Newcomer's Guide to the MC

By Greg Fisher, One Design Coordinator, North Sails

[This article was first published in the April 1994 issue of the MC Newsletter.]

Note: Some of Greg's accomplishments include being chosen collegiate All-American and 12 National Championships in four different classes.

New experiences are a part of every regatta. Maybe a new technique in steering, sail trim or boat handling is learned, or a new way to handle a tactical situation, or a new sailor, or a handful of new sailors are met and new friendships are developed. For me, in my first MC regatta ever at this year's Midwinters, it was undoubtedly all of the above. I definitely enjoyed the challenge of sailing and learning a new boat ... a new style of boat that is totally different from anything I have sailed before. I also enjoyed meeting the MC Scow "family" and realizing quickly why the MC is not only an extremely strong one-design class, but obviously growing as well.

I think it was the people of the MC Class that impressed me the most. Through my travels as a sailmaker, I have the opportunity to sail against and meet many different types of people in many different classes. As we all know, sailors are generally great people, but I feel the MC group has to be near the top. I enjoyed my welcome into the class and open sharing of knowledge on how to sail the boat, which was helpful to me. This friendliness even carried out onto the water.

I was truly impressed by the sportsmanship that I saw on the water. Certainly everyone out there was racing hard, but no matter where they were on the race course or whatever the talent level, they seemed to keep it in perspective. While we were dipping a starboard tacker, an embarrassing pilot error on my part brought our bow in contact with his rudder .... We did our turns, but many sailors still would have gotten pretty excited. I was impressed with how calm the starboard skipper remained. In another instance one of the top sailors evidently hit the mark while leading the race (with a pretty good lead, I might add). Without anyone telling him (no one could see it) he did his turns which dropped him back to probably 2nd or 3rd. That's the sign of a champion. It is pretty obvious why there are a lot of new people continuing to join the class .... it's the attitude Again, it was fun to actually feel a part of things so early.

It is also quite rare to be able to jump into a brand new boat and actually be pretty competitive in the very first regatta. Most one design boats require a little "tweaking" or subtle "adjustments" to get the boat up to speed or make it comfortable to sail. Sometimes it's nice to have the boat as an excuse! Not so in the MC. It is really a blessing to the class that the builders seem to go out of their way to finish off the boats in perfect race trim. 'Me fact that our boat was really ready to roll (and quite pretty too!) helped us get up to speed much more quickly. Treat your builders well .... they're great!

Then there was the sailing .... I had the opportunity to talk with a good buddy of mine, Jeff Baker, before the Midwinter's, who definitely helped me out with some very important advice. He suggested that I visualize sailing the one design I normally sail with 20 degrees of heel and raising and lowering the centerboard every tack .... He neglected to mention the part about the bow spending as much time under the water as above the water when sailing dead downwind in some breeze. To say we were a bit surprised the first time our bow took a plunge up to the splash boards would be putting it mildly. After my crew climbed out of my lap and I slid back into die cockpit from the transom, we regained our composure and watched some of the other top MC sailors. The first thing we noticed was that they were definitely much calmer in this situation. But second, they simply heeled the boat to weather and bore off which quickly popped the bow free. There were also times they headed up while beefing the boat to leeward. We learned that the direction you turned might be different from wave to wave, but was often determined by our goal for that particular leg (sailing high or low) or which direction seemed the quickest way out of the wave. At one point we tried putting both the skipper and the crew behind the traveler, but again, after watching some of the faster sailors, we realized quickly that wasn't the ticket. Instead, situating both the skipper and the crew as close to the traveler, like upwind, seemed to be the fastest.

On thing that definitely accelerated our learning curve was the fact that we spent a great deal of time watching other sailors. After we had been rolled at the start for the third time (fortunately there were a lot of recalls) we stopped and watched the boat to weather and noted that their board was up a good 2". It was amazing how much better the boat felt and how much quicker it accelerated once we yanked our board up as well.

It was interesting that I didn't have near the trouble getting used to sailing the boat heeled as I had anticipated. I think this was due to the MC's lively feel on the helm and how "unattractive" it felt when sailed too flat. It certainly helped to try and recognize the feel on the helm when we found ourselves with good speed.

As far as tuning, we basically just copied what the fast guys were doing. The "magic" number for mast rake was 28' 3-1/2". For our sail, we found it helpful to sweep the spreaders slightly farther forward (31" tip-to-tip) which helped stiffen the mast between the hounds and the spreaders and make the main a little bit more powerful. We just stuck with the standard Johnson spreader lengths, but because of my nature to diddle with things, we did experiment a good bit with shroud tension. It seemed like the faster sailors were sailing a little bit tighter so we cranked our rig up fairly snug as well. We quickly realized it was easy to get the rig too tight as indicated by the spreaders pushing the mast to leeward in the middle (definitely did not seem fast!). This was eyeballed by looking up the back of the mast. Instead, we tensioned the shrouds until the mast was just straight from the gooseneck- up to the hounds at which point the tip sagged off to leeward.

It took us a few races to figure out how important the vang was to wind performance in a breeze. After being pinched off at the start for the second time (we sure appreciated the recalls!), we noticed that die boats that had the height on us had a good deal more vang. Once we started playing with it, we found that pretty heavy vang tension was necessary. Our guide for knowing when we reached the right tension was the development of slight inversion wrinkles in our mainsail. These were diagonal wrinkles that ran from approximately 6' up the luff to 6' back on our boom indicating that the mast had developed maximum bend for our sail. If we over-vang'd and over-flattened the main through bending the mast too much, these wrinkles got pretty severe.

We found there are still some definite boat-handling techniques that we need to work on. Doing 720 turns was certainly a thrill in the MC, especially if you try to turn the boat too fast. We figured that spray coming off the side of the boat instead of the bow was an indication that something wasn't quite right. I'm not sure in those couple turns if we ever figured out which board was supposed to go down when, and I'm still not sure if we came, out bow first or stem first....

I was certainly glad there was enough wind to sail with a crew as I think it also helped our learning curve. Being able to concentrate on speed, sail trim and steering while Carol Newman, my ace crew, was looking around for windshifts and other boats, definitely helped a bunch.

You definitely have to have your share of good breaks to do well in any sailboat race or regatta and we certainly appreciate the luck we had at the Midwinters. We also had fun racing against Andy Burdick, Jim Gluek, and Mark Christensen. Congrats to them on a great series! We sure have a lot more to learn about Scows and the MC specifically. We are looking forward to the regatta circuit this summer. I hope to see you there! Good Sailing!