CHICAGO PHOTOS BY WALTER COOPER
With Chicago’s iconic skyline hanging in the haze and the afternoon breeze finally filling, John Heaton’s J/70 Emperia wrapped up another successful weekend at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Chicago—and checked off an important milestone on the road to the J/70 World Championship this fall. In winning its division Emperia ultimately won the overall title over 130 teams in 13 one-design and handicap-racing classes.
This wasn’t just another top hometown result for Heaton though. Chicago was an early test for this Worlds-bound crew and a chance to confront a familiar weakness: light-air, lumpy conditions.
Emperia’s lineup is built for a long game. Heaton is joined by Gonçalo Ribeiro, Paulo Manzo, and Mark Spearman, the same crew that will carry the program into Barcelona for the Europeans and then on to Cascais for the J/70 World Championship.
The origin story of this squad is classic one-design team building: one weekend, one opportunity, and chemistry that stuck. The result is clinical boathandling; every set and douse is methodical.
“We needed a tactician for one weekend in Davis Island (Florida), and we sailed with Gonzalo, and we liked sailing with him,” Heaton says.
Rivero’s one-off gig turned into a full-time role. He stayed on as the team built its program, including a sixth-place finish at the Worlds in Argentina, where Manzo and Emperia regular Will Felder rounded out the roster. When Felder couldn’t commit to this summer’s schedule, Heaton pulled in Spearman, who already had time in with Rivero and Manzo.
“We just sort of resurrected this organic thing that happens,” Heaton said of the re-formed team.
In Chicago, the focus was squarely on performance in the kind of conditions that can ruin a championship if you’re not prepared. The regatta delivered exactly what they needed: light breeze, leftover chop, and a whole lot of marginal breeze sailing.
To accelerate their learning curve, Heaton brought in coach Nick Turney from Cleveland.
“We had a really great coach this weekend,” Heaton said. “Nick… [was] helping us get better in light air, which we struggle with often. And it was a light-air, bumpy event, which was good for us to learn.”
Turney’s curriculum was simple but unforgiving: weight, kinetics, and discipline.
Heaton, who says he’s “a big person on the back of the boat,” became acutely aware of his aft weight placement. The team drilled kinetics and committed to sailing the boat flatter than most of their competitors, even when every instinct said to heel the boat to make it feel livelier.
“We sail the boat very flat,” Heaton said. “A lot of J/70 sailors… in this lumpy stuff… heel the boat because it feels better, but the J/70 should feel like crap sailing upwind in light air. But when you’re flat you go through waves better.”
Helm and trim were in near-constant motion. Heaton described himself “driving through the moguls”—steering up and down each wave—while the team worked to keep power in the rig.
“Mostly it’s about just trying to keep pressure in the boat and [a] fair amount of mainsheet, trying to keep the headstay from sagging,” he said. “It’s a team effort to make these boats go upwind well.”
The jib trimmer stayed busy, easing and trimming to keep flow on in the barely-there breeze on the final day, while Turney pressed the crew to be “super accurate with helm” and relentlessly flat through the chop.
The result was another strong outing in a growing list of Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series performances for Heaton—adding to what he’s previously said is around 10 class wins at these events. It wasn’t flawless; Heaton admitted they were OCS in the final race, a reminder that even a seasoned team can overreach on a crowded line.
But as a building block toward Europe, Chicago did its job. The new lineup got real reps in its weakest conditions, the coaching paid off in speed and discipline, and the team left the dock with a clearer identity—and a clearer sense of what it will take to be ready when the starting gun sounds in Barcelona and Cascais later this summer.
Once that’s done, Heaton will head to the British Virgin Islands to represent Chicago at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Caribbean Championship with Sunsail. The Emperia team will race bareboat 41 footers against the series’ other overall winners. No doubt a sailing vacation will be welcome after their long road to the worlds.
Alongside Emperia on the Belmont Harbor racecourse, the Tartan 10s, J/88s and Lightnings earned their awards and Mount Gay Rum. With the confused chop and a recourse notoriously shifty no one race win came easy. This was especially true for the Tartan 10s where Craig Roehl and Edward Mui’s team on Meat got it done once again.
Lightning class stalwart David Stark, sailing with Monica Morgan and Jenna Probst, were the frontrunners after two days of racing as they put in the hours for their coming PanAm Games Trials. They had it locked up on Sunday when the wind looked as if it wasn’t going to materialize. Starck and many others hedged the harbor. When the race committee fired off one final race, only three boats remained, shuffling the standings into the hands of Abbie Probst and her teammates on Blueberry Banana Bread. The podium toppers enjoyed what they described as the best breeze of the weekend that was, “worth the wait.”
The J/88 series was thrilling to watch. Many of the teams in Chicago were coming off the winter circuit, putting most of them on par for the weekend. With barely mile-long beats, the racing was short-course style with Dave Dennison’s Piranha emerging from the scrum with a 5-point win over Ben Marden’s Banter.
The regatta’s outer Green circle was a snapshot of Chicago’s handicap and bigger-boat racing scene. It was a weekend’s worth of practice for their beloved Race to Mackinac. Two bands of ORC and PHRF classes enjoyed mid-range breezes all weekend. Sails went up and down, the kinks worked out, and in ORC, Shawn O’Neill’s Sydney 38 Eagle looked as flawless around the racecourse as one would expect—two black pooches along for the ride. Eagle, the perennial champs, tacked on three-straight race wins to close the regatta. In PHRF, Todd Patton’s J/122 Blondie, with its unmistakable spinnaker regularly out front, won five of nine races to claim PHRF honors.
Chicago’s J/105 fleet is plenty competitive, with crowded mark roundings to prove it, and the team regularly out front and out of the fray was Steve Kindra’s Pura Vida. Silviu Petrea’s Nomad nailed a few starts and the boathandling was sharp, earning Nomad the Benteau 36.7 division win.
Winter and spring were not kind to Chicago area boatyards, so for much of the Distance Racing fleet, the Helly Regatta is a shakedown and Mac Race prep. Boats went into the water late and late certificates were streaming out of US Sailing’s Offshore Office. Come start day on Saturday, two deep fleets set off from the city front. The first race sent them off on a reach east. The second day, to the North. Both days’ races offered ample opportunity for getting back into the Mac Race swing of things.
Kenny Kluckman’s J/44 Cheep N Deep won both races to claim ORC 1. Douglas Evans’ J/122 Elbow Room won both races in ORC 2. ORC 3’s top team was Greg Rasmussen and his crew on the Beneteau 36.7 Fog. James Nachtman’s J/99 Elbow Room won both races to claim PHRF 3.
The PHRF Distance fleet’s final results were decided in the protest room late Sunday. In the morning’s start, Jeff Barton’s xUberence got tangled in a pile up and later DSQ’d. As a result, Jeff Janicek’s 1D35 Dire Wolf earned a season-starter win.
