Opposite: Jud Smith (right) and Peter Duncan’s winning crew at the J/70 Worlds in Porto Cervo in 2017. The following year Duncan and Smith would work together as training partners… although that arrangement later had its ‘moments’. For Smith’s team on Africa (left) it all turned out fine: in a high-scoring regatta they won the 2018 world title by a single point from Italian Bruno Pasquinelli; Pete Duncan’s Relative Obscurity finished 4th
Jud laughs. ‘I said, “Italy, whoa! If my
wife could go, I’ll do that.”’ They won. ‘So by that time,’ he adds, with another chuckle, ‘if they had someone else in mind they forgot about it.’ The team arrived at the worlds in Porto
tough period.’ It was also the start of a new Olympic quad, minus one important keelboat class; Doyle had produced 350 Yngling sails in 2008. ‘Half a million dollars’ worth of business just shutting down.’ He shakes his head. ‘No surprise that there are not nearly as many sail - makers as there were 10 years ago.’ Through those tough times local classes
kept the one-design department going. ‘You actually could say that the Rhodes 19 picked up during the recession,’ he says, ‘because the people who owned them said “I know things might be bad, but I’m going to get a set of sails. I’ve got this boat and we’re going sailing.” [Dave] Curtis always told me that one-design is some- what recession-proof!’ What wasn’t recession-proof were the
bigger keelboat classes. ‘Farr 40s and Melges 32s and all that stuff began to fade away,’ he remembers. ‘All these pro sailors all of sudden had nothing to do. So where do they show up? I started to see them at all the Etchells regattas.’ His customers might consider Jud him-
self to be a professional sailor, but he makes a sharp distinction between what he calls ‘the old-time sailmakers’ (the only option when he was young) and getting paid to sail. ‘I don’t think I’d want to be a full-time pro sailor now,’ he says. ‘I’d rather go home at night…’ When the J/70 came along in 2012 the
pro sailors quickly found work there too. ‘I think the class took off in part because it was cheaper than the big boats; the right boat at the right time. It’s probably our biggest class right now.’ A J/70 will plane in 15kt, he says: ‘If you sail hot enough. It’s a mini little big boat. Personally I have no intention of ever going back [to big boats], so it’s kind of neat.’ Another reason for the runaway success
of the J/70: all age groups can sail. The helm can be ‘someone old and get away with it’. And hiking doesn’t require ‘hang- ing like laundry, which would be a bunch of 20-year-olds. That’s why I think the class will keep going.’
But the pro aspect is a problem. ‘There
are so many regattas now, so there’s a need for pro sailors because otherwise no one is going to have any crew.’ But ‘the cost has got pretty out of control and obviously you worry about it hurting the class.’ He claims he was the only top skipper at
the 2018 worlds with an amateur on his team… that’s one amateur. ‘There are at least 10 boats that definitely go the full pro route, but it’s got even deeper than that. In the top 20, 15 boats had at minimum two pros onboard, and most of them had more than two. So that’s a conundrum; if we’re going to have all these regattas then maybe there’s no other solution… but it gets very expensive for small boat racing.’
Bookend world championships Though only separated by one year, Jud’s two most recent world titles (2017 and 2018 in the J/70) were so radically different he feels they could be considered non-matching bookends to an entire racing career. When I ask why, I expect comparisons of crewing vs skippering. Instead he focuses on differences in preparation and strategy‚ proving (with- out ever stating) his own depth as both a sailor and a campaigner.
2017 WORLDS – PORTO CERVO Preparation As he remembers it Jud only signed on with Peter Duncan’s team for the 2017 Europeans in Hamble. ‘I said, “OK, I’ll go do the one regatta. I’m going to see how the sails are set up and you guys can keep looking for a crew.” But I was never supposed to be on that team [for the worlds]. That was never the plan.’ It blew hard for that entire regatta, Jud
says, eyes wide with memories of the Solent’s wind against current. ‘When it’s windy there it’s really windy,’ which is why so many European boats sailed five- up rather than the US norm of four. ‘I’m not a little guy. And even so we were light against these five-up teams.’ But they got better each day, and ‘Next thing I know, we’re talking about the Italian Nationals!’
Cervo ahead of their competition. It was ‘blowing like stink, and we had four or five really good days of sailing.’ Confident in their speed, they focused on boathandling. ‘Who does this, who puts their hands there? Who moves their foot to there? How do we get the pole deployed faster? Those are the things we were working out.’
Racing Just before the regatta a full mistral arrived; practice and the first two race days were blown out. ‘We sat on the dock for two days which was actually perfect for us,’ Jud remembers, smiling. ‘It gave us a chance to rest up.’ Once the regatta got underway all that early practice paid off. ‘We just got better,’ he says. ‘We got better at tuning the boat. We
got better at trimming the sails.’ And the courses were set for what he calls ‘a proper-length race’ – because class guide- lines, which specify a one-hour target time for each race, were ignored. ‘Start, go close-hauled for a while, be a little patient, and then just chip away.’ They won the six-race regatta with just eight points, 15 points clear of second.
2018 WORLDS – MARBLEHEAD Marblehead has been Jud’s home port his entire life, but he calls the 2018 worlds a ‘goofball regatta’ and – only slightly more diplomatically – says the racing was ‘far less perfect than Porto Cervo’. Though that was partly due to unsettled
weather, one-hour races with 91 J/70s on a single starting line made for a very crowded course. ‘We’re in these scrappy little situations, just a pile of boats,’ Jud says, frowning. ‘Maybe two or three times in the entire regatta we got clear enough to put the bow down and let it rip a bit.’ Superior boat speed alone wasn’t going to win this time around.
Preparation Months before the regatta Jud (expecting typical ‘Marble-dead’ conditions) pre- dicted that it would be a high-scoring event; that proved correct, even though there was more wind than expected. He also knew he couldn’t win without practice, because he didn’t start sailing sportboats until his mid-50s; ‘I can’t go into a J/70 cold turkey. I’ve got to be
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