World Sailing was not financially well positioned before the COVID-19 pandemic as ambitious management decisions failed to deliver. While there are now new hands on the wheel, the postponed Olympics meant a delay in funding that Olympic sports receive following the games. With a new CEO and Board of Directors, there is optimism that solvency is achievable but there are no quick fixes in the forecast. Here are some updates:

• World Sailing chief executive David Graham has admitted the embattled Federation would have gone into liquidation without financial assistance provided by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) following the coronavirus-enforced postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Sailing’s worldwide governing body is thought to have received a loan of around $3.1 million as part of the IOC’s support package, designed to offset the financial impact of the decision to delay Tokyo 2020 by a year on Federations and other sports bodies. Without that, Graham said, “we would have gone into liquidation.” – Full report

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Rich Roberts

Noted sports journalist Richard “Rich” Roberts passed away May 12, 2021 in San Pedro, CA. He was 88.

Born and raised in Wilmington, California on March 6, 1933 into a family of newspaper men, Rich quickly learned how to use a camera and how to spot a story while working for the local Press Journal after school and on weekends.

Rich was hired by the San Pedro News Pilot and, having played sports in high school, was always glad to cover the sports beat. He had an innovative writing style that grabbed people’s interest. In interviewing athletes, he wrote from their perspective.

He was given bigger and better assignments as he refined his journalistic skills, all the while carrying his camera just in case the newspaper’s cameraman didn’t get to the event on time. Little did he know how his unique photojournalistic skills would play out in later years…

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The last we heard from British sailor Alex Thomson was during the 2020-21 Vendée Globe in which damage on November 27 to the starboard rudder required him to abandon the race and limp towards Cape Town, South Africa. But the team is ready to begin racing again and will do so in the Fastnet Race on August 8.

The 695 nautical mile Fastnet Race with a record 450+ boats starts from Cowes, UK and sails via the Fastnet Rock off south west Ireland to finish, for the first time in the race’s 96-year history, in Cherbourg, France.Thomson will compete double-handed with a co-skipper yet to be decided by his team…

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Queen Charlotte Strait, on the northern extremity of Vancouver Island, is prone to fog and formidable chop in northwesterly winds. (Tor Johnson/)

I’d never leave the Sunshine Coast. All there is up there are bears and bad weather.”

Having sailed Keala, our Jeanneau 44i, from her birthplace, La Rochelle, France, across the Atlantic, we found ourselves talking to a gregarious fellow sailor at a yacht club in the warm, protected confines of Sidney, British Columbia, in the lee of Vancouver Island. I told him of our intended voyage, up the inside of Vancouver Island with my sister and her family to Port McNeill, where we’d meet my father, now 94 years old, and his lady friend, Christine, for a cruise north to the next island chain, Haida Gwaii. I’d make the return trip doublehanded along the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island with a surfing friend from Hawaii.

“Lots of fog up there too,” replied our new friend.

In a life of sailing around the world, my father, Donald, has wrung more salt water out of his socks than most of us will ever see. He dislikes sitting in the harbor. The world is full of “harbor-sitters,” as he calls them, trading “horror stories” of deadly gales over drinks while waiting for perfect weather conditions to leave the dock. Although he has been called adventurous, or even reckless, over the years, depending on the observer, I’ve always known him to be a very cautious captain who took my brother, sister, mother and me safely across two major oceans to places as varied as Norway, Turkey, the Philippines and Vanuatu. In all those miles, I can’t recall ever being in a dangerous sea. As kids we missed a lot of school, but we came back with skills such as celestial navigation, and the experience of standing a night watch with the safety of everyone aboard in our young hands.

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When Steven Callahan left Maine in January 1981 on Napoleon Solo, a 6.5-meter sloop, for a solo sail to the Canary Islands and back to America, he was planning to fulfill a childhood dream and thought he had prepared for all contingencies.

Callahan was 29 when he started what he later described as an “exhilarating crossing” of the Atlantic and made it safely across the sea. On January 29, 1982, Callahan left the Canaries for the sail back to America. The first week of the return journey, Callahan said, “was smooth trade-wind sailing, and when a gale started, I wasn’t too concerned. I knew the boat, and I’d been through much worse.”

Later, on the night of February 4, 1982, something—”­probably a whale or a large shark,” Callahan ­recalled—smashed into Napoleon Solo with a deafening bang and opened a hole in the hull.” Callahan was forced to evacuate to a life raft and spent the next 76 days lost at sea, an ordeal he described in greater detail in his book Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea.

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Andreas Heide and the crew of <i>Barba</i> are heading back to the Arctic this summer to study whales. (Peter Svanberg/)

The crew aboard sailing vessel Barba is preparing to set sail again to return to the far north in search of whales. This summer’s expedition, dubbed Arctic Sense, will see Barba’s owner and captain, Andreas B. Heide, welcoming researchers aboard his Jeanneau 37, this time bound for Svalbard, Jan Mayen, the Faroe and Shetland Islands and London before returning to their homeport of Stavanger, Norway. The goal of the 3,000-mile research voyage—Barba and Heide’s fourth—is to explore the polar Atlantic ecosystem, including its whales and other sea life. They will depart June 1 on the four-month adventure.

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A new book about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos appears to have confirmed long-standing rumours that he is the owner of a secretive 127-metre sailing yacht currently under construction at Oceanco in the Netherlands. The project, known as Y721, is understood to be a three-masted schooner that will become the world’s largest sailing yacht when delivered…

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With only six races, the elimination of one challenger from the Prada Cup Series was bound to be swift. For the New York YC’s American Magic challenge, the ending came too soon. (Sailing Energy/American Magic/)

As American Magic towed its AC75 Patriot to the racecourse on the afternoon of January 29, everyone with a hand and heart in the New York YC’s 36th America’s Cup campaign knew the situation was dire. They were already down two races to Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli in the best-of-seven Prada Cup semifinal eliminations, their beloved Patriot had been to hell and back, and the Italians were on a roll.

Cue the sporting cliches: chins high, game faces on, business as usual, one race at time. Win one and live to fight another day.

But no amount of positive spin from within the organization could change the fact that the boat was not the finely tuned racing machine it was before it capsized and sank on January 17. Gremlins were lurking inside Patriot’s dark blue hull, and so it was no surprise when the boat started acting up during pre-race warmup laps for Race 3 of the series. The American Magic support RIB pulled alongside and sent technicians through a watertight hatch in the deck to troubleshoot the boat’s foil-cant system. With the scheduled race start fast approaching, they emerged, sealed the hatch, and hoped for the best. Everyone on board knew the boat’s mechatronics weren’t right—not as right as they needed to be when facing an aggressive and confident opponent. Indeed, before Patriot even entered the starting box for Race 3 of the semis, fear of an FCS failure was very real. It would end the day, and the campaign.

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Yachting journalists keen to get a jump on their rivals in reporting the next America’s Cup are no doubt already checking accommodation options in Cowes and Auckland. They would do better to start looking for a decent hotel room in New York state.

When the INEOS/UK team lodged their “Challenger of Record” paperwork a nanosecond after New Zealand retained the Cup on March 17, they claimed to assert a right to host a “Deed of Gift” challenge, presumably sailed on an appropriate stretch of the Solent. This seemed to be a transparent ploy to grab a home-waters advantage and thereby become the defender rather than the challenger for the next full series.

Now, the New York Yacht Club is attempting to muscle themselves into their own seat at the table by submitting a separate challenge to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, complete with a 150-page draft Protocol. NYYC Commodore, Chris Culver, proclaimed that the Protocol “includes the tools necessary to improve the long-term commercial viability and global reach of the competition, while remaining true to the Deed of Gift and to the spirit of one of international sport’s oldest competitions.” Ho hum. There’s also the usual pious piffle about reducing costs, more one-design components, limiting the size of the teams, crew nationality requirements, a one-boat-per-cycle limit, etc etc. These are lofty ideals that nobody involved has, in the past, shown the slightest intention of honouring.

So where is all this headed if – as is likely – the Kiwis, British and Americans cannot agree on conditions for the next Cup? The New York Supreme Court…

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