Here's a little interview I did last week with them:
Last day of racing for the F18 North Americans. Wind was light, increasing in the afternoon. Full results to be posted soon. Thanks to John Williams and his crew at ABYC for putting on such a high quality event.
The official results have no been posted yet, but I can tell you that the first North American team, in a solid 3rd overall, is Greg Thomas and Jacques Bernier. Here's an interview that I did with them on Friday:
Hailing from San Diego, Greg Thomas and Jacques Bernier are well-known in the cat sailing world and they have an extensive resume of accomplishments. They are multiple Hobie Tiger national champions, North American F18 champs, placed first in the Alter Cup, Jacques is a Tornado National champ, and Greg did two Olympic Tornado campaigns, and together they have placed in the top 5 at several Tiger Worlds events. Here's what's on their minds.
JL: Are you happy with the performance of your new Wild Cat? Coming from a Tiger are you getting used to the differences in performance?
GT: Yeah. If you look at our results you can actually tell that we're progressing through the week. We actually had a warm-up regatta the weekend beforehand, and once the Nationals started, it's been a little bit more competitive, a lot more competitive. You can see our results especially after today, we kind of start out medium, and as the week goes we just keep getting faster and faster.
JL: So you've only been on the new boat for 10 days or so. Do you feel that you're getting it dialed in?
JB: I think this is maybe the seventh day we've been sailing it. Today we thought we had the tuning better.
GT: Actually after yesterday we figured out something on the boat, and we definitely felt that we were much better out there.
JL: Is that 'something' top secret?
GT: No, actually it's just the diamond wire tension. We tightened the diamonds and it settled the boat down a bit. It made it go forward, rather than popping a hull up and down.
JB: We just have to communicate a lot more on this boat, like I have to tell him more, alright you've got to foot now and I'm sheeting you out. I'll just tell him stuff. We don't just feel stuff like we did on the Tiger. The boat has this thing where it just goes at a certain setting and if you get it wrong the boat feels like it just stops, especially in the chop. If you hit a couple of waves wrong it feels like it stops, so we always try to anticipate waves. It's the communication thing again, were I know there's waves coming and I have to sheet him out so he can bear away through the wave and I'll just ease him back in, and he eases the steering back up. It's just all-new for us.
JL: It's the modern flat hull designs?
GT: Yeah, the Tiger has a lot more rocker, so it's easier to sail in that kind of stuff, the chop, any kind of chop. So the boats with the flat bottoms like the Wild Cat, you just try to find that groove to keep the boat going forward, because once it starts slapping and bouncing, it's hard to stop it.
JL: I heard you guys talking with Jay and Pease and Pete the other day at dinner about the attributes of the different hull shapes. Would you mind repeating some of that?
JB: I don't actually remember that conversation, but I know that we've talked about stuff like that in the past. It seems, the Nacra seems to do really well in super flat water and under 6 knots. In those conditions it's really hard staying to windward of those guys. We just have to sail free, to tack away and just try to keep our own focus on our boat. We have the same pace, but we sail at a different angle. And the Capricorn, this particular Capricorn has a sail that is really sort of round and the leech stands up, so in 6 to 8 knots they're really tough, because the boat is powered up, and they get on the wire sooner than everybody. But once the breeze increases to 10, they don't get the same twist as we do, and don't get the same acceleration. They kind of seem to start in a high mode, whereas the Wild Cat seems to have a really good spread. You can do a lot of things with it, you can go high, medium, low without really fussing with it too much.
JL: Both of you have been working a lot on developing the F18 class here in the U.S. I know Greg, you've done some tuning seminars and Jacques, you too. What's the next step for the F18? Do you thing it's going to take off here in the U.S.?
GT: We've been trying for years to get this thing going. I mean we were the original F18 guys, we started sailing a Tiger, which is F18, that was almost 9 years ago. So we've been trying for years and years and it seems like it got to a point, like it was going to take off, and then it fell off a little bit. It has its moments where it feels like it has the momentum, but it just doesn't really happen. I don't know what the answer is. We've been trying.
JB: There's little pockets of F18s in different parts of the country where it's quite strong. We're lucky here, we have, I think there's 5 or 6 teams in the top 10 and there all from here. The level of competition here where we train is really, really good, and so that helps our sailing obviously, especially when you go, to a say a Worlds or go sail in Europe, you know, you're more on the pace then if you were, like the guys from Seattle for example. They all kind of sail together, and they are all sort of doing the same things (as far as tuning the boat), but a lot of that isn't necessarily fast. So, we've been talking to them about how to set the boat up and how to sail the boat, just because we've had a bunch of time on it.
I think to get more participation, say at a Nationals in this down economy, so to get boats from the East Coast to come all the way to California. I mean it's expensive to trailer a boat here. I think the fleet's been spit this year, there's a regatta in Canada. The Canadian Nationals, all the guys in the Northeast are going to go there. So that kind of hurt our participation for this event. Whenever we have an F18 event here in the West it seems like, there are more F18 on the Eastern seaboard. When we did the event in Virginia a lot of boats showed up that don't like to come all the way to California, I think we had over 40 boats. This year though, everybody's been downsized, so I think those two factors kind of hurt participation.
GT: Yeah, If you look at the combination of this event and the Canadian event that are going to happen in two weeks, they're going to have 40 plus boats and we have around 27, so that would be about 65 boats total boats for a nationals for one year, so that's more than we've had before. That's one way to like at it.
JL: Do you think that having a class trailer or something like that would help boost participation?
GT: Definitely.
JB: Wouldn't hurt.
GT: Yeah, people want to go to these regattas, but it's just finding other guys to stack with, or the one team that came here, they had a five-stack trailer, but that didn't quite work out. Definitely, anything we could do to get more guys to come out.
JL: It's always great watching you guys race, you make the boats go pretty good out there. Thanks.
GT: Always having fun!
Go here for more pics:
http://surfcityracing.smugmug.com/Go here for more stories:
http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/index.php?showtopic=95774I think Jeff took the top photo and I took the bottom photo, but I really don't know for sure. I took over 1000 pics.
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