Champion


Smith may be the English language’s most common surname, but in the keelboat phonebook there’s only one Jud. Olympian Carol Cronin takes tea with a sailing legend


I first met Jud Smith in 2002, early on in my Olympic Yngling career. I was a nobody and already committed to another sailmaker, but this white-haired gentleman spent half an hour explaining how to sight my spreaders for symmetry (sometimes in very un-gentlemanly language). He could have been off schmoozing


with other teams (his customers); instead, eyes twinkling as we talked tuning techni- calities, he was helping me to improve. Most of Jud’s competitors have prob -


ably had similar help from this lifetime sailmaker. Making sailboats go faster is Jud Smith’s passion, not just his profession – and Jud loves to talk. ‘It’s a fun thing to be able to help other sailors sail up to their potential,’ he tells me, during our lengthy chat in his ‘corner office’.


48 SEAHORSE As president of Doyle One Design, Jud


works out of the Salem, Massachusetts loft. And while ‘corner office’ is technically true, it’s only because his nondescript desk is tucked out of the way of a big work table where almost all of the company’s one-design sails are built. ‘All we do here is one-design,’ he explains… but through the glass dividers is an open floor big enough to produce Doyle Superyacht sails. As we chatted, sewing machines and


workers’ voices chattered away happily. There are fewer people who want to learn the trade these days, he says; young sailors go pro now, instead of working in a loft during the week and sailing at the week- ends as Jud’s done since he was a teenager. I ask him what keeps him excited about


sailmaking, 40-plus years later. ‘There’s a certain amount of pride,’ he replies, sitting up a little straighter in his chair. ‘There’s a piece of you that’s in every one of those sails. You always want to make the best sails you can, and have those sails perform. We make a ton of sails for the Star Sailors League, and more and more are in the finals and often winning. The guy who won the Star Worlds this year has our jibs. I enjoy


making sails and I like to see them do well.’ Another bonus: his job keeps him


young. ‘I’m 61 and I get to go out and sail with a bunch of 30-year-olds. I’ve found the youth. It’s just like being 30 again!’


Four decades of winning As a skipper, Jud’s won world champion - ships in four different classes: Mumm30 (1999), Etchells (2006), Sonar (2013) and J/70 (2018). The most recent is his current favourite, ‘because it’s hard to win a regatta at home. Definitely more pressure and the expectations are higher.’ He also won the Star Springs in 2017, finished second at way too many worlds (six in the Etchells alone), and won another handful of big regattas as a crew – most notably the 2017 J/70 Worlds as bow for Peter Duncan. Yes, that’s back-to-back world championships at opposite ends of what he calls ‘the funnest boat I ever sailed’.


Four decades of sailmaking When asked about industry changes since the 1970s Jud says 2009 drew a big line in the sailmaking sand. ‘Literally everything dropped by 50 per cent, so that was a


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