Tim Hogan’s journey to Lifetime Achievement recognition by the National Sailing Hall of Fame began where many parents have found themselves: engaged in their children’s ­sailing lives and feeling richer for it. Hogan, however, was an ­accomplished sailor with an earned skepticism, and he was not impressed by everything he saw on the Southern California scene. 

What Hogan did about that became his legacy.

As Hogan puts it: “In 1989, I was 40, involved in junior sailing at the yacht club, and I had four kids. My daughter was 12, the oldest. I didn’t know much about what the kids were doing in high school, but the doublehanded sailing wasn’t very organized. I got more involved, and the more I got involved, the more I grew as a person. The better the sailing, the more the kids grew too.”

He then went deep on the mission. As his kids grew and moved on, unlike so many parents who move on, Hogan kept on keeping on. The Tim Hogan story is also the story of how high school sailing—kids representing their schools—became an American institution. His citation in the Hall of Fame concludes: “Hogan’s contributions to the sport of sailing have had a significant impact on the lives of countless young people who discovered their love for sailing under his leadership.”

So, everything is just fine?

We didn’t say that. 

Should college sailing rethink its relationship to Olympic sailing?

Read on. 

The pivotal year was 1989. Hogan says: “I walked into the office of Mike Segerblom, who was running college sailing on the West Coast, and we talked. Mike was building FJs, so we decided to start a Club FJ class. I got funding from CISA, the California International Sailing Association, and from Newport Harbor Yacht Club, my home club, and we bought six boats. Then I went to other clubs and convinced them to buy boats. We built a fleet.

“Was the Club FJ the best boat? No. But the colleges were using it, so we figured if what we were doing didn’t work out, the yacht clubs could sell the boats to colleges and get out.”

FJs are the West Coast boat to this day. Hogan continues: “Now I was involved, and in 1992, we hosted 12 teams for the Baker, the [high school] team race championships. In Newport Harbor. On Memorial Day weekend. With all the crowds of a Memorial Day Weekend. Big crowds. It was crazy. Corona del Mar High School won.”

Corona del Mar is local to Newport Harbor, and that was a turning point. Southern California would become a major player. Seven of the last 10 national-champion teams have come from Southern California. Hogan’s immediate focus remained local as he and others considered how high school sailing should work with yacht club sailing. “The Southern California Youth Yacht Racing Association was strong,” Hogan says, “but there was a void in doublehanded racing.”

The Tim Hogan story is also the story of how high school sailing—kids representing their schools—became an American institution. 

What developed was a SoCal circuit, named for Olympic medalist John Shadden, that was “complementary, not competing.”

The Shadden is still a thing going into 2024, but Hogan was just getting started. He soon went regional, taking over PCISA, the Pacific Coast ­district, and running it for 15 years. “What was fun was ­getting ­further involved with CISA,” he says. “The elder Shadden, Tom, had started this national-­level clinic in 1977, and all the Olympic hopefuls came. It was a good look. Roy Disney took a meeting and offered us $100,000 for youth sailing. But driving home, I started to wonder.”

Whoops. It’s 54 freeway miles from the media nexus of Burbank, north of Hollywood, to sail-happy Newport Beach, diagonally across Los Angeles and then across Orange County. That’s a lot of time to drive between the lines, think and wonder. Hogan says, “I called my cohort Robbie Haines and asked, ‘Was that $100K once or $100K a year?’ We checked. Hallelujah, it was every year.” 

Disney funds went to the CISA clinic, to high school sailing, to sponsoring West Coast kids at Orange Bowl regattas, and to sending a few to race in Europe because, as Hogan says: “I thought it was our 17- and 18-year-olds, high school age, who should go to international events. College sailors compete so much that a lot of them are burned out when ­summer comes along.”

Under Hogan’s ­stewardship, PCISA grew to 70 schools between 1990 and 2005, when he took over at the national level with 350 schools in the Interscholastic Sailing Association. “The challenge was to get more kids sailing,” Hogan says. “I made it a point to go to all the venues because I can’t contribute if I haven’t seen where people sail and how they sail. Every area has its own problems, its own ways. I kept going because I loved it, and I’m still at it because it’s just plain satisfying. We have 625 schools now, 6,000 kids, 400 races a year. It’s successful because it’s a team sport, it’s coed, and the silver fleet that we added ­provides a second-level ­cushion of competition.”

There you have Hogan’s lifetime achievement. Did we mention that “the goal was to get more kids sailing”? Hogan was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame on November 4, 2023. 

I spoke with him over Zoom, from San Francisco to Newport Beach, and we didn’t avoid the but-wait-a-minute ­topics that also arise. We didn’t resolve them either. Florida and Southern California sail year-round. Northern latitudes not so much. New England has a hard winter but a dense network, while the Midwest sprawls. And how does this relate to elite-level competition or college sailing? And what about the infamous Olympic disconnects?

Let’s take the elite level first. How many of those 6,000 high school kids are part of it? “Not many” is the answer. Specialized level-up training centers have grown in pockets all over the country. Hogan observes: “The Northeast has always done well in international youth sailing, in i420s, for example. I love i420s. They have all the adjustments, so you learn everything you don’t learn in an FJ or a C420.”

That automatically leaves out high school sailing or college sailing, which fit together hand in glove. The boats are the same, FJs or C420s, with rare exceptions, and the formats are nearly identical. One difference, Hogan says, is that high school sailing is growing, but “college sailing is a game of haves and have-nots, driven by the big schools.” (Hogan was the 1969 College Sailor of the Year while at USC.)

Most high school sailors aspire to sail in college. The first payoff comes when, as freshmen, they set foot on campus and already have their tribe. Before them lies an intense social experience characterized by Dean’s List sailors who study (seriously) in vans and on airplanes while fine-tuning a narrow set of superb sailing skills. The friendships within and across schools and teams—many of them renewed from high school—last a lifetime.

“We have 625 schools now, 6,000 kids, 400 races a year. It’s successful because it’s a team sport, it’s coed, and the silver fleet that we added provides a second-level cushion of competition.”

That enviable ­success, however, does not contribute to 21st-century trends in apparent-­wind sailing, and it is not engineered to support Olympic aspirations. 

Hogan says: “Olympic sailing in the US will always be challenged because, in the rest of the world, their best 18-year-olds don’t go to college. They get sponsored, probably by the national team. If they sail i420s, they go to European championships with 100-plus boats on the line. As Americans, we emphasize kids going to college straight out of high school, and college sailing can be intense. But look at college soccer. They take a month for pre-Olympic training. College sailing needs to back off and make space for Olympic-type sailing.”

OK, at that we sink a toe into a forever debate. We’re not going deep. Hogan, however, referenced Yale as a school that accommodates aspiring Olympians, and Yale is a success story in the college system. Yale coach Zack Leonard offers that he has volunteered on the Olympic Committee and has “always been supportive of sailors ­interested in the Olympic path.” He says: “I think most college coaches are. The other side of it is that college is a lot of work, and there is only so much time you can afford to be away.” 

The Cowles twins, Carmen and Emma, 2018 Rolex Yachtswomen of the Year, came out of high school in Larchmont, New York, and deferred freshman year at Yale to pursue Olympic selection for 2020. They missed, coming second. Now both are College All-Americans. Carmen was the Women’s College Sailor of the Year in 2023. They no longer sail together in a 470 because of the new mixed-gender ­requirement, but they ­haven’t given up on the Olympics. Leonard says, “You get better sailors if you let them pursue their dreams.”

Rolling that back to kids in high school, and ­discounting a few who are in it just for a PE credit, that’s a lot of young sailors pursuing their dreams. Climbing out of the silver fleet to gold? College ­acceptance? Maybe the Olympics? Few teenagers know anything of the Hogan legacy, but that was never the point. And even though Hogan says that he has a succession plan for the ISSA presidency, he doesn’t sound like a man in a hurry to pass the baton.

“The founder of Newport Harbor Yacht Club was adamant that sailing was the best possible pursuit for young people—the best thing they could do to have fun, grow, and flick that elusive switch to learning how to guide themselves as they grow. That was Al Soiland on his soapbox beginning in 1916. Frankly, I think he got it right.”

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This second Thursday in January is a perfect Florida winter morning, the sort of weather the local chamber of commerce dials up regularly—a light easterly breeze barely ruffling the shallow, pristine waters of Sarasota Bay. Along the beach that fronts the busy Sarasota Sailing Squadron, there is commotion; like every early Thursday morn from September through May, several dozen seasoned gals known as the Luffing Lassies, almost all with their diverse and accomplished working lives in the rearview mirror—and none of whom will be remotely mistaken for college kids—are rigging up their prams, 420s and Sunfish for their weekly fix of sailboat racing. This particular Thursday, however, is somewhat different: It is the running of the 24th Annual Lilly Kaighan Memorial Regatta, so named for the Lassies’ founder, the somewhat obsessed sailing lady who came up with the idea for this organized madness in the first place—some five decades ago.

My introduction to this uncharted world is a ­fellow Rhode Island snowbird like myself, on hiatus from the New England winter for a few months. Before her recent retirement, Lee Parks was the inshore director at US Sailing for 33 years, but she’s also a lifelong Sunfish racer. “I never outgrew my junior boat,” she says. “The class has a culture that’s just phenomenal.”

She’d competed in midwinter Sunfish regattas in Sarasota many times and considered it a premier venue for dinghy racing, but she never knew about the Luffing Lassies until she inherited a property nearby, was introduced to the group, and quickly became one of them.

“They envelop you,” she says.

Lee loves the weekly competition but adds: “The biggest, best thing they do is bring in new people to the sport, teach them to sail, and give them an outlet to the water. They’re so welcoming.”

And so is she, inviting me to walk the beach while she makes some introductions.

So, thanks to Lee, there I find myself, chatting up the Lassies. And, oh my, what a story they have to tell. These days, there’s much hand-wringing from cranky old men like myself about the decline in sailboat racing. But here on the Gulf coast of Florida, where geezers abound, the Luffing Lassies and their 700 counterparts in the Florida Women’s Sailing Association, comprised of nine yacht clubs from Dunedin to Venice (the Salty Sisters from St. Petersburg, the Dinghy Dames from Davis Island, the Mainsheet Mamas from Tampa, the Windlasses from Dunedin, and so on) represent nothing less than a sailing renaissance, where they’re having trouble figuring out where the new members in the ever-expanding fleets will store their boats. They admit it’s a fine problem to have.

Is there something here that the Luffing Lassies can tell us about sailboat racing that perhaps should be obvious? Like, if you form a group that’s open, accommodating, friendly and supportive, and you invite just about anyone sharing the same mindset who wants to learn and challenge themselves, you can come up with something cool, unique and wonderful, where people dive in and thrive? As in, if you build it, they will come? The Lassies, I discover, in both their long history and unrivaled passion for sailing, have quite a bit to say about it all.

Ursula Olson has been there from the beginning, before the Luffing Lassies taught and introduced more than 500 women to the sport, back when it was originally known as the Sarasota Sailing and Sinking Society. “We used to capsize quite a bit,” she confesses.

Olson, who tells me she’s been a Lassie for 44 of the 50 years they’ve been in existence, says the organization was launched when Kaighan, a recent arrival from Tampa where she’d started a similar group, approached a handful of women about doing the same thing in Sarasota.

“She had two Clearwater Prams (a close cousin to the Opti) and said she had access to three more, so there were five boats,” Olson says. “Learning to sail was very attractive to many, including myself. The message always was: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll help you.’ She was absolutely the most accommodating, positive person. And she attracted those kinds of people. Some come and go quickly because they don’t want to mess up their hair or their fingernails. But that’s not who we are. There are about 90 Lassies today, ranging in age from their 30s to their 90s. Our 90-year-old still sails, not racing, but on a Hobie Wave we have for fun sailing. Everybody feels like they belong. It’s empowering. I’d say 95 percent of my friends are from this group. I’ve definitely found my tribe.”

That tribe, I soon learn, is an accomplished one, whose previous occupations include airline pilots, lawyers, doctors, even a federal judge. Then there’s Linda Schwartz, who joined the Lassies in 2009 after retiring to Sarasota following a career in the Army as a chief warrant officer.

“I was working out in the gym when somebody asked if I was interested in joining a women’s sailing group,” she says. “Yes, I was! I knew immediately when I walked in that this was for me. This isn’t mahjong; we’re a pretty Type A bunch. Actually, we’re a sisterhood. You put us all together, and we’re a force to be reckoned with.”

Schwartz, a former FWSA president with a solid mechanical background running Army maintenance units, has earned the nickname “Miss MacGyver.” She oversees the platoon of “Maintenance Mamas” who work on the 15 Sunfish the Lassies keep for training newcomers in the offseason summer months when they aren’t actively racing. Once the newbies get a season of racing under their belts, they generally procure their own boats, and the cycle repeats itself.

“We have a long-term planning committee now because we’ve gotten so big and are growing so much,” Schwartz says. “How do we manage it? We’re outgrowing the area we have at the Squadron. Our group has always been about word of mouth. The locals always knew. But now we’re getting more publicity, which means more women. It gets complicated.”

Once everybody is rigged and ready after a skipper’s meeting, which commences with laughter, stretching and calisthenics, I hop aboard the safety boat to observe the on-the-water action with a pair of the so-called “Starboard Studs” (everyone gets a nickname), the male volunteers from the Squadron who man the race committee and mark boats. “When the whole #metoo thing happened, they thought about changing our name,” says studly Pete Buros, one of the safety officers. “Instead, they gave us shirts with the name on it. They’re fun to wear in bars.” Buros intimates that they are excellent conversation-starters.

Before heading out, Lorri Kaighan—the daughter-in-law of founder Lilly, who succumbed to breast cancer at far too young an age—hands me a copy of the day’s schedule, which reads:

“The Lilly Kaighan Memorial Regatta is a special day for all Luffing Lassies. It celebrates its founder by having its members participate in a typical day of competition by racing in Clearwater Prams, a Sunfish or a 420. (The Prams and 420s had three boats each; with 30 boats, the Sunfish has become the group’s predominant class.) And the course is the original one that has been sailed by the Lassies for over 45 years: Modified Olympic (for the Sunfish and 420s) and Triangle for the Pram. It is a day filled with camaraderie, good competition, special trophies, and a luncheon to celebrate the day. The perpetual trophies were handmade by Lilly’s oldest son, Jim Kaighan, who resides in Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas. Lorri Kaighan made the individual trophies this year. And they were definitely made with a lot of love.”

With that, the fun begins.

Three races unfold, the first two in a light southeasterly, the third in a building westerly as the sea breeze kicks in. There is a disparity in prowess and efficiency on the starting line. A handful of competitors several rows deep seem not to have gotten the memo that there’d be racing today, which I realize is utterly beside the point. “Everyone who competes is a winner” is somewhat of a cliché, of course, but in this event, it is absolutely true. There are some midfleet clusters at the top mark, and some obvious fouls committed by the tail-enders, but not a raised voice to be heard. It’s all so…conversational and punctuated with laughter, so totally refreshing.

All that said, the sailing is crisp, clean and very, very competitive at the front of the busy Sunfish fleet. There is also a clear, dominant competitor, a mere wisp of a woman on a Sunfish called Wild Child named Lisa Brown Ehrhart, who runs away with the Memorial Regatta with three straight bullets.

Like every Lassie, it seems, Ehrhart has a unique background. Originally from the Virgin Islands, where her family ran a yacht-management business, for years she worked as a professional captain, delivering boats and skippering charters. Though she never raced sailboats in the islands, she says: “I had the gift of growing up on the water. There are many people who are better than me in terms of tactics, the chess game. But I do understand the water, as a surfer and windsurfer, and maybe that’s the only piece I have that’s a little different.”

When she moved to Florida so her kids could attend high school, she immersed herself in dinghy racing for the first time. “I needed to get on the water and sail, and I discovered the Lassies,” she says. “It was very humbling to start off with. But I’ve grown to love it. It’s the culture that’s so amazing. It’s like a Caribbean vibe, so relaxed.”

At 5 feet and 100 pounds, Ehrhart says the regatta’s two early light-air races played perfectly to her strengths. And she credits professional sailing coach Mike Ingham—whose wife, Delia, is a Lassie and recently organized a new Sunfish fleet at the Sailing Squadron—with “truly helping me develop my newly acquired racing skills.”

But, like every other Lassie I speak with, it is her fellow Luffing mates that really make the difference. “There are some really talented, amazing women here,” she says. “We learn from each other. We’re just really passionate about being here and sailing together.”

So, what to make of all this? It’s pretty simple. In these divisive days, when we fret about politics and the economy and every other bloody thing, at least one thing in this madcap, crazy world of ours is certain: The Lassies will be back at it next Thursday, bright and early.

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“Ease, hike, trim.” Say what? This a ­common phrase that’s been around for a long time, and one that has always bothered me. I understand that the point of this age-old piece of advice is to keep the boat flat and humming along through gust, but taking it literally, it’s misleading. If the goal is to go fast, I think a rewording is in order to make the technique more accurate through a range of conditions. Hear me out.

It’s safe to assume that the phrase lays out a sequence of events meant to handle an upwind puff: 1) ease the sails; 2) hike the boat flat; 3) trim the sails back in. The specific condition this phrase refers to is hazy to me. By telling us to “hike,” is it implied that we are not yet hiking but on the edge? Close to hiking? Are we already hiking but not all the way yet? I’m not sure, but instead of worrying too much about that, let’s just go through the wind ranges and decide the best thing to do in a puff for each scenario.

Light Wind

I define light wind as ­conditions when you’re well below hull speed and your team is sitting inboard. In this condition, you keep the boat level by moving body weight in and out, and you are trimming to maintain flow over the sails. A puff comes along, and the proper response is to move your body weight to windward to keep the proper heel. Leeches on both sails will blow open a bit with the new pressure. You will need to trim them back in; but not too quickly—the timing is important. Your first response is to move your body weight gently to windward. Next, head up a bit as your apparent wind increases and shifts aft while trimming just enough to match your new steering angle. The order of events should be: 1) weight to windward; 2) trim in as you head up. The light-wind equivalent phrase to “ease, hike, trim” would be “weight up, point, trim.”

Medium Wind

In this wind range, you’re getting close to hull speed and your weight is to windward. You’re either sitting on the rail, or at a gentle hike. You’re watching your leech telltales on both sails to trim to optimal flow. The ­forward crew counts down, “puff in 3, 2, 1.”

The flatter the sea state, the more I feather to depower; the wavier it is, the more I ease the main to depower.

At right around “1,” your team hikes (or hikes a little harder, if you already are) to keep the boat from heeling as the puff hits. The leeches will blow open, so you will have to trim in to keep optimal flow, and you will want to head up as the apparent wind moves aft. The order of events should be: 1) hike; 2) trim in as you head up. In other words: “hike, point, trim.”

Medium to Heavy-Air Transition

Here, you’re already hiked, and a puff will transition you to overpowered. This is a sweet condition to sail in—my favorite. A lot goes on to maximize your acceleration in this puff, so, “puff in 3, 2, 1, puff” sets a bunch of things in motion. At around “3″ or “2,” to get ahead of the curve, any significant depower controls come on, such as the backstay, if you have one. I have sailed on boats where the vang rams the boom into the mast, bending it, and in catamarans where an 8-to-1 cunningham compression bends the mast. Whatever the major depowering tool on your boat is, now is your time to use it. At about “1,” you’d better be hiking harder, or you are already too late. At the front edge of the puff, the leech will blow open, but unlike the lighter winds, this is good because it helps auto-depower, and you will likely need to ease more to balance the boat, depending on how big the puff is. As in lighter winds, you will head up, following the apparent wind’s aft shift, and you might even want to head up more to feather the sails.

The order of events goes like this:

1. Pull on depower controls
2. Hike full (if you are not already)
3. Ease (if necessary)
4. Head up and re-trim.

This one is a ­mouthful: “controls, hike, ease, point, trim.”

Overpowered Conditions

You’re hiking as hard as possible while feathering and playing the sheets to keep the boat flat. I don’t believe in changing how hard we hike by hiking extra hard in a puff because that is not sustainable. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so I would rather a steady 80 percent effort over a long day. Your primary depower tools are already at max, so that’s easy—just leave them where they are. With that, when a puff hits, there are only sheets and steering left to keep the boat flat. It’s always a combination of both, but the question is how much of each. The flatter the sea state, the more I feather to depower; the wavier it is, the more I ease the main to depower. Even when it’s flat and the priority is to steer, easing the mainsheet is the quickest way to spill power as the front edge of a puff hits, so most often, I ease on “2″ or “1″ of the puff countdown. The order here is: 1) ease; 2) head up and re-trim. In our phraseology, that would be: “ease, point, trim.”

Though it does not match the way I would respond to a puff in any of these conditions. I do think that the ol’ “ease, hike, trim” serves as an ­effective reminder of the importance to keep the boat flat, and for that I give it credit. There are two significant things that rub me wrong, however. The first is that if you’re easing and not hiked full, you are giving away precious leverage. I can think of no condition where it is better to ease before you hike. If you are ­overpowered, you should already be fully hiked, whether it’s 15 knots or 30 knots, so it does not work there either.

The second rub is that the phrase implies reaction instead of getting ahead of the puff. Ease before hike is what one would do if blindsided by a gust. Someone should be looking and calling that puff.

The closest condition I think “ease, hike, trim” refers to is in the medium-to-heavy transition condition. Clearly “controls, hike, ease, point, trim” doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it’s a far more accurate description of what’s best to do. Get used to saying it if you want to go fast.

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Frostbite racing in the Northeast has been going on for ages, especially in Wickford Harbor, Rhode Island, where the Sea Dogs have romped every Sunday since the 1960s. Chuck Allen, Wickford YC’s past commodore, had been raving to me about them, so I recently texted him on a whim and asked if there was spare boat I could race with them for a day. “Yes,” he replied. “First race is at 1, but people start showing up at noon.”

Anxious to rig, source a few pointers, and get a handle on the boat before the first race, I pull into Wickford YC’s clamshell parking lot early on a Sunday morning in January. The club is deserted, so I mosey down to the docks to inspect rows of overturned dinghies. I assume them to be Sea Dogs, and upside down, they look simple enough.

Promptly at noon, the first sailor arrives, jumps out of his BMW, and heads straight to his craft. It’s Wickford YC Commodore Gordon Fletcher, a relative newcomer to the Sea Dog fleet. I introduce myself and help him flip his boat, which is when I begin to learn no Sea Dogs are alike. Fletcher explains how his is heavily modified, with watertight tanks and cut-out transom, then points out a few shiny new Sea Dogs farther down the dock.

Allen eventually pulls into the lot and hops out of his silver Ford Ranger. It’s 30 degrees and he’s in a thin, long-sleeve shirt, sweatpants, socks and sandals: the attire of a frostbite nut job. He’s a sailmaker with North Sails, a Sea Dog “world champion,” and the energy fueling Wickford’s Sea Dog resurgence. He introduces me to a few others, including young newcomer Ross Ween.

“He came once,” Allen says as he turns over his own boat, “and now he’s totally into it.”

Allen’s Sea Dog is nothing like the sparkling new fleet-owned boat sitting inside the club awaiting its hardware. Ugly would be a compliment, but his Dog is stiff — and fast. Whether it would pass class measurement is debatable, but it doesn’t matter because there are no hard-and-fast rules anyway. His also has tanks, which he explains is a “game changer” in Sea Dog sailing.

“They make the boat a lot safer and easier to sail,” Allen says. “With the old way, you’re either sitting on the hard rail or inside the boat on your knees.”

Alongside his boat are a few relics. Judging by their appearance, some of them might have been around when the Sea Dog was first commissioned by frostbite sailors at Sachem’s Head YC, in Guilford, Connecticut. Early Dogs were built by Skimmar in Greenwich, Conn., (for $425) which claimed the pudgy 9-foot, 125-pounder could be sailed safely in winds up to 25 knots, and would outperform any similar-size dinghy. They also claimed it to be unusually seaworthy — a claim that’s easy to refute.

“If you capsize one of the older boats,” I’m told, “Don’t fight it. Just go swimming, let it sink, and wait for the race committee to come pull it out.” Later in the day, I will witness this phenomenon. Ween, in a borrowed old boat, submarines on a downwind leg, filling the boat to its gunwales. The race committee retrieves his bowline, which is then tied to a sprit extended off the top of a mast on the race committee boat. They pull the bow skyward and the boat dangles in the air as seawater pours out. When it’s empty, Ween is back in action and the racing resumes.

RELATED: Frostbite Freedom

This delay is a chilling ­showstopper, which is why new and many retrofitted Sea Dogs have watertight tanks, introduced a few years ago. The new boats, which also have ­beautiful glass blades, Dwyer spars and quality hardware, go for about $3,500, and the builder (Jibe Tech), I’m told, has been stamping them out. Growth in Wickford and Sachem’s Harbor, Allen says, is a testament to their efforts to update the boat for the better. Plus, more sailors are showing up each week and the racing is more competitive than before.

Not everyone’s completely onboard with the new breed, however. Skip Whyte is a past Sea Dog world champion, and his father was a fleet founder, but he’s turned off by the rampant modifications of the past few years. It’s a story heard often with reborn one-design fleets: a few good sailors start messing with old boats with good intentions, but the old dogs soon become obsolete.

“The new boats are easier to sail and self-rescuing, which is all good,” Whyte says. “But they’ll never be faster than the custom boats.”

He may be the grumpy minority, but he has a point: New boats will grow the fleet, but custom Sea Dogs will continue to win. Greg Phipps, who led the evolution, says the custom boats are consistent with the spirit of class rules: to keep racing fair, safe and fun, and promote growth. “Ironically, the old dogs are the ones that were saved from the scrap heap and are winning for now,” he says, “but that will change when the fleet’s better sailors start sailing the new boats.”

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International 505 sailors love big breeze. The enduring image of the high-performance dinghy is blasting downwind under spinnaker in 25 knot winds, so the class world championship should be held in a venue known for delivering heavy air, right? After all, a true and worthy 505 champion should be able to handle those types of conditions, right?

Or is all that a myth?

It is obvious from the selection of Annapolis, Maryland, with its notoriously fickle conditions, as site of the 2017 SAP 505 World Championship, that there are numerous other factors involved. Quality race-committee personnel, a suitable yacht club, an army of volunteers, and a location that is fun to visit are just as ­important as reliable breeze.

“People want to do Worlds at places that are fun to vacation,” says Carl Smit, an Annapolis resident and past world champion. “That’s why they picked Kingston, Barbados and Hamilton Island, Australia.”

Some of the most renowned heavy-air ­venues in the world have hosted 505 Worlds with Santa Cruz and San Francisco — a pair of class hotbeds — topping the list within the United States. According to several 505 veterans, Durban, South Africa, is among the windiest places the class has ever gone.

The majority of locations that have hosted the 505 World Championship, however, are more akin to Annapolis, unpredictable and just as apt to produce no wind as strong wind. Even Fremantle, Australia, famous for its reliable sea breeze, did not live up to its reputation when the 505 Worlds were held there in 2002.

“It seems like every venue that we go to, the locals say, ‘It’s never like this.’ Unless you go somewhere extremely predictable,” says Ali Meller, a lifelong 505 sailor and former class officer, “like Santa Cruz in midsummer or San Francisco in fall, you are going to get a mix.”

There are some teams at the top of the class that crave a world championship with multiple days of 20-plus knot winds. Mike Martin, who has won world titles as a skipper with Jeff Nelson (2009) and Adam Lowry (2016) is a heavy-air specialist. Mike Holt and Carl Smit, who teamed up to capture the 2015 crown, also tend to do well in a blow.

“I think there is a cult of us that always looks for locations with windy conditions,” said Smit, an Annapolis resident who previously lived in northern California and routinely raced on San Francisco Bay. “Mike and I love heavy air, but we didn’t manage to win worlds until we got better in light air. For a long time, we were super-fast in a breeze and not very competitive in the lighter stuff.”

Truth be told, the majority of 505 sailors do not want to be battered for an entire week. For most, the time and expense involved with ­traveling to the world championship is not worth the risk of suffering a catastrophic boat breakdown a day or two into the regatta.

“I think the fleet, as a whole, wants to sail in a venue that won’t break the boat and won’t leave you so beat up that at the end of day you can’t enjoy dinner and drinks,” Smit says.

The 2017 SAP 505 World Championship is scheduled for late September in Annapolis and will be co-hosted by Severn Sailing ­Association and Eastport YC. It marks the first time 505 Worlds has been held on the East Coast since 1988 when Hyannis, ­Massachusetts, hosted.

That was the first 505 Worlds for Jesse ­Falsone and got him thinking that ­Annapolis would be an ideal host city the next time the class decided to come to the East Coast. ­Falsone, who was runner-up at the 2005 Worlds as crew for Martin, never imagined it would take almost two decades to come to fruition.

Falsone, who has raced 505s out of West River Sailing Club and Severn Sailing ­Association, got serious about putting together a formal bid on behalf of Annapolis in 2013. SSA had developed a solid 505 fleet and thus ­provided the core group of volunteers needed to serve on the organizing committee.

“I thought all the people and infrastructure was in place for Annapolis to conduct a top-notch world championship,” says Falsone, who is serving as regatta chairman. “­Sailing-wise, I think we’ll probably get a full range of ­conditions, which will reward versatility. You cannot be a one-trick pony and expect to win in ­Annapolis.”

In considering East Coast locales, the ­American section of the International 505 class also looked closely at Miami and Newport. However, neither city had enough active 505 sailors to spearhead the organization.

New York’s American YC made a spirited effort to host the 2013 505 World Championship and thought it had the bid locked up, but at the last minute, the class decided to go to Barbados instead. Spurned and disappointed, the Long Island fleet subsequently died out.

“For fleet-development purposes, I think it’s important for the class to mix it up when awarding Worlds,” Smit says.

Annapolis didn’t become known as one of the world’s premier sailboat-racing destinations for nothing. The Chesapeake Bay can certainly deliver a big blow in late September, but the nature of this particular body of water is that it can just as easily be light and shifty. Smit admits he’s heard some grumbling, mostly from the California sailors, about holding a 505 Worlds in Annapolis.

“It’s very polarized,” says Smit. “There are a lot of heavy-air gurus that joke about scheduling a regatta at a windy venue at the same time. There are a lot of other people who are super-excited about coming here. They know there will be good racing, challenging racing and fair racing.”

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