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 Sailing 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 San Diego State). 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)
