Dinghies USA - Pt2

Today Vanguard Sailboat's Steve Clark discusses the Optimist, the 420 and the interscholastic sailing scene

Read part one of this article here .

At their impressive premises on Aquidneck Island in north Rhode Island state, Vanguard’s biggest production lines are for the Laser and its predecessor, the Sunfish, sales of which he says still outstrip the Laser.

“You would certainly design a different Laser rig today if you started today,” ruminates Chairman Steve Clark. “But you would never have the opportunity to do that because the Laser rig is cast in stone, even if it doesn’t 100% stand up to the rigours of how people are sailing it now. You look at how Robert Scheidt goes upwind and it is like “gee, you’re actually trying to break that aren’t you?” The violence in the new techniques of getting a Laser upwind - it looks like you are trying to break the maststep out of the boat and break the mast.”

Vanguard also build Optimists, which as in other parts of the world is the starter boat of choice in the States.

“At the Optimist North Americans at Barrington YC there were 350 boats. This qualified as the largest one design regatta ever held in the US at that point. In New England a local regatta is 40-50 boats and in the summer Saturday there will be a 40-50 boat regatta every 40-50 miles.

Clark holds strong views about how well the Oppie succeeds in its role as the boat to get kids into sailing. “The Optimist does everything right and then proceeds to do everything wrong in very short order. As the correct boat to put a little kid in, it is the golden retriever of sailboats. It will take care of little kids in a way that most little boats won't. They’re kids’ size.

“But with the big rudder, the kids learn a bunch of bad habits, about how they can muscle the boat around. It isn’t until they get to a slightly larger boat that they realise that you can't just bump and skull and rock. You’ve got to learn to drive the elephant, rather than cuff it around.

“Unfortunately because of slowness of the boat and the numbers it rewards the most aggressive kids. They aim their boats at other kids and yell at them, so it turns into Dodge Ball.

“Then there is the whole issue of inappropriate use of technology where you have people in my position spending way too much time, developing faster Optimist stuff that probably has no reality but which can be sold to parents who want their kids to have everything.

“People say things that sound believable to gullible parents and sell stuff to them…“oh, you have to buy an Argentinian boat because it is lighter in the ends”. But the Optimist is an 8ft long shoe box that weighs 70lb. How much weight concentration can there be and what significant does that have? But everyone has heard lighter in the ends is better. Some one is sitting there blowing smoke.”

Then there is the use of 7000 series aluminium spars over 6000 – and which are 50% more expensive. “7000 series aluminium is not stiffer. It is just stronger,” says Clark. “So until you start permanently bending the spar there is no reason to have it there. Then there’s there centreboard and rudder. You have to pay $700 to have custom built wooden centreboards and rudders. Is that justified for a boat that goes 3 knots?

“As far as I can see the largest variable is whether the kid is excited and feels good about it. The kid’s attention span is what makes the boat go fast. So you’ve got everything right about teaching sailing and then immediately you start doing everything that’s wrong, turning it into some sort of pressure gear game.”

Clark says that in the States there is a great fall out after kids have been through Optimists. “I think in youth sports, there is too much focus on finding prodigy and rewarding children early - focussing their energy and trying to find the next Nadia Comaneci or Olga Korbut. In trying to find the prodigious little kid we throw away a lot of people on the edges who may turn out to be very good at it, but just develop over a different period of time. In sailing, you don’t have to be really good when you’re six or seven.”

He adds that it is also not just about competition. Sailing on small boats should also be teaching kids about responsible risk taking and self reliance “and all sorts of life's little lessons that are quite irrelevant to the sport of sail boat racing, but that are taught very nicely in the world of sailing.”

At Vanguard they also build versions of the 420, the Club 420 and the Club Flying Junior. These are primarily used for collegiate and inter-scholastic racing, both aspects of the sport in the States that feature to a far lesser degree in the UK or Europe.
“One of the reasons for this was Title 9 - an anti-discrimination statute that stated that men’s and women’s sport needed to be equally funded,” explains Clark. “Because sailing is a co-education sport like rowing, you can add women’s teams at marginal cost, so it got a boost from the administrators.

“Another side of it is that the yachting demographic is good for fund raising. Sailors come from families that typically have strong financial balance sheets and a tradition in philanthropy. So they are good citizens for a college or a prep school to recruit.”
Clark describes the boats he builds for this market as being “industrial strength”. “They do still manage to destroy them. F=ma etc. And the kids sail them with increasing violence . Over the last 15 years the physicality with which little boats are sailed has grown greatly. We just keep reinforcing them trying to make them so that they don’t break.”

These 420s are also used as club training boats and Clark says have displaced the international 420 in US competition. “It will get 100 boats at its American championships and the International 420, if they can muster enough boats, will have less than 10.”



One of the most interesting boats in Vanguard’s range is a two man skiff called the Vector. “That is our attempt to fill the gap between the Club 420 and the 49er - to be a logical next step in the tuition process. We sailed the prototype 29er with Dave Ovington. When Ovi and Mike Zani pushed off the beach, the boat filled and flipped. Later having turned turtle - it sank when we tried to stand on it. Archimedes has been around for a long time. It is a very easy sum to work out if a boat has enough volume to float with a crew. Even the cop thought it was pretty funny. Frank and Julian were asking for something like $40,000 for development up to that point. I was so shocked and angry that we decided to pass. I believed we could do a better job. Of course there are 400+ 29ers in the world and only about 40 Vectors, although the Vector kicks a 29er butt up and down the block.”

Another of his bugbears over how young sailors develop in the US is that they don’t spend enough time developing their handling skills in ‘fast’ boats. “When are your skills finished? Typically the answer is that once I can sail a single trapeze boat with a spinnaker reliably I don’t need to perfect my boat handling skills anymore. I think that is pretty low bar.”

“So the next step these guys take is to get into the hyper intense team and match racing side of the sport. College racing is like that - very intense short course and fast boats don't lend themselves to that.”

The reasons for this are similar to why the America’s Cup isn’t best raced in 60ft trimarans. “There’s a question of at what speed is chess best played? What is the size of a puff? The speed of the boat determines your transit speed across the puff. This is the duration of the puff. From here you can work out how much you are willing to sacrifice to take advantage of a puff or a shift.

“The geography or texture of the wind is pretty constant. So if you are going Tornado speed through a shift cell of a known size, the decision whether you tack or don’t tack is a function of how much you slow the boat down to make that manoeuvre, because it goes faster when it is going straight than it is when it is turning. And how long is the puff going to last?

“There is an argument that sail boat racing as a tactical game is very pleasant at about 4-6 knots upwind. If there is a standard shift size, and the boat doesn't take a huge step backwards when it tacks - with roll tacks you can make turning a low cost or no cost endeavour - you can play a very interesting chess game at a low speed. But as you speed the boat up it becomes more strategic than tactical and you start playing trends rather than specific situations and a whole different set of skills emerge.

“Typically boat handling is more critical the higher speed the boat is. But for close-in, thrust and parry and crowd management issues and little passing games where you play a tight tactical race - as exemplified by match racing - speed is irrelevant relative to position. And that is presented as the pinnacle of the sport rather than being able to fly around at 20 something knots with 1300sqft of area on a 400lb boat.”

This raises the interesting question – who is the best sailor in your club? “Is it the guy who can sail the most difficult boat in the most wind without tipping over, or is it the guy who can win the largest fleet race with the best competition? Is the World Champion of sailing Howie Hamlin for winning the 18 Worlds or is it the guy who wins the Star Worlds which is a slower, more bunched-in boat?”



Like elsewhere in the World the States has seen equipment arms races happening through all walks of the sport over the years, often to the detriment of the sport.
“In the early 1970s we were screaming and yelling that club racing really wasn't good enough,” says Clark. “We wanted to go out and sail Olympic courses set well from the beach and get ‘fair racing’ and I think that had the effect of driving the middle and back out of the sport. Basically it got to be too hard to do well enough to make it rewarding for people.

“On a test of pure merit, the sailmakers always won. Fairly early on, you sit there and say ‘our sail budget involves a new jib for every major regatta’. I have a friend who doesn’t believe sails are capital expenditure. He says ‘when I used to go motor racing, I bought cans of gasoline before I went to the track. I buy sails and they are just bags of gas. I might as well throw them in the dumpster once I leave the venue, because I am never going to use them again’”.

“There was a pile the size of a haystack kicking around after racing the Tempest Olympic trials, They all had hours and hours of good use in them, but the draught had blown back in the jib and the mainsail was the wrong mainsail that week. The only thing wrong with them was that they weren’t as fast as new sails.

“The waste that comes off the back side of a one design racing programme is prodigious stuff. The notion that this is an ecological sport, doesn’t look at the pile of scrap high quality plastics, polyester films and aramid fibres we throw away. It isn’t stuff you can melt down and turn into milk jugs or bubble pack. And you can’t make boat covers or awnings with it, because it doesn’t last long enough to do that.”

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Next week we speak to Clark about his Cogito C-class Little America’s Cup winner, what makes a C-class wing rig tick and how the event will proceed since the Trustees of the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy opted to hold it in one designs.