The beauty, the appeal and the uniqueness of US Sailing’s annual Championship of Champions invitational is the brilliant concept of forcing champion sailors into an unfamiliar craft. Fundamental to the regatta is that a true test of prowess is not in what the sailors have mastered in their respective one-design classes, but what they can master in a matter of days, against a field of known and unknown greats, on foreign waters.

First raced in 1976, this annual regatta is officially the Jack Brown Trophy, named after a long serving US Sailing official. Entry is open to all one-design classes big and small, with US Sailing selecting as many as nineteen competitors who are either current national, North American, or world champions. The list of luminaries and past winners runs long and the regatta will mark its 50th Anniversary in September, hosted by the New Bedford YC. The provided one-design craft for this edition is the traditional 15-foot Marshall Sandpiper catboat, still built in New Bedford by Marshall Marine with active fleets across the Northeast.

A Who’s Who of One-Design Champions

This year’s roster of champions has numerous household names among the skippers and crews: from Lightning guru Ched Proctor to Texan MC Scow ace Bill Draheim, and San Diego’s Chuck Sinks who has recruited fellow San Diegan Chris Snow.

Sinks and Snow should be a formidable pair, but they—like all their competitors—are no guarantee. As neophyte catboat sailors, they’ll have to be mindful of their habits. Snow, who’s been summering on Cape Cod of late, recently made a recon trip to Pleasant Bay Community Boating in Harwich, Mass., which has a fleet of Sandpipers, says his outing was highly beneficial.

“The Sandpiper doesn’t have the same sensation as a sloop,” he says. “For those of us unfamiliar with the boat, it will require a good amount of feel and getting a handle on the angles. I think the people who will do well will not stress out too much.”

In his discovery outing, Snow and his wife, Mary, casually “did a bunch of tacks and tried to figure out the tacking angles.” They also did time runs at a mark to see how fast the 1,050-pound Sandpiper accelerates. “It was flat water, and a couple of times we stopped the boat completely,” Snow says. “So now we know it takes a long time to get going again.”

Insight From A Sandpiper Champ

That nugget of knowledge, says reigning Sandpiper National Champion skipper, Susie Klein, is in fact, the most important thing in catboat racing, a tip she learned early on from Tim Fallon, a well-known catboat sailor in the Northeast.

Fallon’s early advice, she says, was “Momentum, momentum, momentum.”

Klein races Sandpipers with her husband Jim Hammitt and both were top college sailors in the late 1970s (Klein at UC Berkeley and Hammitt at Harvard). They have had long and fruitful sailing careers that included a Tornado Olympic and shorthanded racing campaigns for Hammitt. Klein grew up racing high-performance dinghies on San Francisco Bay and internationally before stepping away from sailing for nearly 40 years to raise a family on the East Coast and at sea on their cruising boat while Hammitt taught at Harvard.

The white-hulled Sandpiper is Klein’s personal craft, and now 68 she is the Championship of Champion’s sole female skipper. She’s only owned the Sandpiper for a year, and while she’s obviously a quick study of catboat racing, she does share one important bit of advice for her inbound competitors: “You get four tacks maximum on the windward leg.”

And as for things related to the gaff, the throat, and the Sandpiper’s big white sail, she says there’s really no adjustments to be made aside from easing the gaff halyard on the downwind leg. Her recommendation to others for an upwind gaff halyard setting came from Fallon: “tighter than you think” to keep the leech loaded.

While Klein and Hammitt may be considered strong COC contenders as the newly crowned Sandpiper national champions in their first try, she confesses that they’re a good 125 pounds shy of the boat’s optimal crew weight of 400. And, by the way, she’s never raced on the Buzzard’s Bay, which can serve up stiff southerly and steep chop, so she will be keen to follow Fallon’s advice: keep the momentum and tack wisely.

Recent Championship of Champions Winners

• David Starck and Jenna Probst (sailed in Y Flyers)
• Peter Feldman (sailed in DragonFlite 95 RC yachts)
• Peter Keck (sailed in MC Scows)
• Connor Blouin, Samuel Blouin and JoAnn Fisher (sailed in Lightnings)
• Jake La Dow and Alexander Curtiss (sailed in Harbor 20s)

The post Inside the Championship of Champions: Sailors vs. Sandpipers appeared first on Sailing World.

Tony Gonsalves’ thumbs caress the sail and rudder joysticks on his remote, making millimeter adjustments to his DragonFlite 95’s trim as he silently wills the 37-inch one-design through the leeward gate and toward the 12-foot-long finish line. When his boat’s blunt bow finally breaks the line, the Bajan radio sailing champion from Florida emerges from his flow state with a long and deep exhale.

“Sometimes, I forget to breathe,” he says with a grin, his competitive juices draining from his broad and tensed shoulders. After thumbing 21 races, he’s finally bagged one on account of a good start, a lucky shift, and a clean getaway in a breeze barely strong enough to rustle the leaves of a nearby oak.

These zephyr conditions, which would leave traditional sailboats at the dock, is nerve-racking stuff on Dallas’ White Rock Lake, where experts of various model-yacht classes have been invited to the inaugural American Model Yachting Association’s Champion of Champions Regatta. Their host is DragonFlite importer and racer Chuck LeMahieu, who supplied 17 complete boats with custom graphics and sails.

The vision of this championship, LeMahieu says, was to gather the greats of American radio sailing on one dock, put them in identical boats, and demonstrate to the world at large that remote-control racing is just as fun and competitive as traditional yachting. This is real racing among real sailors, he says, most of whom have or continue to race in bigger boats as well.

“The AMYA has talked about doing something like this for like 20 years, as far as I know,” LeMahieu says. “For it to finally be a reality is exciting—and a lot of work. What’s cool is that all of these guys also race DFs in addition to their other classes, which is pretty unique. Because of the one-design nature of the DF95, we’re finally able to do something like this.”

An experienced radio sailor knows how to build their own boat, regardless of size, and that’s what competitors must do as they trickle into the Corinthian Sailing Club, a one-room overwater facility surrounded by Flying Scots nestled in boat lifts. With handshakes, bro hugs and fist bumps, the champions greet each other as old friends do before diving into boat assembly, a harried pace of gluing, miniature knot-tying, fine-tuning rigging, and adjusting the digital end points on their controllers. These guys do in a few hours what would take a day or two of meticulous ­amateur building.

The Corinthian Sailing Club, says LeMahieu, who lives a Texan hour away, is an excellent venue for radio sailing. The club’s aluminum upper deck ­provides an elevated vantage point over the course—and more importantly, the starting line. The typical southerly allows them to set a course mere feet from the club, which means it takes 30 seconds or less to get from the dock to the starting line, allowing for last-minute tweaks. When it comes time to launch, some racers gently place their hull into the water, while others lob the boat and then sprint up the clubhouse’s external staircase to claim elbow room at the railing.

“On the clock in one ­minute!” shouts the young local pro before he presses a button on a starter/loudhailer that’s resting on a picnic bench next to the scorer’s clipboard. It’s the first morning of the regatta, and the frigid wind is gusting to 20 knots, well past the edge of A rig conditions. (LeMahieu ran out of time to build smaller B rigs.) Success in this wind strength is all about tacking and not pitch-poling downwind, says Steve Landau, who hails from Atlanta, and is a pre-event favorite on account of him being the DF65 national champion (a smaller version of the 95).

During the first of dozens of two-minute countdowns to come, the diminutive boats—each bearing graphics to represent the model-yacht class of which the skipper is champion—jockey for position, bobbing and weaving through each other. There are hails of port and starboard, of windward and leeward, and groans when rigs get locked or someone gets stuck head-to-wind. And just like any other sailboat race, one or two boats shoot forward from the scrum with full-speed starts. Those in the second and third rows scatter to the sides in search of lanes and clear air. Squint and you might just think you’re watching faraway footage of a keelboat regatta.

Just like any other sailboat race, one or two boats shoot forward from the scrum with full-speed starts. Those in the second and third rows scatter to the sides in search of lanes and clear air.

Once a race is underway, the dock gets eerily silent as the sailors keep sharp focus on their respective yachts, straining to see telltales from 100 feet away and judging crossing situations that are near misses measured in centimeters. The only sound is the aluminum floorboards creaking under the load of heavy feet shuffling back and forth to get a better vantage point at the railing. The silence is only occasionally broken by right-of-way hails, which reach a fevered pitch as boats pile into the weather mark on both laylines.

“Starboard 6!”

“I need room 13!”

“Protest acknowledged. Doing turns.”

The tactics employed by these top-level sailors are all very calculated, and while there’s plenty of touch-and-go contact, it’s like any other sailboat race where the first boat around the offset and away from the fray gets launched, especially in the big breeze and steep 10-inch swells. Like any race, the downwind game is all about speed and clear air.

From dawn to dusk the race committee nets 21 races, a relentless pace even for these world-caliber model yachties. With so many scores, a handful of throw-outs will eventually redo the math, but the top pecking order is set, with the likes of Landau; Peter Feldman, a Soling One-Meter class champ; Mark Golison, a DF95 ace; and even Ken Read, the president of North Sails and two-time Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. He’s got the watchmaker’s royal crown insignia on his sail, and his boat looks just like the big red-and-black sneaker he once raced around the world. What the heck is Ken Read doing here in Texas anyway?

The not-so-secret is he’s a DF95 addict representing the Newport, Rhode Island, fleet that his other famous brother, Brad, started a few years ago during the pandemic. The two of them trade 1-2 on a weekly basis back home off the Sail Newport and New York YC docks all summer long and through the New England winter. Brad (who is supposed to be here as well, but COVID-19 kept him home) is one three celebrities LeMahieu invited, including Hall of Famer Ed Baird, who dabbles in DF95 racing with his sons on the canal behind the family home in St. Petersburg, Florida (aka “Club Ed”).

As talented as Baird may be, however, he’s fully aware he’s out of his league with these guys. On the opening day, he takes a more conservative approach to his starts by hovering outside the starboard end and swooping in late. When that doesn’t work, he tries the middle but keeps getting flushed, so he tries the leeward end with better results, but even that isn’t good enough to crack the top 10.

Only on the 21st and final race of the day does he get a top-five result: A keeper third to celebrate at the post-race gathering organized by LeMahieu at the American Airlines Arena, where the NHL’s Dallas Stars put up a pitiful performance.

The first day’s big blow is a distant memory, however, when competitors arrive for the second day. An unfavorable wind direction forces the race ­committee to set a course on the far side of the docks, where competitors must stand shoulder-to-shoulder and try their best in the millpond conditions. Seven light-air races produce a few new faces into the winner’s circle: Gonsalves, Ron Stephanz and Brig North (multiple classes), Jack Ward (Micro Magic) and Bar Batzer (RC Laser), who closes the regatta with a nail-biter. But it’s Landau who offsets two poor finishes with a pair of race wins to be anointed the first-ever AMYA Champion of Champions. Feldman is second, and Read is third to complete the podium.

For good measure, the regatta concludes with an impromptu exhibition match race between Read and Baird. This one’s for bragging rights. Read cops a pre-start port/starboard penalty, allowing Baird to get away and around the weather mark first and down the run with a few boatlengths between them. Halfway up the second beat, however, they were back at each other with Read on the attack until they coast into a textbook midcourse dial-up.

In agonizingly slow motion, Baird is able to peel away first, but Read soon sneaks past with a better lay on the offset leg. Down the final run, the boats zig and zag, with Baird attacking from behind, skills he’d honed in the old days of the America’s Cup before there were foils. With one final smooth jibe, he connects with a random puff, scoots away, and leads into the finish.

Once a champion, always a champion, no matter the size of the yacht.

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A select group of elite remote control yachtsmen are invited to Dallas for the inaugural Champion of Champions regatta to do battle in one-design DragonFlite 95s.

The post Top Remote Control Yachtsmen Race For Champion Title appeared first on Sailing World.