwind effectively shortening my night’s sleep. But, when we walked out of the doors of the airport bracing for the typical Dutch May conditions (51 and raining) we were instead greeted by cloudless skies and temperatures near 70 degrees. My crew Brad Nichol arrived a few hours after I did, so with some logistical magic, I and 470 sailors Erin Maxwell and Isabelle Kinsolving hopped in a rental car and met Trevor Moore, a 49er buddy of ours already in Europe and pulled my borrowed Star and the girls’ 470 out of storage. They started the hour-long trek to Medemblik and I ran back to the airport to grab Brad and Mark Ivey who will coach the 470s this week. Sound complicated? Now try it with only a couple hours of sleep. After an afternoon of rigging I could barely keep my eyes open, so we went to get some food* and off to bed. *Please note: normal habits in my new class, the starboat are to “get some food” before everything, and often times after as well.
Today we went sailing for a couple of hours. When we first went out on the water, we managed to break the forestay under the foredeck. The thing made a bang so loud you thought somebody had been shot. Thank goodness the breeze hadn’t filled in completely so the jib cloth took the load and kept our mast up as we limped back to the dock for some quick repairs. As soon as we hit the dock we started the re-rig process, scrambled for the right pieces, wire and tools, and got to work. We got a new forestay rigged in an hour or two and went back out on the water (after lunch of course), only to head out and hear the moaning and groaning of the new forestay trying to pull out of its crimp. Tomorrow’s project: permanently solving the forestay issue so that the week goes without any trouble.
More to come from Medemblik and the Delta Lloyd Holland Regatta 2009
Qingdao Report
June 28th, 2008 in Training.
The fog has come and gone these last couple weeks here in Qingdao. Most days we’ve had to live without any direct sunlight and visibility of a mile or less due to the low clouds. But a few days ago, just when we were losing hope altogether, the clouds broke, the color blue spread across the sky, the fog lifted and the breeze filled. From noon to four in the afternoons we have had anywhere from 6-10 knots and a decent little swell (enough to make Graham Biehl our US 470 crew feel a little queasy). In the theme of our training we’ve been heading out to make the most of what we had on hand but still were up against the odds. Massive swaths of algae are still the dominant factor in our training. The green ‘fairways’ as we call them are aptly labeled. Sometimes hundreds of yards long and up to a hundred yards wide, the blobs creep the water in massive waves of weed spoiling any racecourse in their path. It’s our own personal version of the sci-fi movie: the Blobs!!! They never go fast enough that you cannot outrun them (you are moving in the same current the blobs are). However, if you have to go through a line to get to a mark or get back to the beach, you may be swallowed alive and not make it back in before dinner. We’ve watched the Dutch Yngling team, coach boat and three boats in tow get stuck so badly they had to be hooked and hauled out by a local fishing trawler. Acres of the nasty stuff are the target of an increasing number of fishing craft and rumors are filtering through the boatpark that more help is on the way in the form of a Chinese Navy destroyer and some offshore fishing fleets from other ports along the coast.
The current has made as big and impact as we expected it would. With a knot to a knot and half of current running across a six knot breeze, it can skew a racecourse very easily and force you to spend as much time racing against the moving water as much as you race against the moving fleet. I thought maybe a good way to put a good spin on the few weeks we’ve had over here is to re-publish a post debunking the myth of the mysterious Lee-Bow Effect that I posted a few years ago in the Monday Morning Tactician column:
One theory that must be put to rest without hesitation is the famed Leebow Effect. Many revered and heralded sailors have presented cases for such an effect and the Monday Morning Tactician wishes to drag into the light all those under the spell of vile Leebow Effect. I will put my hypothesis forward with full knowledge of the possible outcry and controversy: The widely acknowledged theory of the Leebow Effect is decidedly FALSE!Buddy Melges, the Gold medalist, Champion and ambassador for the sport co-authored a great book, published in 1979, called Sailing Smart: Winning Techniques, Tactics, and Strategies. Many an evening have I spent squinting at its pages, well after my ‘bed time’ reading every word and studying its figures and theories. One that I wish I had never read comes leaping off of page 110. According to Mr Melges and his co-author Charles Mason (former editor for Sail Magazine):
Lee-Bow Effect: This brings up the famous lee-bow effect. If the current is coming at you at an angle that is very close to the course you are sailing and if, by pinching just a little bit, you can get your lee bow into the flow of the current, the movement of the water is going to push against the hull, the keel, and the rudder, and it is goign to drive you up to windward even though you are going slower over the bottom. If you are on the other tack the current is going to be hitting you broadside and pushing you down. If you can get the lee-bow effect to push you to windward, I feel you also increase the wind pressure on the sails. If I am on the tack that goes across the current I feel I am losing speed and distance to the mark. That is why, unless there is an obvious way to get out of the current entirely, or at least to a slower flow, I think you should always make your longest tack to the next mark sailing in the lee-bow position. And I would do this even if it meant pinching a bit to do so.
This seemed appealing enough to my young, malleable, Naples sabot sailing around current-less basins in Southern California brain. I was willing to believe anything out of the Wizard of Zenda’s mouth, or written on the pages in front of me. The idea that a boat sailing alone with its bow slightly above the angle of adverse current would gain distance to windward makes sense, relative a stationary object like a shoreline or a mark anchored in the water. This idea is sufficiently flawed when you either of two things: add another boat to the situation, or remove the mark from the racecourse. At the risk of being flicked into oblivion as I tug on Superman’s cape, the lee-bow effect does not exist when racing against other boats.If two boats are sailing upwind on opposite tacks. According to Melges, the boat with its lee-bow facing the current will gain distance. to windward, and the boat with its windward hip facing the current will lose distance to leeward. In the following diagram. The boat gaining the mythical advantage is in red, as the current crossed the picture right to left. The critical issue is that two boats sailing together upwind are affected exactly equally by the current! Imagine that the two boats are dead in the water. There is no movement whatsoever up the racecourse or towards each other, but there are 2 knots of current running beneath them from right to left across the racecourse. As Mr Melges points out, the red boat is traveling over a distance to windward which happens to be to his left. Likewise, the green boat is traveling distance to leeward. However, there is no advantage to being the red boat or the green boat because both boats are moving at exactly the same speed in exactly the same direction, that of the current. Simply because the red boat is moving to windward, does not mean that the boat is gaining, it only means (in the demonstrated scenario) that it is gaining distance to the left. The green boat is likewise not losing anything, in fact it is gaining the same distance as the red boat toward the left.
Now if we add breeze to the situation and the boats start moving up the page and towards each other, nothing changes! The current is still affecting their movement pushing both boats from right to left across the course, and they meanwhile sail up the racecourse as if they were sailing on a lake with no current. Their paths sailing forward, upwind on closehauled are the same as they would have been without current. Because of the additional current vector in the motion of the boats, the resultant vectors place the boats slightly to the left of where they would normally be, but makes no difference between the boats relative each other.
If we add a mark to the mix, little changes in our revised theory. The red boat will in our diagram will be pushed closer towards a port-tack layline, and the green boat will proceed the same distance, in addition to the forward progress he would have made anyway.
Monday Morning Tactician Says: The best way to look at current while racing is as if the water your sailing on is a conveyor belt moving across the racecourse. The marks are moving relative your normal sailing tracks. It is important to realize, if the current is different on one part of the racecourse than on another, then the strategy becomes significantly more complex, and may be worth discussion in future MMT columns. However, if the current is moving across the racecourse in a uniform fashion, then it is better to not even worry about the current EXCEPT for dealing with 1. Laylines, 2. Mark Roundings, 3. Starting strategy.
Foggy Qingdao
June 20th, 2008 in Training.
“No buddha, no boatracing” was our basic rule to decide whether to go out training on a given day. There is a fifty-foot tall gold statue protecting the harbor entrance about 200 yards from our container-basecamp in the boatpark. If it’s blanketed by fog, that’s usually the best indicator that it will be too difficult to see anything to be useful on the water, and if it’s clear enough to see then we might be able to see the other end of the starting line or maybe even the windward mark. The pea-soup fog has been the dominant weather factor of the sailing so far. Yesterday we had a good practice session going until the fog rolled in so thick we couldn’t see the marks at a range of 100 yards. The US Star fleet of three boats and two coachboats ghosted past us yesterday at about a tenth of a mile and never knew we were there. The only reason we knew they were there was because all of a sudden we had a waft of very bad air and wake. We get back in via compass angles, GPS, and blind faith on a daily basis.We’ve had breeze in the light air range to be sure.
Its been three to six knots with rarely a puff that would make us wish we had our hiking pads on. Its actually quite an interesting mix between San Diego’s morning light air, swell and kelp with the Potomac River’s tidal current and dirty water. Perhaps the biggest oddity here is the massive paddies of algae floating across the racecourses and the fleet of harvesters hired to clear it up. Very thin and gooey seaweed is the only form of life we can detect in the water in off the YinHai Yacht Club where we are training. Every day a rally of Chinese junk-style fishing boats lines up out in front of the club and then disperses across the racing areas to clear the waters of the great blobs of algae. It is a bit of nuisance while we are sailing having to dodge the globs that can sometimes grow to be the size of a baseball diamond. They generally form in the lines between different current. Yesterday I saw a British laser sailor try and navigate his way through one of the blobs, but before he stopped dead in the water. Before he could get out of its green grips he had to pull his centerboard up and scull downwind out of the enveloping goo. It seems to us a futile effort, but apparently the entire fishing fleet of Qingdao has been hired out to harvest the algae and pull it out of the water and offload it into waiting tractor-trailers that standby just adjacent to our training site bound for some undisclosed location.
I use the term “rally” when refering to the fleet of Chinese fisherman because they sound like a gang of Hells Angels coasting past in the fog, their V-8 muffler-less engines popping and sputtering loud enough to make any hard core biker dude jealous. It is a curious sight to see these fishermen come out of the fog, laden with a huge mound of seaweed on their ancient wooden craft. I’m sure we’re as odd to them in our colorful inflatable ribcrafts and sleek racing sailboats. Our only point of commonality is our complete lack of understanding for how each other lives. More to come from Qingdao…�
Terrigal Update
February 1st, 2008 in Training.
The fleet has arrived in full force here in Terrigal, Australia awaiting the upcoming 2008 Laser World Championships. With racing starting on February 6th, the fleet is in full training mode with about a week to go. That means there are easily 100 boats on the water often lining up for impromptu rabbit starts with as many as seventy boats. As if the numbers aren’t wild enough, the 3-4 foot swell running under an open ocean wind chop make the racing extremely difficult. For a group this size, this is one of the most competitive environments in sailboat racing, and because it is still informal racing, rules and general standards are thrown to the wind making it a take-no-prisoners, testosterone-filled brawl. While the sailing is good, the crazy “No speak english” attitude you get from a guy not making a close cross gets old after the first time, especially when they don’t give you the same leeway that they expect from you. Speaking up hardly helps because there are so many guys doing it, and essentially it is the greatest movtivation to be out in front early. From about 7th place to 70th is a knife fight that you are bound to see multiple times daily.
More to come from Down Under.