Harley Soltes
On land, Dave Marod (in yellow jacket with crew member Kris Lea) drives a Hummer; on water, he commands a sea-going "Ferrari" named Minor Threat that competes with other high-end sailboats on Puget Sound.
Harley Soltes
On land, Dave Marod (in yellow jacket with crew member Kris Lea) drives a Hummer; on water, he commands a sea-going "Ferrari" named Minor Threat that competes with other high-end sailboats on Puget Sound.
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The Luff, the Leech, and the Clew
An admittedly incomplete linguistic primer for wanna-be sailors.
By John Knapp and Mike Seely
Handicap Racing: Allows boats of different designs to compete against one another. Most common system is PHRF (Pacific Handicap Racing Fleet), which relies on observed performance and speed potential when calculating a given boat's rating.
One-Design Racing: Scratch system where boats of identical design compete against each other without handicap, as in elite events such as the Olympics or America's Cup.
Hull: The frame or body of a ship.
Knots: Boat speed equivalent of miles per hour. 100 knots = 115.2 mph.
Bow or Bowman: Crew member on the front of the boat who, among other duties, raises and lowers jibs and spinnakers as well as handling the spinnaker pole on gybes.
Mast: Crew member responsible for pulling sails up and helping the bow.
Pit: Crew member in the cockpit who raises and lowers halyards as well as adjusting control lines.
Trimmers: Crew members who adjust jibs and spinnakers to proper angles with wind so as to maximize speed.
Helm or Helmsman: Crew member who steers the boat.
Tactician: Crew member responsible for tactical positioning of the boat during a race.
Marks: Temporary, anchored, inflated markers used during buoy races.
Gybing: Turning the boat from one side of the wind to the other while sailing downwind.
Tacking: Turning the boat from one side of the wind to the other while sailing upwind.
Clear Air: Position that results from not being in the wind shadow of another boat.
Disturbed Air: The opposite of clear air, wherein positioning is turbulent and hinders power of sails.
Dirty Air: Positioning one's boat upwind of another's to put them in one's wind shadow.
Tacking Duel: A showdown that occurs between two boats trying to put one another in dirty air.
Sail Trim: Proper shaping and angle adjusting of sails.
Halyard: Tension-based device used to raise and lower sails.
Sheets: Line that adjusts sail angle in and out, as in "ease the sheet."
Boom Vang: Device that pulls down on the mainsail boom.
Outhaul: Device that pulls out on the back corner of the mainsail.
Cunningham: Device that pulls down on the front edge of the mainsail.
Luffing: Undesirable fluttering of sails.
Draft: The curvature of the sail one observes from below.
Jib: A triangular fore-and-aft sail.
Aft: Situated at or toward the stern or tail of a boat.
Head: The top corner of a sail.
Tack: The front corner of a sail.
Clew: The back corner of a sail.
Luff: The front edge of a sail.
Leech: The aft edge of a sail.
Foot: The bottom edge of a sail.
Sloop: 1. Traditional type of sailboat with one mast, a mainsail, a jib, and a spinnaker. 2. Popular Ballard tavern/workaday yacht club that serves 34-ounce tankards of beer.
Bow Sprit: Nontraditional boats that utilize an asymmetrical spinnaker and a retractable pole extending forward from the bow.
PFDs: Personal flotation devices, aka life jackets.
OPBs: Other people's boats.
Swiftsure: Famously grueling Memorial Day weekend distance race that originates in Victoria, B.C.
Mount Gay: 1. Leading brand of rum among sailors. 2. Slang term referring to the grassy plateau that separates Dave Marod's living quarters from Puget Sound.
Meyer's Rum: A close second to Mount Gay as the rum of choice among sailors.
John Knapp serves as tactician for Minor Threat, the 35-foot One Design sailboat featured in the accompanying story.
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With cigarette in hand and a bottle of Gatorade pressed against his crotch, Dave Marod squeezes his enormous yellow Hummer into a parking slip on Shilshole Bay Marina's L-Dock at 7:45 on a cold Saturday morning in early March.
A trifle hungover, wearing dark shades, rubber overalls, a black fleece vest, and brand-new deck boots, the 37-year-old Marod exits the Hummer and laughs about what a favored target his rig has become for eco-conscious vandals who slap stickers on his bumpers. Best one to date: "I'm Changing the Environment. Ask Me How."
Having descended the pier to slip 30, Marod loads a passel of gear onto his 35-foot Carroll Marine One Design sailboat, a premiere racing yacht that Marod scooped up for a cool $80,000 late last year. Greg Barckert was there when Marod started making waves about buying the boat during Whidbey Island Race Week last summer.
"We were up all night drinking and playing Grateful Dead covers when he mentioned the 1D 35-footer," recalls Barckert. "That boat is like a Ferrari."
"Dave's got a really hot boat—people are looking to sail on it," says Barckert's friend and fellow sailor, Rachelle O'Haleck, who describes Race Week as "basically a five-day bender."
When Marod made good on his drunken boast and announced plans to sail a 25-race campaign around the Sound, trimmers Barckert and O'Haleck signed up for two of nine available spots aboard the nautical Ferrari, named in honor of the seminal punk band Minor Threat.
Within 20 minutes of Marod's arrival, the whole crew is present and prepped to shove off. All of these sailors smoke, save tactician John Knapp, Minor Threat's resident romanticist.
"Sailing is so many things," says Knapp, a self-employed technology entrepreneur who sports a soul patch underneath his lower lip. "It's going out with your girlfriend on a Sunday morning with a couple croissants. It's dropping anchor in a beautiful lagoon in the South Pacific. Or it's going like hell at 20 knots."
But racing isn't always romantic. "If you want to know what it's like to sail competitively," says crew member Tim Cleary, "stand in a cold shower for four hours and tear up $20 bills."
Today, during this 27-mile race to Possession Point on the southern tip of Whidbey Island and back—the second in the Corinthian Yacht Club–sponsored Center Sound Series—the crew is in go-like-hell mode, as helmsman Marod didn't drop all that dime to waste his Ferrari on a bunch of pleasure cruisers.
"Some of my friends like the solitude and being one with the ocean," explains Marod. "All that shit's fine, but I just want to beat the other guy and his expensive boat."
With approximately 100 boats racing toward the lone turnabout today, Marod is competing in a top-tier class against just eight other vessels that are more or less in his "Ferrari" class. Still, there are enough variances for Corinthian officials to rank the boats according to the Pacific Handicap Racing Fleet (PHRF) system, a highly subjective standard that relies heavily on "observed performance" and "speed potential" rather than hard mathematical data.
"The bad thing is, when you cross the finish line, you don't know how you did," says Marod, alluding to the fact that a boat in his class that finishes behind him on a scratch basis may end up leapfrogging him in the final standings on account of being assigned a weightier handicap.
"I think it sucks that there are other factors involved other than the boat and the sailors in them," grouses Knapp, who favors elite handicap-free racing to the PHRF system. "Handicap racing is good because it gets more people into racing, but it can sometimes get political."
Take in a sailboat race from the shore or on television, and it's "like watching grass grow," concedes Marod's fellow helmsman, drinking buddy, and sometime racing rival, Garey Harr.
But merely observing a crew in action from a spot aboard requires the onlooker to be intense, alert, and nimble enough to perpetually traverse the bow of the boat, as weight distribution is king on a hull as light as Marod's.
"It's like a roller coaster, and you've got to hang on," explains Harr, a 47-year- old lifelong Ballardite and professional gardener who lives aboard a 27-foot Coronado at the Shilshole Marina. "If you fuck up, you capsize."
While it's not spectacularly gusty during the trip upwind to Possession Point, it is, after all, winter sailing, which means multiple layers of clothing for all but the silver-bearded crew member Cleary, who is either tough enough or stupid enough to weather the trip in khaki shorts.
Barking instructions from the middle of the bow in a vernacular unknown to land mammals is Wendell Gregory, a 58-year-old Texan who fell into the sport by default when, as an adolescent summer camper, he was forced to choose among horseback riding, archery, and sailing as his afternoon activity.
"It's not much fun to shoot at a target that doesn't move, and I can't stand horses," explains Gregory, who's stayed hooked on halyards for upward of 40 years.
Dubbed "the Boat Whisperer" by Marod, Gregory's job is "to pretty much read the wind" and advise the tactician and helmsman when to gybe—in lay terms, to shift sails for optimal wind velocity (see glossary, p. 29).
