Some family
Bill Goggins and Dave Decker talk life, sailing and scow boats with three generations of the Melges family
Bill Goggins: You guys do a lot of different sports – iceboating, ski racing, motorcross, duck shooting… In terms of preparation is there a common thread? Harry Melges III: Whatever the sport, make sure your equipment is ready to go. So if it’s skis proper tuning and waxing. On a boat a well-polished hull, good sails and being comfortable with your tune. After that it’s a lot of practice time to get your confidence level up to a point where you’re confident that you can win. Buddy Melges: And your technical prepa- ration has a big effect on your ‘head’. Harry Melges IV: Yeh, just keep doing the important stuff over and over again and perfect what you’re doing. Bill Goggins: When you are competing against other people your age, what gives you that ‘edge’?
30 SEAHORSE
Harry Melges IV: Well, I like to think that I feel the boat better than other people. I can always predict what the boat’s going to do using the angle of heel and stuff… But I’m still working on that! It’s getting a lot better, though. Bill Goggins: Funny, I set an over and under time before I’d hear an angle of heel reference and you nailed the under at 1.59. It’s good because there’s some secret sauce with Buddy when it comes to angle of heel, and still so many sailors around the world that just don’t get that. Really it’s a very pure principle. Thinking more about that, Buddy, you’re really the author of the concept. Can you talk about that and how it has translated through your family… Buddy Melges: Well, the angle of heel thing comes from the scow family of hull shapes. A scow’s got a flat bottom, so it’s two boats in one but you’re only going to use one of them at a time. So now how much heel do we put into the boat? Also, you have to tie that together so that the bilge board is absolutely vertical. Now you take a centreboard boat, and they start to heel too much and they’re immediately going to lose lateral resistance from their plates. Take the bilge boards now and
they’re starting to bite at the maximum; and downwind to put water on the deck is also OK because we want to slip that way anyway and the heel is going to decrease the wetted surface. Now you take this to any boat, Star boat, America’s Cup boat and all that stuff, you get that feel more quickly by using the scow system of using heel to find the maximum performance you’re going to achieve. SH: Malcolm Gladwell wrote the popular book Outliers, for which he did his homework and concluded that you’re not able to be an expert at anything until you’ve put about 10,000 hours minimum into doing it. He talked about the Beatles and before they were even big they spent 10,000 hours playing in dive bars in Germany and Liverpool. So talk about practice…
Harry Melges IV: Well, during the summer pretty much every day I go sailing with my friends. Sailing by yourself is a little more boring but it can be more serious too. With your friends you can also talk through stuff. SH: So let’s try to figure out how many thousands of hours each generation has put in at the tiller…
NATALIE COLLOUD/DPPI
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