NORTH SAILS BLOG

TRAILERS READY, BLADES SHARP DN Sailing: In Search of Perfection 📸 Gretchen Dorian Things happen fast in DN Iceboat racing—and we’re not just talking about whiplash turns, skid outs, or cheek-flapping straightaways. We’re talking about locations, too, as in where, when, and how races happen. For “soft-water” sailors (yes “hard-water” sailing is ice sailing), planning a regatta is easy: pick a venue, nail a date, and pray for wind—but for hard-water racers, finding good ice, and better yet, scoring the rare combination of slick black magic with the right amount wind is up there with blue moons and flying pigs. More often than not, finding the ideal racecourse is a task darn near impossible, but for the nomadic and diehard ice yachters of the International DN class, it’s just another part of the sport. Our case-in-point is the most recent International DN Yacht Racing Association’s National Championship. This past January, icemen and women gathered in Madison, Wisconsin, at Lake Monoma. The lake had good ice as far as the eye could see, but in the forecast was also an iceboater’s four-letter foe: snow. “We knew it was coming,” says Deb Whitehorse, longtime DN Class secretary and treasurer who’s superpower is orchestrating a full regatta relocation mission from her kitchen table. “We gambled, hoping would be on the low side, but it ended up being more.” Whitehorse and fellow DN class officers had two backups: Green Lake, about an hour and a half north of Madison, and Senachwine Lake, two hours south in Putnam County, Illinois. “Scouts” were dispatched to both locations and soon reported back: Green Lake was no good, and Senachwine was good enough. Scouts are higher-ranked DN sailors who know what to look for. 📸 Gretchen Dorian “The first thing is ice conditions,” Whitehorse says. “There can be a little snow, but not too much. We can’t have too many hazards, heaves or cracks. It has to be a large enough area for a racecourse and have access to landings for people to get their trailers to it.” Once Whitehorse gave word Senachwine was a go, the DN armada was en route from all points, and among them was DN newcomer Eric Doyle, a North Sails sailmaker of 30 years at the sun-kissed loft in San Diego. Doyle relocated to Minneapolis two years ago and promptly joined the DN scene. He hasn’t collected a garage full of stainless runners, planks, rigs, and sails yet, but it’s only a matter of time. “It is, as they say, the sport of gypsies,” says Doyle. “They’re ready to go, ready to wait, or ready to change venues and drive six hours . DN sailors will do anything for good ice conditions because, when it’s right, it is by far the most fun sailing I’ve ever done. It’s just so fast, so effortless and so cool to take this little 12-foot boat and fly 25 to 30 miles per hour upwind. Then to go 40 downwind is really incredible.” Doyle purchased his first two DNs last summer, a “woodie” from the 1960s and a “real race boat” from Rob Evans, his friend and mentor of all things iceboat racing. And like the erratic movements of DN regattas and the winter gypsies themselves, Doyle’s experience has been all things fast and unpredictable. “I’m still learning how to get around the bottom mark,” says the Star World champion and sail designer with a distinguished career in one-design racing. “At the start, first you have to sprint—and I haven’t done any all-out sprinting since high school—and then you have to figure out how and when to jump into the boat smoothly. There’s a lot of technique involved. “The bottom mark is really challenging because the boat starts to slide,” Doyle says. Whitehorse bears witness to his early attempts: “I remember watching him try to figure it out,” she says. “It was very fascinating to watch.” How so? Well, there’s an art to going around the leeward mark, she says. “He spun out a few times. You kind of have to let out the sheet when you come around, and once he was told that, he got it immediately.” “I just have to learn how to control it at the bottom, to have that smooth turn. There’s just this moment in time where, if you judge it wrong and you’re in that power zone… oh, man, it’s all on and you’re just sliding out of control. Plus, everyone who is waiting to start in the next fleet is there to watch you spin out,” says Doyle, who in his first DN National Championship appearance, finished fourth in Silver. There was a fair bit on when Doyle and 54 other competitors eventually slid their three-bladed flyers onto the snow-streaked Senachwine for the first races of the Nationals in January. As a low-ranked newcomer, Doyle was automatically assigned to the Silver fleet, where he eventually faced the likes of Karen Binder, a petite museum executive director and past college sailor from Bristol, Rhode Island, who was winning every race. Binder, who is also relatively new to the class and a quick learner, is Gold Fleet material but bum luck with conditions in qualifying races relegated her to the Silver Fleet for the Championship. “She works really hard at the technical parts,” Whitehorse says of Binder, one of several women at the top of the male-dominated class. “She’s only done it for a few years now but she works hard at it.” Binder’s partner is James Thieler, who introduced iceboating to her in Rhode Island a few years ago. Thieler is the reigning North American champion, so one can only imagine the quality debriefs and knowledge sharing over the many daylong drives in search of good ice. “Yes, it helps to have the right gear and the good people surrounding you,” Whitehorse says, “but Karen is the nut behind the tiller—she’s really good.” “Karen and I had some really good battles on the last day,” Doyle says. “It was back and forth. She was too tough to beat and sailed incredibly well. That’s one cool thing about this class: I haven’t raced in big breeze yet, but in medium conditions it’s no problem at all for the women to compete at the same level. It’s about being smart and smooth and having good equipment and taking care of it. She had it down and smoked us.” On the long drive home to Minneapolis, however, Doyle’s Senachwine experience cemented his new fascination with DN sailing. Yes, it’s unlike anything he’s ever done under sail but it’s the unpredictability of DN sailing that has his full attention. The parallels between sailing the boat and getting to the regattas is obvious to him, expressed in one rambling thought: “Everything about it is much bigger… It’s the big ninety-degree course changes to keep the boat going. It’s the excitement of stopping, where if you stop, you have to get out and push, and while you’re doing that, there are guys still going 25 miles per hour and you’re thinking ‘oh man, I’m really losing a lot right now. And then there’s the whole thing with the regatta’s location. You’re in one place and then you gotta go somewhere else, but don’t worry, it’s only six hours. Just like the sailing, it all happens so fast. It’s just so cool.” 📸 Gretchen Dorian READ MORE

DN ICEBOATING: INNOVATING FOR SPEED What does it take to go even faster than last season? For Chad Atkins and Oliver Moore, winter means fast apparent wind sailing on their DN iceboats—whenever they can find ice and wind within driving distance of Rhode Island. We recently spoke with them to learn more about a recent speed jump made by North Sails clients. Chad finished third at the 2020 DN North Americans, his first time ever in the top five—and he was just “one bad leeward mark rounding” shy of winning the whole thing. (Tuning partner James “T” Thieler won the regatta.) Oliver, who owns the Moore Brothers Company and builds iceboat masts, says it’s Chad’s tuning that makes him so fast. Chad, who worked with Mike Marshall to develop the North Sails DN inventory, says it’s those composite masts—and the sails designed to match them—that made his speed jump possible. But both agree that the most significant speed gains are made long before the regatta starts, which is why iceboaters spend so much time developing and dialing in equipment to suit style, body size, and personal preference. “Most of this stuff is happening before we hit the ice,” Chad says. “Static deflection, bend testing, the development of the mast and the sails and the plank… that’s 75-80% of the speed right there.” Oliver enjoys that part of the challenge; “It’s the most technical boat I’ve ever sailed, from a setup standpoint.” And he says Chad was the guy who got him into iceboating. “He helped set me up and got me close enough to right that I could be in the conversation. Then you can say, okay, ‘this is the effect I’m trying to achieve.’” Mast pop Mast bend characteristics are absolutely critical, and the goal is the same as soft-water sailing: to get powered up as low in the wind range as possible. The ideal look, though, is radically different; the mast is tuned to make it “pop” to leeward. That exerts downward pressure on the iceboat runners, acting (as Oliver puts it) “like a spoiler on a race car,” which makes it possible to push harder without losing control. “When the breeze builds, the first to get the mast to pop wins,” Oliver says. “So at that point you want a super-soft mast. But as the breeze keeps building, you’re trying to restrain that overbend, because you’re losing power. The way you control that is all in rig geometry: adjusting your shrouds or forestay, and moving your mast.” Once you’re in the ballpark, he says, the entire range is only a couple of turns on the shrouds. The fuselage (hull) on a DN can vary quite a bit in size and height, but both the length and stiffness of the plank (which runs athwartship and holds the shrouds) are critical. “People are measuring to make sure that when you stand on your plank, it’s bending to the exact millimeter that you think is correct,” Oliver explains. Sails are built to match each mast and plank’s combined bend characteristics, also factoring in other variables like wind strength, ice conditions, and sailor size. “Some people have four or five different sails—I’ve got two.” Tuning up before Racing Though the goal is to be in the ballpark speed-wise before showing up to sail, everyone fine-tunes rig tension and mast rake before each race. The mast step can move backward and forward on the fuselage up to six inches, Chad explains. “The farther forward it goes, that’s going to be a narrower triangle , so it’ll bend sooner. The farther back it is, it’ll be a little stiffer.” Though that sounds quite straightforward, Oliver points out that there are other considerations as well. “The farther back you have the rig, the less pressure there’ll be on the front runner. Which can be fast, but you don’t have as much control.” With so many variables, it’s hard to compare one boat’s tuning to another. “It’s very easy to get completely confused about what’s doing what,” Oliver says, “so I try and simplify as much as I can. If you want more mast bend, ease the shrouds. If you want less, shorten your shrouds.” Chad says that when he’s going the best, the boat “has some fight to it. I have to work pretty hard to get off the line, get the plank squatting and the mast bending, all the things that need to happen before you can really get going fast.” If the rig tension is too soft, he says, it affects height. “You might have the same speed, but guys are going to be pointing higher. It’s a pretty noticeable difference.” If the rig’s too stiff, “people are going to be laying down and their leeches start twisting off and they’re just—gone.” Once the boat is set up the way he wants, Chad gauges mast bend off the forestay, “to know whether to press more (shoulders back on seatback) and keep the boat lit, or ease sheet some and try to get some height upwind—or soak downwind with pressure and angle.” Between races, sailors often swap out runners or sails to better match the conditions—which can change significantly throughout the day, as rising or falling temperatures affect the ice. “You bring all your stuff out,” Oliver says, “spares and everything, dump your toolbox on the ice. That way you can change things.” Fast sails Chad uses the All Purpose Power sail that he helped Mike Marshall design, or the Max Power if the wind is light and the ice soft. Oliver uses the APP as well; “I think the APP works further up the speed range and is more versatile” than older designs, adding that there’s always a tradeoff in DN sailing between versatility and optimization. “Because you can change between races, there is the temptation to have very specialized equipment for each condition—but you still need to figure out which is the right setup. I try to keep it as versatile as possible.” What’s changed, and what hasn’t Chad has been iceboating since he was seven. Only a year or two later, “My dad just pushed me off and I went out and didn’t come back.” He laughs. “He’s like, holy crap, I gotta build a second boat.” Since then, Chad has seen the development that used to take place in basements and garages migrate to professional shops like Moore Brothers. Composite masts are more predictable than the spruce or aluminum rigs he grew up with, making DN sailing safer—and a lot more fun. “The technology is really paying off, because you can drive the boat harder and just continue to accelerate another couple of knots.” Oliver came to iceboating as an adult, and he admits that it’s a pretty crazy sport—especially when you factor in all the driving time that chasing ice requires. But it’s addictive, he says. “The racing at the top-end is insanely amazing—so close, you have one bad mark rounding and you lose the regatta. It’s everything that Laser racing is, but at 40 miles an hour.” Another thing that keeps both of these guys hooked is the continuous innovation in search of ever faster speeds. “We’ve outgrown some of the smaller ponds that we used to be able to sail on,” Chad says, “because we’re going too fast. But we’re still working to go faster. The aero package part of it’s really starting to come into play, reducing that triangle between the fuselage and the forward top part of the boom… You’re never done, and it’s always fun. That’s what I love about it.” Or, as Oliver puts it: “It’s a radical thing to be going that fast, that low to the ice, crossing ten boats! One good day of sailing every three years—that’s enough to keep you coming back.” READ MORE