The sleek 66-foot sloop Blue Yankee slices through the choppy water past the breakwater at the entrance to Stamford Harbor, moving into position for the start of the 2001 Vineyard Race. The wind is from the southwest off Long Island Sound and freshening, and the wind-speed gauge attached to the boat's mast reads 16 knots. The mainsail goes up in shimmering folds of gold as four men grind the winches to raise it. The first of the three jibs and three spinnakers they will use during the race is on deck, awaiting the helmsman's order. In 15 minutes, Blue Yankee will cross the start line and begin her 238-mile voyage through Long Island Sound, past Block Island, around the Buzzards Bay light tower between Newport, R.I., and Martha's Vineyard and back to the finish in the harbor at Stamford, Conn. It is the Friday before Labor Day weekend. The sky is clear; the tide is flowing into Long Island Sound; and the forecast is for a steady southwest wind into Saturday. For 23 hours, 16 men will try to keep Blue Yankee's sails full and her course on track to win the only ocean-racing prize that has eluded them: the Vineyard Race trophy. On board are some of the world's best sailors: helmsman Steve Benjamin, an Olympic medalist and winner of three world championships; tactician Eddie Warden-Owen, also a multiple world champion, who has flown over from the United Kingdom for the race; and navigator Bob Towse '63, the boat's owner and three-time United States Admiral's Cup team captain. Towse has been winning some of the most grueling long-distance yacht races for 25 years. The key to victory, he says, is the same as it was when he played football at UNH: teamwork. "It's the consummate team sport," Towse says. "To win at this level you've got to have the best people at each position."
Towse, an advisory director for the investment-banking firm Morgan Stanley, was a relative latecomer to yacht racing. Most of the world's top sailors begin sailing dinghies as young children, but Towse spent his boyhood summers piloting powerboats on the St. Lawrence River. "I thought sailing was a sissy sport," he says with a rueful smile. "I found out it's very complicated, athletic and cerebral."
Towse sailed for the first time in the late 1960s when friends invited him aboard their 28-foot Olympic-class sloop. "I had no idea where it would take me," he says. In 1970, he bought his first boat, a 26-foot-long sloop, and named it Blue Yankee, the first of six of that name. He quickly discovered the world of racing, and within a few years he was competing in major races.
"I'm very competitive," he says. "If we can reduce a race to a war of wills, we'll win." Towse has won many of the world's top offshore races, including the prestigious Newport-Bermuda race. He has represented the United States in Admiral's Cup competition four times. The Admiral's Cup-considered the world championship of ocean yacht racing-involves a grueling series of five buoy races and two long-distance races off the coast of England, including a 608-mile-long loop around the Fastnet Rock in the Irish Sea.
Today, Towse employs a full-time captain, America's Cup veteran Jamie Boeckel, and works with some of the world's top professional sailors-men like Benjamin and Warden-Owen, America's Cup-winning navigator Peter Isler, and Ross Field, a two-time winner of the Whitbread Round the World Race. The Blue Yankee crew also includes gifted amateur sailors, many of whom have been sailing with Towse for 20 years.
Sailing on a racing yacht is no pleasure cruise. The cabin is stripped of cruising comforts: no galley or shower or bunks, just a small head, or toilet compartment. To save weight, all food is freeze dried. Crew members bring a minimum of clothing and gear and sleep in hammocks or on top of sailbags. By the race's end, the cabin smells "pretty ripe" and so do the men. They are also exhausted. Towse and his crew members have spent up to 20 hours at a stretch clipped into harnesses and riding the rail to balance the boat in a stiff wind.
Blue Yankee is a low-slung boat-long and flat, narrow and light-which cuts down on water and wind resistance and helps it keep pace with much larger boats. (Generally speaking, length at the waterline is the major factor determining how fast a boat will go.) The boat was designed for an Australian, who won many offshore races with her, mostly in the Pacific. "Every once in a while you get a lucky boat that's a synthesis of several design elements," Benjamin says. "Blue Yankee is one of those."
Towse bought this Blue Yankee in 1999, when he decided to concentrate on offshore distance racing, which required a faster boat than the 47-foot sloop he owned at the time. He had to reconfigure the new boat for racing off the New England coast, where winds are lighter and boats frequently sail upwind. Working with Benjamin, he took some 2,500 pounds of ballast out of the bilge. He replaced the mast with one that's taller (99 feet high) and more flexible, and the spinnaker pole with one that's 2.5 feet longer. Towse also replaced the sails with a new set-two mainsails, five spinnakers, four overlapping jibs and five nonoverlapping jibs.
Two days before the Vineyard Race, Towse, Benjamin and tactician Owens begin checking weather forecasts and tide charts and talking strategy. "We want to diminish the effect of the tide in the beginning when it will be running against us," Towse says. "Then as it turns and diminishes, we want to work our way north, where we expect a stronger breeze and a wind change." That would allow Blue Yankee to leave the Sound on a reach, not running dead downwind-the slowest point of sail.
Thursday dawns bright and clear. By afternoon Blue Yankee is out on the Sound, and the crew is practicing every maneuver that might be required during the race. There have been subtle changes to the rigging since the last time some of the crew members were on board, and they must be able to execute each maneuver swiftly and surely, even in the dark.
On a long-distance race in the North Atlantic, hundreds of miles from the nearest port, there is little room for error. Two years ago on a 1,018-mile voyage from Key West to Baltimore, Towse and his crew faced gale-force winds gusting up to 55 miles per hour and waves cresting 20 to 25 feet high. The temperature dropped from the 90s to the 50s in 24 hours. The waves rushed over the deck from bow to stern as the boat pitched down one wave and through the next. Two yachts in that race lost their masts and limped into port in the Carolinas.
At one point, 36 hours into the race, Blue Yankee submarined under a wave and the impact ripped off the forward hatch. Seawater poured into the cabin. Some of the sailors began pumping as the boat pitched and tossed. With four feet of water rushing over the deck, other crew members in safety harnesses put together a makeshift patch and screwed the pieces of the hatch to the deck with as much caulk and sealant as they could slather on.
The wind continued to push Blue Yankee on at speeds up to 26.5 knots. At times the 38,000-pound boat was planing. "Fourteen knots is very comfortable on this boat," Benjamin says. "At 16 to 17, things start to get a little sketchy-it puts a load on everything. At 20 knots, things start to break. When you're going that fast with 17 guys on board, you're relying on everyone to do their job." The gale helped Blue Yankee enter Baltimore Harbor just 95 hours after she left Key West, establishing a race record that still stands.
On the morning of the Vineyard Race, Towse checks the global-positioning system and loads tide information into a laptop computer. The computer already contains data on Blue Yankee's performance under any combination of weather and current conditions. Towse speaks by phone with a meteorologist and goes over the latest faxed weather maps with Warden-Owen and Benjamin. The men are confident they have a strategy that should keep the boat moving at peak speed. All that remains is to put that strategy into play. Because she is larger than most of the other boats in the race, Blue Yankee is among the last to start, two and a half hours after the first boats set sail. There are 11 classes of boats competing in two divisions. Only three boats are racing in Blue Yankee's class, including the 60-foot Carrera, which Towse identifies as the boat to beat. Carrera and Blue Yankee have been battling all season and are virtually tied in the contest for the Northern Ocean Racing Trophy, which is awarded to the yacht with the best performance in three of four blue-water qualifying races. The Vineyard Race will determine the winner.
The three boats tack and jibe as they jockey for position. As the starting gun booms, Benjamin drives Blue Yankee first over the starting line with Carrera a short distance behind. Now he must guide Blue Yankee through the fleet of 70 smaller boats, whose sails might interfere with the wind. "It's like a bird's wing in flight," Benjamin says. "You have to choose the right course to prevent stalls."
Benjamin keeps an eye on the instruments that display wind speed, wind direction, wind angle and boat speed, among others, but he also relies on experience and instinct, checking the mainsail for signs of luffing (shaking that means the boat is pointed too close to the wind or the sail is not properly trimmed), watching for the rapid line of crinkled water that signals a gust of wind. "Driving a sailboat is a lot like being a great hitter," Towse says. "You've got to have good eyes and a computer in your head to measure time, speed, distance. To win you have to interpret the weather better than anyone else and take advantage of opportunities better than anyone else."
Two and a half hours into the race, the sun begins to set, its glancing rays turning the sea pink and orange. From now on, all sail changes and adjustments must be made in the dark. Blue Yankee has passed some of the smaller boats in the fleet and is heading for The Race, which constricts the Sound at its eastern end near New London, Conn. Here the current is strong, often more than four knots. Tactician Warden-Owen calls for a change of spinnakers. Three crewmen perform what's known as an instantaneous peel, running the new sail up inside the old one, so when the old sail comes down, the new one is already working. It's a maneuver that requires the precision of a drill team. One false move and the sail can end up in the water.
"Sail choice and sail trim are critical," Towse says. Choosing which sails to carry on board is an important part of the pre-race strategizing because there is a sail for every possible wind condition. Modern racing sails are lighter and stronger than their cotton predecessors, which bulged uncontrollably with every gust of wind. Blue Yankee's jibs and mainsails are made of individual carbon fibers laminated to a mylar film. Because there is so little stretch, the sails maintain their shape as the wind builds, using it to best advantage.
The wind is steady and from the southwest, and Blue Yankee is on a reach (with the wind at right angles to the keel of the boat-one of the fastest points of sail) all the way through the mouth of the Sound. "We went through The Race in all its fury," Towse says later. "We hit everything at the right time. The tide had turned and we rode the crest of that ebbing tide all the way down and through."
By the time they reach Block Island Sound, Blue Yankee, the 70-foot sloop Donneybrook and Carrera have passed all the other boats and are dueling for the lead. Blue Yankee rounds the Buzzards Bay light between Newport, R.I., and Martha's Vineyard and begins the voyage home at about 3 a.m. Twenty minutes later, she passes Carrera heading in the opposite direction and then overtakes Donneybrook to claim the lead. "This is the challenging part," Towse says. "Going out was pretty straightforward."
Going home, Blue Yankee must beat against the wind, sailing as close to the wind as the boat will point in one direction, then coming about and tacking in the other direction. The weather forecast calls for a cold front to pass through about the time the boat will re-enter The Race, shifting the wind from southwest to northwest. Benjamin keeps the boat on a long port tack, with the wind coming over the left side of the boat, passing south of Block Island at dawn.
Benjamin brings Blue Yankee into the Sound on the starboard tack, squeezing between the Stratford, Conn., Shoal and Stratford Point. So far it has been a textbook race. By both the electronic mapping system and Towse's dead reckoning, Blue Yankee has arrived at every milestone on or ahead of schedule. With 32 miles and four hours of sailing to go, talk of a record begins in the stern of the boat and makes its way forward to the bow.
An hour later, as Blue Yankee passes Bridgeport, Conn., Towse radios the Stamford Yacht Club to report the boat's position. Talk of a record spreads through the club, the race's sponsor, and boats set out to watch Blue Yankee's arrival. Carrera is visible only through binoculars, and Towse estimates she is more than 40 minutes behind-the critical time, since the International Measurement System of handicapping means Blue Yankee must be at least that much ahead of the smaller Carrera to finish first on corrected time. Twenty-three hours, three minutes and 57 seconds after Blue Yankee started the race, she crosses the finish line, setting a record, winning her class and the IMS racing division and locking up the Northern Ocean Racing Trophy.
The Vineyard Race was Blue Yankee's last offshore race of the 2001 season. Towse and his crew competed in a series of buoy races on Long Island Sound near Towse's home in Stamford before putting the boat away for the winter. But even before Blue Yankee came out of the water, Towse was already planning his 2002 campaign.
This season began with a second-place finish in the Key West to Baltimore Race in April, and Towse is looking forward to a second win in the Newport-Bermuda Race in June. But ask him the race he has his heart set on and he will tell you it is still the Vineyard Race. While Blue Yankee set a record last fall and won the IMS racing division, an older, smaller boat beat Blue Yankee on handicap. "A lot of my dreams have come true," Towse says, "but I've never been the overall fleet winner of the Vineyard Race." This Labor Day weekend, Towse and Blue Yankee will try once more to make that dream come true. ~
Editor's note: At press time, we learned of the death of Blue Yankee's professional captain, Jamie Boeckel, on May 27 in an accident on Long Island Sound. Blue Yankee was one of 86 boats participating in the Block Island Race when she was hit by a sudden squall. Boeckel was on the bow, helping with a sail change to a smaller spinnaker, when the spinnaker pole broke and knocked him into the water. Crew member Brock Callen dove in and, in spite of the waves and cold, was able to reach the unconscious Boeckel, but could not hold him. We extend our sympathy to Jamie Boeckel's family and to the members of the Blue Yankee crew, who have lost a close friend and comrade.