Coop's Corner

If it’s fall in an Olympic Quadrennial year, it must be time for the Vendée Globe: this edition started Sunday, November 8. First held in 1989, the Vendée Globe was the brainchild of, who else, a French guy named Phillipe Jeantot. Jeantot had won the BOC Challenge, twice, in the 60-foot class. Naturally, there had to be something harder than spending six months sailing around the world by yourself with only four stops. Thus, begat the Vendée Globe….

Ten for two is an appalling cricket score. It translates to the batting team scoring only ten runs, at the cost of two wickets. But we’re not here to talk cricket. We are here to talk sailing. Shorthanded sailing, in fact. I preface the following with this advice: “Shorthanded” is NOT a number; just one or two people aboard. Rather is it is the number of persons aboard relative to the size and complexity of the yacht….

By Joe Cooper Good morning class. This month’s question: Who has seen a sail plan of their boat? OK, there are sail plans of a sort on the brochure on the builder’s website. You can find them elsewhere in the internet. Some of the sporting sailors may well have a trophy incorporating a profile of their boat presented for some successes. But, no, I mean a real live, honest to goodness paper drawing, say a meter square…

I got a call from a mate/customer of mine recently asking if we could do a quick repair on the kite. I said, “Sure, what’s the matter, what are we talking about, a two-inch tear from a naked cotter pin?” “Well, no.” There was a rather sheepish pause, so I asked, “So what you go fishing with it? Ya wanna help me out here? We have a lot on, and I need to give the guys some…

By Joe Cooper Facebook is many things to many people, from the keeping up with Grandma and the grandkids to yelling back at bot-driven political memes. During this morning’s coffee-lubricated graze through my various FB pages (Yeah, I know I’m looking for the 12-step program) in a full DeLorean moment, I came hard aground against a post from a fella I used to work with. Cue the Flux Capacitor and file the following under ‘Little known details…

I usually spend a lot of time (most, my wife Jill would say) thinking about sailing. Of late I have been thinking about sailing even more. Life lessons, funny stories, dumb moves and everything in between. As I tell my high school sailors, give me a sentence and I can give you a sailing story. In the November/December 2017 Coop’s Corner (“Figure It Eight”; windcheckmagazine.com/article/figure_it_eight/), Randall Reeves, who would soon become the first person to complete a…

By Joe Cooper I’m going to start a book. No, not that sort. Think distance race or delivery back from somewhere type of book…the Belmont type of book. The kick in a dollar, write down what time you will finish and the person with the time estimate closest to the actual finish time takes the kitty kind of book. In this case, send your dollars to me, after putting them in the microwave for two minutes. Include…

Apart from the actual sailing of the boat, one of the top three things we love about sailing is the characters we meet, the Kapers we get up to and the stories they spawn, like for instance this beauty. Since November of 1975, I had been sailing Finns. How that happened is its own story but, anyway in the late winter of 1976 there was in Sydney a strike by the truck drivers who delivered gas to…

If you number yourselves amongst the U.S. sailors who watch the start of the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race on TV, you will be familiar with the topography, the spectacular scenery, of Sydney Heads. While they are certainly dramatic, they are not the only such highlights of suburban Sydney geography. Some 30 miles north of ‘the heads’ lies the entrance to Broken Bay. This circular indent is the exit for several rivers and creeks, flowing from the…

By Joe Cooper Jill and I travelled to New York City before the holidays to visit with a mate of ours from Oz. Nina is the younger daughter of one of my great mentors, Tony James, the Finn sailor I wrote about a while back (www.windcheckmagazine.com/article/the_finn_dinghy_the_olympic_singlehander/), and she was in town for business. We met at the Museum of Modern Art and spent an hour wandering the museum’s fascinating galleries and catching up. We had Good Gossip…