and even the Figaro 3 starting to appear more regularly in local races such as the Stamford-Vineyard Race in early September and the Annapolis Double-Handed Race in October.
In 2020 both of these races were big successes in the Double Handed classes. The 240nm Vineyard Race (which starts and ends in Connecticut after poking out into the Atlantic east of Long Island Sound) had 11 out of 38 PHRF entries racing two-handed, as were eight of 27 ORC-scored entries.
In Annapolis last year’s inaugural race – MCed by Gary Jobson whose promotional video shown at the World Sailing conference in Bermuda helped cement the new offshore Olympic medal among the politicians – was repeated as a shorter overnight race of about 100 miles. The course was raced as a tour of the mid-Chesapeake, intended to be 24 hours long but mercifully shortened by PRO Dick Neville to 92 miles due to excruciating light-air conditions. Regardless, the turnout was also impressive: double that of last year, with 11 entered in a J/105 one-design class with mandatory mixed-gender crews, and 26 entries divided into two ORC classes from a Mini 6.50 to large 40ft+ cruiser-racers.
The only loud graphics seen on the course were two Figaro 3s with branding from State Street – a Boston-based financial firm. Raced by two mixed-gender teams of Jesse Fielding/Francesca Clapcich on one and Laurent Givry/Sara Stone on another, this two-boat programme is fiercely targeting Paris 2024. So here it is at last: corporate sponsorship meets offshore sailing in the US. It’s not a coincidence that State Street’s CEO is Ron O’Hanley, the owner of one of the more active offshore racing pro- grammes in the US campaigning his Cookson 50 Privateer. No doubt we will be hearing more about this US Olympic effort in the future. So, aside from the State Street team, there were not many other high-profile ringers in the Annapolis fleet – except multihull legend Randy Smyth who came up from Florida once again with team mate Christina Persson in the J/105s to prove he’s damned good in mono- hulls too: they bested their nearest class rival by 43 minutes. No, these are primarily amateur owners and their mates having a go in a very organic approach to playing a game that’s new and intriguing. A little less organic but certainly targeted for Olympic development is the approach being taken at the Oakcliff Sailing Center in Oyster Bay, which has for the second year outfitted Melges 24s with smaller mains and kites to hold two-handed trial events. Their efforts benefit from large resources of equipment and organisational talent they have on hand, and will probably be embedded in whatever structures eventually arise for the selection trials for US Olympic dreamers. And finally the other interesting development ahead of the World Sailing conference is the launch of ‘Offshore Doubles’ by Larry Rosen- feld, a technology entrepreneur, adventurer and offshore navigator on the round-the-world maxi-cat Team Adventure. He had been asked by Stan Honey and Dina Kowalyshyn, who along with Australian Matt Allen identified a rather glaring gap in the run-up to the 2024 offshore medal race: specifically, without a choice of equipment yet there is no class organisation to help plan ahead for selection criteria, formats, ranking lists, or anything else!
‘It’s been our intention to not start selecting and promoting a boat type this early in the cycle,’ said Honey, ‘because this would bias in favour of the wealthy nations who would purchase boats and start right away. Our idea is to instead promote the discipline itself so the sailors can acquire their skill sets broadly without being so specific at this early stage. Thus we launched Offshore Doubles to fill this gap while also providing a cohesive home for everyone interested in double-handed offshore sailing.’
Rosenfeld seeks to use this and other recruiting initiatives to build a grass-roots movement to demonstrate strength to the politi- cians at World Sailing who may still be sceptical about racing for medals in boats that aren’t dinghies. Some of the board of advisers appointed to the new grouping, such as Loïck Peyron, Gilles Chiorri, Dee Caffari and Knut Frostad, in addition to Honey himself, are of course well-embedded in the World Sailing political culture. Let’s hope their efforts can convince not only World Sailing but, more importantly, the IOC – from whom signs of uncertainty about Olympic sailing’s new baby are growing in volume – that this is indeed a medal-worthy new discipline. Dobbs Davis
SEAHORSE 31
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