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Left: Buddy, Harry III and Harry IV, three iterations of the Melges sailing dynasty. Harry IV is already filling some big shoes with recent major successes in the E Scow (below), plus numerous regatta wins in the various Melges one-design keelboat classes racing with Dad – also a multiple world champion in his own right. After a slow start, solid support for the class turned the Melges 32 (far left) into a premier international grand prix class


Harry Melges IV: I have absolutely no idea!


Harry Melges III: For sure, way way more than 1,000. I don’t know if it would be close to 10,000. That’s a lot of hours if you do the maths. Actually, I think the big thing with practice is that you have to love it enough to want to do it enough. And you’ve got to put some variety into it so it’s not mundane. It’s the same with ski racing as it is for sailing. But sailing you’ve got a lot of different great boats to sail. All the scow boats that we build, our new Melges 14, Harry grew up sailing the Bic O’Pen. Now he’s playing around with a Moth and an A Class catamaran. There’s lot of variety in this sport which is fun but it also improves your skills across the board. I believe that if you improve in one boat you also get that much better in another boat. Buddy Melges: Confidence, confidence, confidence. When you’ve got confidence you win. When you haven’t you get beat. SH: What’s your favourite boat? Harry Melges IV: The Moths are a lot of fun. It’s hard to keep up with the boat sometimes. But these days the E Scow is my favourite to sail all round. Harry Melges III: The E scow is just an


awesome boat. But I’ve done a lot of Melges 17 sailing with Harry and my daughter Munro now as well. For me probably the most fun sailing I do is with my kids. The 17 really teaches the kids how to sail; it’s a high-performance, apparent-wind masthead A sail boat. So to go from the 17 to the E Scow is a piece of cake – Harry actually felt the E Scow was a little easier than the 17. But the 17 creates great drivers. Buddy Melges: As I said, the scow type of boat does wonders. It drums the angle of heel into you and when you’ve got that down then whole horizons open up. You don’t have to be looking at the numbers up and down and stuff like that. In the Amer- ica’s Cup we got Bill Koch to buy a scow because we wanted him to become sensi- tised to the angle of heel so he wouldn’t have to look at the numbers so much and could keep the boat driving in a nice straight line. Early on his track was pretty wide and after sailing the scow it got nar- rower and narrower. Not only that but the speed wasn’t going up and down like a yoyo either. So there’s a lot to say about being able to feel the boat. Find the angle for every boat you’re going to sail. Now


you can present her to Mother Nature and you know before she gets there what’s going to happen. As far as I know, there is no compass yet nor other instrument that tells you what’s going to happen 100 yards in front of your boat. SH: You mentioned confidence. What’s the secret to gaining confidence? Buddy Melges: Time in the boat is where you get your confidence. You can’t be an Olympic skier going down the hill twice before the event. So you’ve got to do your homework, build your foundation, you can’t have a George Washington Memor- ial type of tall thin structure, you’ve got to have a nice broad base like a Pyramid. Then you can always fall back on that knowledge. Harry IV will find out, Harry III already knows. SH: So some lessons learnt listening to Dad and Grandpa! Harry Melges IV: Yeah, every time. SH: So not yet 10,000 hours but already plenty of confidence. Tell us about going to the E Scow Nationals… Harry Melges IV: To be honest, going to the nationals I was just happy to sail the boat where my whole crew was my family… We also had a great regatta. Then we went into the Blue Chip regatta and now I knew I could sail the boat, like quite well I guess. SH: It was pretty breezy with some good guys like Brian Porter falling over… Harry Melges IV: That’s what all the Moth sailing, 14 sailing, 17 sailing is about. You get such a good feel for when the puffs are going to hit and what to do, you can just anticipate much better. Your head’s out of the boat, you see it coming. SH: You mentioned the new Melges 14, what’s the goal with that platform? Harry Melges III: The goal is to be an international one-design. Hopefully one day an Olympic-class boat. It’s the latest hull design from Reichel-Pugh, with a nice carbon rig and a square-top main. It’s a very active sailplan and a really fast, fun boat to sail. I think it’s time for something fresh and it’s got a lot of potential. SH: So the son continues in Dad’s footsteps… Buddy Melges: (Laughing) Footsteps! He passed me long ago. He’s creating his own footsteps. There’s no tracks he’s following. Maybe on a turkey hunt, or maybe a duck hunt, but when it comes to water I think he’s got his own track. He’s not following anybody’s. SH: What about you, Harry, an AC campaign some day or an Olympic campaign…


Harry Melges III: No. I just don’t have the  SEAHORSE 31


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