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Aboard the Blue Yankee
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Today, Towse employs a full-time captain, America's Cup veteran Jamie Boeckel, and works with some of the world's top professional sailors-men like Benjamin and Warden-Owen, America's Cup-winning navigator Peter Isler, and Ross Field, a two-time winner of the Whitbread Round the World Race. The Blue Yankee crew also includes gifted amateur sailors, many of whom have been sailing with Towse for 20 years.

Sailing on a racing yacht is no pleasure cruise. The cabin is stripped of cruising comforts: no galley or shower or bunks, just a small head, or toilet compartment. To save weight, all food is freeze dried. Crew members bring a minimum of clothing and gear and sleep in hammocks or on top of sailbags. By the race's end, the cabin smells "pretty ripe" and so do the men. They are also exhausted. Towse and his crew members have spent up to 20 hours at a stretch clipped into harnesses and riding the rail to balance the boat in a stiff wind.

Blue Yankee is a low-slung boat-long and flat, narrow and light-which cuts down on water and wind resistance and helps it keep pace with much larger boats. (Generally speaking, length at the waterline is the major factor determining how fast a boat will go.) The boat was designed for an Australian, who won many offshore races with her, mostly in the Pacific. "Every once in a while you get a lucky boat that's a synthesis of several design elements," Benjamin says. "Blue Yankee is one of those."

Towse bought this Blue Yankee in 1999, when he decided to concentrate on offshore distance racing, which required a faster boat than the 47-foot sloop he owned at the time. He had to reconfigure the new boat for racing off the New England coast, where winds are lighter and boats frequently sail upwind. Working with Benjamin, he took some 2,500 pounds of ballast out of the bilge. He replaced the mast with one that's taller (99 feet high) and more flexible, and the spinnaker pole with one that's 2.5 feet longer. Towse also replaced the sails with a new set-two mainsails, five spinnakers, four overlapping jibs and five nonoverlapping jibs.

Two days before the Vineyard Race, Towse, Benjamin and tactician Owens begin checking weather forecasts and tide charts and talking strategy. "We want to diminish the effect of the tide in the beginning when it will be running against us," Towse says. "Then as it turns and diminishes, we want to work our way north, where we expect a stronger breeze and a wind change." That would allow Blue Yankee to leave the Sound on a reach, not running dead downwind-the slowest point of sail.

Thursday dawns bright and clear. By afternoon Blue Yankee is out on the Sound, and the crew is practicing every maneuver that might be required during the race. There have been subtle changes to the rigging since the last time some of the crew members were on board, and they must be able to execute each maneuver swiftly and surely, even in the dark.

On a long-distance race in the North Atlantic, hundreds of miles from the nearest port, there is little room for error. Two years ago on a 1,018-mile voyage from Key West to Baltimore, Towse and his crew faced gale-force winds gusting up to 55 miles per hour and waves cresting 20 to 25 feet high. The temperature dropped from the 90s to the 50s in 24 hours. The waves rushed over the deck from bow to stern as the boat pitched down one wave and through the next. Two yachts in that race lost their masts and limped into port in the Carolinas.

At one point, 36 hours into the race, Blue Yankee submarined under a wave and the impact ripped off the forward hatch. Seawater poured into the cabin. Some of the sailors began pumping as the boat pitched and tossed. With four feet of water rushing over the deck, other crew members in safety harnesses put together a makeshift patch and screwed the pieces of the hatch to the deck with as much caulk and sealant as they could slather on.

The wind continued to push Blue Yankee on at speeds up to 26.5 knots. At times the 38,000-pound boat was planing. "Fourteen knots is very comfortable on this boat," Benjamin says. "At 16 to 17, things start to get a little sketchy-it puts a load on everything. At 20 knots, things start to break. When you're going that fast with 17 guys on board, you're relying on everyone to do their job." The gale helped Blue Yankee enter Baltimore Harbor just 95 hours after she left Key West, establishing a race record that still stands.

On the morning of the Vineyard Race, Towse checks the global-positioning system and loads tide information into a laptop computer. The computer already contains data on Blue Yankee's performance under any combination of weather and current conditions. Towse speaks by phone with a meteorologist and goes over the latest faxed weather maps with Warden-Owen and Benjamin. The men are confident they have a strategy that should keep the boat moving at peak speed. All that remains is to put that strategy into play. Because she is larger than most of the other boats in the race, Blue Yankee is among the last to start, two and a half hours after the first boats set sail. There are 11 classes of boats competing in two divisions. Only three boats are racing in Blue Yankee's class, including the 60-foot Carrera, which Towse identifies as the boat to beat. Carrera and Blue Yankee have been battling all season and are virtually tied in the contest for the Northern Ocean Racing Trophy, which is awarded to the yacht with the best performance in three of four blue-water qualifying races. The Vineyard Race will determine the winner.

The three boats tack and jibe as they jockey for position. As the starting gun booms, Benjamin drives Blue Yankee first over the starting line with Carrera a short distance behind. Now he must guide Blue Yankee through the fleet of 70 smaller boats, whose sails might interfere with the wind. "It's like a bird's wing in flight," Benjamin says. "You have to choose the right course to prevent stalls."

Benjamin keeps an eye on the instruments that display wind speed, wind direction, wind angle and boat speed, among others, but he also relies on experience and instinct, checking the mainsail for signs of luffing (shaking that means the boat is pointed too close to the wind or the sail is not properly trimmed), watching for the rapid line of crinkled water that signals a gust of wind. "Driving a sailboat is a lot like being a great hitter," Towse says. "You've got to have good eyes and a computer in your head to measure time, speed, distance. To win you have to interpret the weather better than anyone else and take advantage of opportunities better than anyone else."

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