Stuart Walker and Sinjin; Together Again

Ahh! a human interest story for Earwigoagin, a coming together of an old sailing team after a long hiatus.

Dr. Stuart Walker should be familiar to many in the sailboat racing community. Stuart has been a longtime racing tactics columnist for the U.S magazine "Sailing World" and, must be the most prolific author of how-to books on sailboat racing in the short recorded history of this sport. Here's a list of Stuart Walker's titles that I could compile off the Internet (there's probably some I missed);

• Winning; The Psychology of Competition
• Advanced Racing Tactics 
• Techniques of Small Boat Racing
• A Manual of Sail Trim
• The Tactics of Small Boat Racing 
• The Sailors Wind
• Positioning: The Logic of Sailboat Racing
• and his newest, The Code of Competition

Dr. Walker started his racing career in International 14's in the 1950's and, in the early 1970's, switched over to the Soling class. (I haven't seen it but I've heard his trophy room is very impressive.) Early on in his International 14 career (1957), Stuart Walker teamed up with a St. John Martin (Sinjin to everyone), and they remained a team until 1963 when Sinjin bought his first International 14. Sinjin would still be called on to occasionally fill in as crew in big regattas, crewing with Stuart in the 1967 English championship.

Sinjin would become a top notch International 14 skipper in his own right, winning the U.S Nationals in 1971 (Stuart would win the nationals in 1969) and representing the East Coast in several International Team Race competitions. He was Annapolis's first Laser dealer. Sinjin retired from the International 14 and hard core racing in 1977.

A picture of Dr. Stuart Walker and Sinjin taken in 1962. This appeared in "Sailing World's" article celebrating Stuart Walker's 300th column for the magazine. This is US666, Salute, the International 14 in which Stuart Walker won the Prince of Wales Cup in 1964 (not with Sinjin as crew). I think all photos in this post were taken by Ellie Martin.

Another pic of Stuart and Sinjin in the International 14, Salute.

US 800 was Stuart Walker's next International 14. This looks to be Stuart and Sinjin. Stuart had devised a really skinny mast out of 1 1/2" tubing for this 14.

Fast forward to Jan 1, 2012. There's a long distance sailboat race on New Years day that Severn Sailing Association have hosted since 1954 (this race being Stuart's idea as well). It's a 14 mile race up the Severn River, into Round Bay, around St. Helena's island and back again. International 14's and then the Solings and then J22's have participated but with the demise of the International 14's at SSA, it remains today, primarily a Soling event.

This year, Stuart recruited his old 14 crew, Sinjin and Sinjin's son (named Stuart, after Stuart). Sinjin hadn't crewed for Stuart since the 1980's but the chemistry was still there. In a breezy southerly and moderate temperatures for January, Stuart claimed his 32nd win in the Ice Bowl. All of us look at the good Dr., in his mid eighties, still racing hard in his Soling year round, and shake our heads in amazement and admiration.

Jan 1, 2012; Stuart, Sinjin, and Stuart Martin bombing up the Severn River in Stuart's Soling with a strong following breeze.

Stuart Martin, Sinjin, and the good Dr. Walker with the Ice Bowl.

And Sinjin, back in 1965, was to take a wet-behind-the-ears teenager, who was mad about sailing, but had never raced, Sinjin took a chance on this teenager and made him his International 14 frostbite crew (Sinjin's wife finally putting her foot down about racing wet boats that capsize in the winter). And that merits a very grateful TOH from the blogmeister.

Header Photo: Stuart Walker: Over the Bar

The previous header photo was of the legendary Stuart Walker, on the plane in his International 14, US 578, a Fairey Mk VI. The photo was taken in 1956. The crew was his college room-mate. If I remember correctly, this photo was included in one of his first books, "The Techniques of Small Boat Racing."

This past November, age 95, Stuart Walker passed on.

I've written about Stuart Walker before on Earwigoagin. Of all the Type-A competitors in sailboat racing, he was the most singular human being I have come across. Stuart, for his entire adult life, was obsessed with winning sailboat races. It wasn't unusual to wander down to Severn Sailing Association, his beloved home club, and see Stuart, age 90 or so, climb up the ladder, clamber in the cockpit of his Soling sitting on the hard on the trailer, to look carefully at a new jib. It wasn't unusual to see Stuart, age 90 or so, and his crew launching the Soling in the winter to go sailing by themselves to tweak something that wasn't quite right the weekend before. (Stuart loved winter sailing and the SSA Soling fleet had a winter series.)

Stuart readily admitted that, if he won on the weekend, it set him up for a happy week; if he lost on the weekend, the following week was not happy as he analyzed and came up with a plan to return to the top.

The result of this constant striving to be a winner was a spate of books and magazine columns that covered all aspects of winning sailboat races; boat handling, tactics, tuning, weather, psychology and sail trim. For my generation they were the bibles and they were frequently referenced in post-race kibbitzing. Most of Stuart's writing on tactics and wind were of his own races, good or bad, and he could present his failures with unvarnished clarity.

"My disastrous showing in the Ice Bowl of '68 prompted my competitors to remark that I wouldn't write that one up for publication. However, disaster to me is a challenge which demands the salvage of some profit. I barely fought my way out of last in the final yards of the race but I learned something and I can write about it!"

Yacht Racing, February 1972

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This past August, Stuart had a party down at Severn Sailing Association to introduce his latest book, a history of Severn Sailing Association. I bought the book. I've owned several of his books, which I read cover to cover, but they seem to have gone missing. In my library, Stuart's last book will have to do. He will be missed.

Stuart Walker; Unified Theory on Fleet Dynamics

I attended a lecture by Stuart Walker over at the Annapolis Maritime Museum on Thursday. The latest issue to attract this icon of sailboat racing analysis is not a new wrinkle in racing tactics, or how to suss out the wind, or how to factor in current on a race course but the psychology of group dynamics in sailboat racing fleets. Stuart Walker has developed an unified theory on the rise and fall of sailboat classes at club level. At the foundation of his theory, Stuart has categorized sailboat racers into three categories;

• Top competitors - In a local fleet, the one or two competitors where winning is the most important thing. They hate to lose ! and they usually don't.
  
• Semi competitors - They are competent racers but are out there more for fun. However semi competitors are very cognizant of where they should finish within a fleet. If they usually finish fourth and beat Ray ..... they are comfortable with this result. If Ray beats them and they finish sixth, it is not a good day. A semi competitor is out there to enjoy the competition but finishing where they assume they should finish is also very important. Pecking order matters. A semi competitor also needs to gauge his finish against a top competitor.
  
• Non competitors - Tailenders. They like to belong to the group. They just enjoy being out there and they can be very regular attendees.
  

Stuart's unified theory maintains that a thriving fleet needs all three competitor types to be successful. An ideal fleet size is 12-20 because if a fleet gets too big, a greater degree of randomness upsets the pecking order. If a fleet gets too small, say around five, .... finishing position becomes too rigid. Stuart maintains one of the attractions of competition is the romance, the unknown when one competes. As someone in the audience pointed out, part of what brings racers back is what he termed, intermittent reinforcement .......... or to put it in a real world scenario, if today it is blowing under 5 knots and I am very good in light airs, then maybe today I can beat Ray.

Certainly I can apply Stuart's theories to my own sailing. When I realized the International Canoe class had moved beyond where I could compete physically or wanted to compete technologically (both in cost and time)........ when I realized I was not going to get results at my previous level, I moved on.

What Stuart's unified theory doesn't explain is how someone picks a fleet and why fleet loyalty is so important. If at Severn Sailing Association I want to race a doublehander class, I can pick either a Snipe, Comet, Jet 14, Daysailor, Vanguard 15 or Johnson 18. Usually once a sailor chooses his class, there is little crossover. When the Comet fleet declined relative to the Snipe fleet, there was not one Comet sailor that switched classes.

Stuart Walker's Tales of Cars and Trailers and International 14 Destruction

This past Wednesday, Stuart Walker gave a talk on crewing at Fawcetts,the local chandlery, but two weeks before that I sat down at Stuart's table during a pot-luck dinner (non-sailing related event) and, given the two of us, the talk turned to sailboat racing. Stuart, as expected, has a wealth of stories and somehow the conversation turned to sailing dinghies and cars and trailers. I present two of Stuart's stories.

Sometime in the late 1950's, an International 14 team from Montreal, Canada, was trailering their 14 down to Massachusetts for the Buzzards Bay Bowl, one of the premier events during the early years. As they were getting close to Marion, passing through one of the small Massachusetts's towns, they noticed a fire truck, sirens going, in their rear view mirror. They pulled over on the shoulder to let the fire truck go by, but, instead, the fire truck pulled in right behind them. Sixty years ago there were no custom formed bunks on trailers; this 14 team adopted a common practice of placing a mattress on the trailer and then strapping their 14 on top of mattress on top of trailer. At some point in the trip, this duo, rocking down the highway at a high rate of speed, had tossed a cigarette out the window and, unluckily, it had landed on the mattress, where it started smoldering. The smoke from the fire had been blown flat at sixty miles-per-hour but when they slowed to navigate through the towns, it was obvious to bystanders watching them go by that this car was towing a trailer and boat that was definitely on fire, hence the fire truck was called and responded. Stuart dryly noted that enough of the bottom of this International 14 was charred to be a total write-off.

In story number 2, Stuart told of an English gent who, again in the early days, was finishing off an International 14 in a workshop situated in a room at the back of his garage (to save a few quid, the DIY crowd would buy a cold molded shell from the professionals and then build in the interior, centerboard trunk and gunwhales). The International 14 was nearly complete, just short some varnish coats when the builder's mother somehow drove her car through the garage door, through the intervening wall to the workshop, into the boat, through the back wall to the house, depositing the whole mess in a pond in the back yard. Sailing stories become more and more apocryphal with age, so to see if I could corroborate Stuart's account I went back to the list of English International 14 numbers that Tom Vaughn put together in his International 14 history.

Sure enough, K 736, named Delight built by Ian Cox (a very accomplished 14 skipper) was "Destroyed in accident" in 1960. The next year, Ian Cox, had put together K 753, this time, given the anguish and teeth gnashing that must have happened after the first 14 was destroyed, Ian named the new 14 Despair, (just as Stuart had told the story).

Stuart turns 90 years old in little over a month. He still races his Soling at every opportunity, especially enjoying the winter racing. I asked Stuart if he ever kept track of how many races he's done over his lifetime. He said he doesn't have an exact number but he estimates he has over 6000 hours of racing!

What? A Wordsmith Competition on Earwigoagin!

I'm not a wordsmith sort of guy, never have been (crossword puzzles are not my thing). But I have noticed that wordsmithing attracts lots of attention in the bloggosphere. When blogger 'Sweet Bluesette'; put up a post titled Syzygy (a straight line between two celestial bodies), the excitement among certain bloggers in the discovery of this word was almost palpable; the post garnered 17 comments.

So here is Earwigoagin's wordsmith competition: In conversation with Stuart Walker, he mentioned that, in the early 1950's, International 14 sailors considered the following format as lucky when naming International 14's (he thinks this may originally be a Portuguese tradition):

 Seven Letters with Four Vowels

Here are some of the International 14 boat names from that period (1950's) that follow this convention;

• Joyeuse - Charlamagne's sword
• Bacalao - Codfish
• Rio Nina - (which probably isn't a proper Spanish usage - but who cares)
• Barilea- (I think this may have Scottish origins - not sure)

So have at it, boat names real, or imagined using the format, Seven Letters with Four Vowels. No real prize, just a tip of the hat to the authors wit, wordly knowledge, and intellectual prowess in wordsmithing.

Steve Toschi, Dave Klipfel from the 1970's

I periodically check the Google Stats on this blog for search keywords that Net denizens are using to get directed to Earwigoagin. Two days ago these odd search keywords popped up, "Steve Toschi International 14 sailboat."

Steve Toschi was United States' top International 14 skipper in the mid-1970's. With Dave Klipfel in charge of the front half of the 14, this team won several National championships and also the prestigious POW cup in England in 1975 (The second American team to do so; Stuart Walker and Stovey Brown being the first in 1964).  Steve and Dave were a Mutt and Jeff team, but backwards for a trapeze dinghy; Steve the skipper, long and lanky, Dave the trapeze crew, short and quick. (This was not too unusual for the American International 14 fleet at the time, there being a good number of women crews; even I got my start crewing International 14's as a scrawny teenager.)

Steve had his own sail loft in San Francisco at that time, Leading Edge Sails, and the team was always blazing fast in any breeze (as all of the San Francisco 14'ers were, living and sailing and surviving in the big breeze of San Francisco Bay). I ended up having my best two competitive years in the International 14's when I had the good fortune to race on Steve Toschi's ex-POW winner, Stradivarius, once it got sold into the east coast.

I figured, given the chance that, down the road, some other person would sit down and type the Google search words "Steve Toschi International 14 sailboat" I should dig into my archives and provide some content that would match the keywords. I found two photos.

I think this is the 1973 U.S. Nationals in San Francisco Bay. Steve and Dave are in US 946 which is a Sailnetics Kirby IV.

Steve raising the main at the dock. This looks like the same KIV. Later on Steve would design and build two 14's, his first design, Home Brew, a three planker plywood design that was ingeniously engineered to take the fiberglass interior of the Sailnetics KIV. Notice that T-shirts and jeans were considered perfectly acceptable as sailing kit in the 1970's - most of us favoring the cut-off jean shorts that Dave is sporting in this photo (and now, 40 years on, these jeans contributed to our generation keeping a legion of dermatologists busy today).

Tom Price Illustration; Windrustler

Good friend Tom Price, knowing my interest in all things to do with Classic International 14's, sent along one of his charcoal illustrations of Tom sailing his International 14 over in England, circa probably early 1980's. Although Tom doesn't make a living as a professional artist, his work has illustrated Stuart Walker's books and one of his drawings hangs in my living room.

Tom currently is a top competitor in the Star and 210 fleets as well as a crack helmsman on several larger keelboats on the Chesapeake Bay.

From Tom's email;

"Windrustler" winning "Old Boats Prize" at POW, Hastings, sailed by Tom Price, Louis Phillips from Annapolis, Md. Super Casson III design, McCutcheon built originally for Jeremy Pudney,