THE PALMA PLAN: WHAT IT TOOK TO WIN THE J/70 WORLDS
Discover the formula behind becoming a World Champion in arguably the most competitive one design class
Rob Greenhalgh knows difficult. And we’re not talking about his hard laps around the planet, his skiff class world titles or all the grand-prix programs. We’re talking about the recent J/70 World Championship in punchy Palma with 95 teams, the most difficult one design class championship one can only hope to win.
But hope isn’t what gets you the title—it’s commitment. Just ask Doug Newhouse, the 70-year-old grandfather and now once-in-a-lifetime world champ, or Ava Wilson, the top all-female skipper, or Greenhalgh himself, the top “One-Pro” on Tim Ryan’s Vamos.
They all put in the work. And they all put their North One Design sails to work.
“For sure, it's getting harder,” Greenhalgh says, “and Palma was a particularly competitive Worlds. “The J/70 class is great because it attracts great sailors and everyone there was putting in the effort. It was a big fleet, so we really had to work harder on our speed.”
J/70 World Champion: Yonder 📸 María Muiña / Sandberg Estates J/70 Worlds
Vamos was off the pace in the first two races having only arrived at the regatta with a day to practice, but Greenhalgh and his mates recalibrated their gears as the series went on and sailed to the top of the fleet, finishing fifth overall—over a big pile of pro teams.
“It was how we were trimming the sails, to be honest. With some subtle rig changes—a turn here and a turn there—a little bit on the jib is set up, and suddenly, we go from struggling to being right on the money.”
The key, Greenhalgh adds, was “being accurate with our trimming and our rig settings. Really setting up those sails accurately, day by day and minute by minute.”
One Pro: Vamos 📸 María Muiña / Sandberg Estates J/70 Worlds
To Greenhalgh’s point, Aussie-American helmsman Jeremy Wilmot wholeheartedly agrees. Exhibit A would be the cockpit walls of Yonder, graffitied in numbers and settings and sticky with champagne after he and teammates Ted Hackney, George Peet and Newhouse won the title with 55 points after eight long and difficult races.
Hackney, Yonder’s trimmer, is a “perfectionist—by definition,” Wilmot says. “Even as one of the best trimmers in the world, it’s easy to get lost in what mode you’re in with all the different modes going on. [By the end of the regatta] our boat was like a piece of artwork—just scribbles everywhere. On each side of the boat was every single mode from every day. We could fact check straight on the boat: our jib settings, our rig, or [jib] car. If we ever got caught out a little bit in a setting where we weren't quite feeling good we could easily reset.”
For Ava Wilson’s young American five-some on Convergence, the only all-female team of the entire fleet, Palma was their first international J/70 event, so the goal was absorbing the experience and improving each day. “Nerves on the starting line,” was their biggest hurdle initially says North sail designer and trimmer/tactician Madeline Baldridge. “But finding any bit of a clear lane was really the toughest part. We did get better at handling that more. The nerves got better, Ava got more experience and we had more confidence to hang in the lanes longer. Then, the better we got off the start, the more congestion we found at the weather mark and the tighter lanes downwind—it was really difficult.”
With an unfamiliar charter boat, a mast that was wrong for their F1 mainsail, no coach and zero knowledge of the venue, there were plenty of other challenges for Convergence, but the experience gained, Baldridge says, negates the disappointing result.
All Female: Team Convergence 📸 María Muiña / Sandberg Estates J/70 Worlds
“All of the [top] guys have been racing since the class started 10 years ago and have thousands of hours on these boats,” she says. “They’re so precise with everything. The boat is pretty simple to hop on and sail, but being super aware of precise changes and being finessed with all the boat handling and the settings really pays dividends.”
Such a level of perfection comes only from time and effort, and for Wilmot and the Yonder team, their collective labor spanned three years of sailing together—what Newhouse estimates is 70 days or more of regattas, training and tuning over the past two years.
It was all part of what they called, “The Palma Plan,” hatched at a steakhouse in Annapolis, Maryland, in the spring of 2022.
“I said to everybody, ‘I don't want to go to Palma and just participate,’” Newhouse says, “I want to see what it would take to win. And that meant ramping up the number of regattas that we were doing. It meant going to Europe. It meant getting coaching. It meant summer training days with other top teams, and it meant more of a focus on all the different details and a sail development program, which we did extensively."
Long tuning sessions were Newhouse’s grind, but Wilmot, now a three-time world champion, knows great things happen when great sails are put into the hands of great trimmers.
Working with North Sails’ Mike Marshall and their tuning partners on Laura Grondin’s Dark Energy, they eventually locked in on a stock North Sails F1 mainsail (with some eventual tweaks). “Straight out of the box, it was easy to trim and easy to mode with,” Wilmot says. “It’s very rare that those two things go together.”
Female Helm: Dark Energy 📸 María Muiña / Sandberg Estates J/70 Worlds
And nothing pairs better with the F1 than a full North inventory designed in the same suite. After experimenting with different jibs, Wilmot says, “We put up the stock J2 and within 15 minutes we looked at each other and agreed that this is the best package and we just have to get good at sailing with them.
“I believe the jib really sets the mode and what you're trying to achieve. On the J/70 especially, where you can manipulate the clew position so much with the inhaler, the sheet tension and the car position. You can change it so much, and with just the smallest ease of the inhauler or the sheet, your power and your grip from the leech and the power down in the foot of the jib can change so dramatically.”
How Yonder got to the top of the podium in Palma is a story much larger than this space, but suffice to say, they stepped off their climb to the summit with a race win and a pair of sevens before their mid-series hump. As champion teams do, they turned to their all-star coach Evan Aras, yet another perfectionist of the group.
J/70 World Champion: Yonder 📸 María Muiña / Sandberg Estates J/70 Worlds
“We had a really bad day,” Wilmot says of their slide. “We didn't take enough leverage on the start line. We didn't push for the favor then and we got lazy with our shifts, you know, we started looking for that big shift.
“We came in and we were all sitting there like, ‘What do we do? How do we fix that day? How do we go out and recover?’ That day, the boat wasn't going very well. We couldn't hold lanes and we weren't getting off the start line. Evan completely reset the whole team in the next morning debrief. That reset was what gave us the outcome at the Worlds—no question about it.”
With the wheels put back on the bus, and attacking the course and fleet management more aggressively, particularly downwind, they knocked off a second in the penultimate race and a 10th in the final.
Conditions aside, the most challenging aspect for the Yonder team was the target on their transom, the curse of the yellow jersey, if you will, that they carried from Day 1. “It was very hard and very stressful to be the leader,” Newhouse says. “And the longer we kept the lead the harder it got.”
As difficult as it may have been, however, victory came according to the Palma Plan. Newhouse now knows exactly what it takes to win a J/70 world title. Commitment.
Author: Dave Reed
