Welcome to 2025

Despite best intentions, this blog lay fallow in 2024. Work demands were a big part of it as the fundraising cycle for our company was in high gear through nearly all of last year. When you’ve just completed your 15th investor deck that week on your way out to Saturday’s dock call, pretty much all you want to do when you get home from racing Saturday afternoon is anything other than more writing. Sorry about that…

I’m unsure what the work cycle will look like for me in 2025, but I do know two things:

• We’re racing Van Isle 2025 this year
• We have to relearn sailing One Life because we have brand new sails

Anyone who has read this blog knows we’ve struggled at times with the original sail plan. Nobody’s fault, really, it’s sometimes what happens when sails and sail plans are designed with draft rig dimensions and when hull #1 isn’t even in the water yet. And I freely admit there was some user error going on there, too, given my inexperience as a sailor. Whatever the reasons, sailing One Life fast was hit or miss and we had a very narrow range of conditions in which we were competitive.

With 4+ active racing seasons on the original sails, and the multiple times we blew out the J3 in 2023 and early 2024, I knew I’d have to buy at least one or two new sails. After doing our best to change rig geometry and tune for the existing sails in early 2024 — which gave us some success early on — I made the call to change up the entire sail plan.

I decided to work with the local sail shop, Ballard Sails, over the national brands for a couple of reasons. First, Alex and his team have done sails for two of the four local J/99s so they had on-the-boat experience — something not possible the first time around. Second, Alex uses a lot of Contender sailcloth and the Contender-sponsored J/99 team (Disko Trooper) won the first double-handed Sydney-Hobart and were competitive in other major races around the globe. I wanted to make sure we got advice from experienced J/99 sail designers before finalizing the sail plan.

Working with Alex, and with advice from my crew, we made what I hope to be some really good choices for the new sail plan.

• Smaller main (no flat top)
• Lightweight J0 to replace the J1 for light airs
• New, larger J2
• New J3
• New, larger “A2.2” with bigger to improve downwind performance
• Abandon the furler so we could do quick jib peels and regain jib area at deck level

Most of our racing in Puget Sound is done under PHRF. The smaller main eliminated the penalty PHRF assigned for the original mainsail. This allowed us to go to a larger spinnaker and keep the same rating.

We’re still awaiting our ORC cert, but test certs suggest we’ll pick up a second or so on most rating bands except downwinds. Due to racer demand, we’ll have more ORC classes locally in 2025 — which we’re very excited with given we believe ORC more fairly rates the J/99.

The One Life season traditionally ends in early November and picks back up in late February, despite our area’s year-round racing schedule. With the new sails arriving, we’ve already been out for three practices and one race.

The early learnings are clear:

• We’re clearly faster in light airs and downwind
• We have more upside as we re-learn how to sail the boat

Any boat owner knows completely re-working the sail plan is a gamble. Corinthians (amateurs) have it the worst as we are almost completely reliant on the chosen sailmaker for ideas. Even professionals, with all their experience and money, sometimes get it wrong. I leaned hard on Alex and his team for advice (hey, I watched Bull Durham and know thinking can only hurt the ballclub) and tried to be as clear as possible about where I thought we needed help. Another advantage of using Alex’s shop is he’s an accomplished racer himself and was out on the racecourse nearly every race One Life was over the last several seasons. Folks in his shop have also raced on our boat, which I’m sure helped.

The main uses Contender ZZ-C 14 Enduro Carbon/ dyneema radial laminate with double light taffeta. It’s sized smaller than the first main. It has two reef points in it, the second of which allows it to substitute for a storm trysail in our local major races. We’ve done that reef point in tests and the main is so small everyone’s immediate reaction was, “I hope we never actually have to use that!” (Amen!)

The J0 is built with Contender ZZ03A Radial aramid laminate and probably weighs a third of the J1 it replaces. Its range is up to about 6-8 knots (not sailcloth limited). Above that the J2 is a better option given the larger sail area. The J2 is Contender ZZ-C 10 Carbon/ dyneema radial laminate with a range from the J0 up into the mid teens or so. The J3 is Contender ZZ-C 14 Carbon/ dyneema radial laminate and should be good up into the high-20s or low-30s. The A2.2 asym spinnaker (which the crew has already nicknamed “Bluey”) is Contender SK 80/60 and is meaningfully bigger than the prior A2.

Sharp eyes will notice the difference right away, especially when we’re flying the translucent J0. The J2 and J3 are even more different visually, with both sweeping the deck where the old sails were well above the deck given the furler.

In low air, we’re noticeably faster upwind and with much better point than with the old J1. This was noticeable in the early practice runs, and proved true in the STYC Iceberg Race yesterday. We were holding lanes with speed, keeping boats behind us (for good or for longer distance from the start line) to a degree we simply haven’t seen in prior seasons.

Downwind was like night and day. In certain conditions with the old sail plan, we were sometimes able to round the windward leg in very competitive positions, only to give it away to pole boats who simply sail far fewer miles or to asym boats with bigger kites. In the Iceberg Race, we caught two pole boats who rounded in front of us and legged out distance (or better VMG) from all but three of the asym boats.

Overall, for the ~13 mile race in 5-12k wind conditions (mostly 5-7k) we were third across the line. We corrected 4th in class (tough class, as you can see below) and 5th overall in the 22-boat fleet. While “just” getting 4th in class may not sound like much to celebrate, trust me. For the first time out of the gates with the new sails, and the performance (lanes and speed) we saw compared to surrounding boats, we were VERY happy.

We know we can get a better point. We also can come up with a kinder steering groove. Knowing we haven’t likely hit our peak performance with the new sails is exciting. We also haven’t used the J2 or J3 at all yet, except for briefly on the test fit sail. We also haven’t done a jib peel.

So, we have a long way to go.

But for first impressions, w00t! The Ballard Sails team looks to have done an amazing job for us!