A King and its Court
A King and its Court
Simple. The way Robbie Haines saw it, things weren't complicated at all. Haines, the tactician on Daniel Woolery's new King 40, Soozal, gathered the crew around him as the boat made its way out to the racecourse to begin Day 2 at last January's edition of Acura Key West Race Week. Though it was early in the week, Haines had already seen enough to understand that Soozal was firmly in the hunt in the 13-boat IRC-2 class. So the wisdom Haines wished to impart was elemental.
"We've got the speed to win the regatta," he said. "We're sailing the boat well. We don't need to push it on the line. Let's get a good, clean start, and we should do quite well."
For Haines and his team, the week ultimately played out exactly as he scripted. Conservative starts, followed by smart tactics and flawless boathandling, led to a 7-point win.
Behind Soozal, however, the story was anything but straightforward, featuring an IRC rating blunder that reshuffled the results mid-regatta, a key redress claim due to spectator boat interference, and a pair of anticipated new designs that fell short of expectations.
But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves. At the outset, the one thing known about IRC-2 was that it consisted of an interesting and eclectic mix of boats. It had two brand-new Santa Cruz 37s; an Archambault A40 RC, a French import that's done well overseas and was making its U.S. IRC debut; and a slew of Mark Mills designs, including a trio of King 40s. There was also a veteran warhorse in the 20-year-old J/44 Gold Digger, a consistently well-sailed J/122, Teamwork, a DK 46 called First Light, and the comfy Elan 450 Hurrycane VI. Some flew symmetric spinnakers, while others featured sprit-flown A-sails. But for all their differences, it was a tightly bunched group according to their IRC ratings. Based on a 60-minute course, nine of the 13 boats were within 3.5 minutes of each other on corrected time. The total spread, fastest to slowest, for that amount of elapsed time was just over 9 minutes.
In that pack of nine were three new racer/cruisers. For these designs-the aforementioned King 40, Santa Cruz 37, and A40 RC-the ultimate prize wasn't the hardware handed out at the end of the week. It was all about first impressions. Call it a debutante ball, call it an open tryout, call it a showcase or proving ground. For these boats, and their respective designers and builders, the results were likely to matter in a place they rarely do in sailing. On the bottom line.
For Philippe Paturel's A40RC, Ciao, disappointment hit early, in fact before the racing started. Due to weather, the boat was not shipped overseas from France to Miami in early January, as originally planned, but to New York. A collision with a bridge on the journey south left the boat with a gaping hole in its deck.
Paturel and two boatbuilders did the best they could to repair the damage, and the boat went for its first sail an hour before Race 1. But Paturel, the North American distributor for Archambault boats, never felt comfortable cranking on the hydraulic mast jack, jib halyards, or backstay
with the sole exception of the second race on Day 2, when he basically said, "Screw it, let's see what we've got," and Ciao recorded its best result of the week, a second.
"But at the end of the race we realized there were some cracks in the repair," says Paturel. "We sailed the boat at about 65 percent of its capacity the rest of the week." All things considered, the A40RC's grade for the regatta was "incomplete."
Matters didn't work out as hoped for in the Santa Cruz camp, either. Aboard Santa Cruz One, designer Tim Kernan and company owner Tom Slade had assembled a strong crew led by skipper Scott Dickson and sailmaker and tactician Larry Leonard. Like Ciao, the boat arrived in Key West in less than fighting trim after one of its twin steering pedestals was leveled by the mainsheet in a windy jibe on the delivery. And in the early racing, with staunch northerly winds and choppy seas, both 37s, the class's smallest and lightest boats by a good margin, struggled to keep pace with the fleet's larger, heavier competition. Santa Cruz One finished the week in tenth, with Tiburon, from Northern California, bringing up the rear.
Still, Kernan, who believed the respective IRC ratings for his boats were "overly punitive, specifically for this type of venue," considered the week a valuable learning experience. For instance, he remained comfortable, in hindsight, with the decision to race IRC rather than PHRF, and felt his team had developed a much better grasp on tuning, sail trim, and inventories, particularly with regard to wind ranges and the windward/leeward track on which Key West racing is conducted.
If Kernan had one regret, it was the decision to go with smaller kites for a better IRC rating, rather than with the larger spinnakers for which the boat was designed. "It would've been worth the (rating) hit," he said. "What we really wanted to show people is that the boats are fast, and we need those big kites to get the boat to break free sooner."
Looking forward, Kernan hopes the jury will remain out on the boat's all-around competitive potential until it's tested in an off-wind, point-to-point contest, which should better play to its strengths.
