Update
Oops… Dee Caffari’s VO65 Turn the Tide on Plastic reveals her underthings at the Leg 3 start in Cape Town – it sometimes still surprises just how small you can go with twin rudders even on a boat as powerful as this because of their much greater efficiency. Caffari found herself skippering a team at the very last minute so getting to Cape Town one minute off 6th was an honourable opener
The five annual Finals to date have been one-off events out of
the Nassau Yacht Club in the Bahamas, a supreme sailing venue where in 66 days of SSL racing to date only one day has been lost. To achieve its goal the SSL is building its own fleet. At present
it owns 45 Star boats, and with more boats already under construc- tion the intention is to build this to 100, with boats divided between five bases around the world. According to Niklaus, having regional fleets is much more cost-effective than shipping boats between different venues. Then there is prizemoney, which certainly adds spice. At the
2017 Finals in Nassau winners Paul Goodison and Frithjof Kleen walked away with US$40,000 of a $200,000 prize purse. With the current development of a relatively complex (necessarily
so, since sailing itself is complex) ranking system, to filter through the best sailors from all major classes, as well as from events like the Volvo and the America’s Cup, the ultimate aim is for the SSL to evolve to the point that one day it may be able to determine – finally – who is the world’s best sailor, regardless of what they usually sail. However, this is still a long way off, as Niklaus says: ‘It is a big job… you have 10 Olympic classes, 143 World Sailing classes and 1,000+ non-WS classes!’ One of the main question marks over the league is: is the Star
boat, a design that is now 107 years old and that doesn’t have downwind sails, the right boat to determine the best sailor in the world? The ancient keelboat does have a reputation for being sailed by the ‘best of the best’. Scuttlebutt Europe editor David McCreary points out that whenever he is asked ‘who is the world’s best sailor’ he will often answer simply ‘the Star World Champion’. Despite it being a keel boat, techniques for sailing the Star, such
as the use of kinetics downwind, are oddly similar to those in the Laser and Finn. Thus it was less of a surprise when Paul Goodison, the Beijing 2008 Laser gold medallist, coming to the SSL Finals fresh from a second consecutive win in the Moth Worlds, became the first SSL Finals winner who was not a Star sailor (Torben Grael points out that this might not be possible if the Star were still an Olympic class). So much of the performance of the Star is down to the crew that
a good sailor is able to step onboard as a helm and, provided their crew is good enough, they can achieve good results. Thus Paul Goodison was sailing with German Star veteran Frithjof Kleen and came to the SSL following a few days’ training at Lake Garda and in Miami. Onboard Goodison was steering, trimming the main and
14 SEAHORSE
providing feedback on the helm while Kleen was managing everything else. Perhaps even more impressive is how British Nacra 17 World and European Champion Ben Saxton, coming from a foiling cata- maran completely unrelated to the Star, should manage a race win in the qualifiers. Fortunately for the likes of Saxton and Franck Cammas, both of whom are 470 (ie pint) sized, the crew weight equalisation in the Star works well. Cammas had American man-mountain Mark Strube doing the hard work in front of him. No article about the Star Sailors League is complete without
tribute being paid to Michel Niklaus, whose driving force and philanthropy fuel the circuit. A self-made man, Niklaus spent most of his life working to go sailing on Corsaires, which he started sailing with his family as a child on Lake Neuchâtel. This included the creation of a vast T-shirt printing business, then a real estate company and finally a successful real estate fund which now looks after some 2.5 billion Swiss Francs of investor money. Niklaus hoped to mount a Star campaign himself for Rio 2016
but hit a brick wall when the Star was dropped from the Games. As a consolation prize he set up the Star Sailors League, as one of his fundamental beliefs is that in sport the athletes are the stars of the show and in sailing at present they are not valued highly enough. No wonder he is already regarded by many of the sailors with something approaching reverence…
THE END OF THE BEGINNING – Rob Kothe The 2018 Golden Globe Race (GGR) round the world solo non-stop, which will now start in Les Sables d’Olonne, home to the Vendée Globe, experienced a not unexpected bump in the road (up til then the event was enjoying a charmed life) before Christmas when a potential clash appeared between moving the race start to France and the safety measures put in place by race organisers. The Vendée Globe first ran in 1989 and was originally inspired
by the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in 1968/69. But this modern version of the 1968 race has of course been marked with multiple instances of keel and rig problems and several catastrophic structural failures. The French authorities initially looked at the GGR and felt that safety regulations should apply similarly to both types of event… or they would not allow the race to start and finish in France, as agreed. They took a fair bit of persuading otherwise. Set against the very fast but sometimes fragile all-carbon modern Imoca 60, the Golden Globe by contrast requires all vessels to have w
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