1995 Lightning World Championships

- Bill Faude

You've heard about what great hosts the people of Finland were. You probably know the results by now. Thanks to the "masthead fly" you might even know about our current North American Champion (Blood alcohol level 3.6) narrowly avoiding being entwined in an International Incident with a train conductor. But unless you were there, you don't know about something that happened there that was the single most amazing thing I've ever seen happen in these blessed square yachts.

If you look at the results of race 2 you will find Peter Hall 1st. Our boat 2nd. Thomas Allen Jr. 3rd and Tito Gonzales 4th. Now, Tito and Tommy ended up 1-2 in the regatta. Both had better finishes in the event so what's so special about this race? In the World Championship, in a competitive fleet of more than 40 boats Tito and Tommy and their teammates finished 3rd and 4th in a race where they both tipped over.

In the part of the world where I do most of my sailing, we don't get a chance to sail in breeze much over 25 mph. And that's too bad, 'cause as we were reminded in Finland some of us kinda like to plane. And since we seem to not be sailing reaching legs enough any more, it needs to be really blowing to do it dead downwind. So, although some people thought the conditions were a little extreme to be racing, we were racing in over 30! And I think they were right to do it - it was the World Championship - it should be special.

Tito went over in an unusually large puff about 4 boat lengths from the offset at the second weather mark of a Triangle, Windward, Leeward, Windward, Leeward, Windward course. His team was in second place behind Peter Hall. They had just hoisted their chute. His boat is one of the early tank Allen Boats hull number 11011. He's done a lot of work on it you can tell. It's bullet proof but in this situation, it's on it's side, it's blowing hard... we went planing past, fully cognizant that Tito has been the fastest Lightning sailor in the world in big breeze for some time. Frankly, we thought that time was up.

Tommy, his sister Jane and brother Jimmy moved into 2nd when Tito went over. We were right behind them when they went over trying to jibe. We were running in the middle of the leg in about 30 knots, both with our chutes up with bow waves coming off back by the bailer. I think they actually went over in a little bit of a lull. So it was probably only blowing 25 or something. But when it's blowing that hard, you really want to be planing when you jibe - there's less load on everything. We watched them go over. Nobody got hurt. I've got to be honest, we were actually happy to see them go.

In the world I knew before, when it's blowing over 30 and you tip over hoisting your spinnaker, or you wait a little longer and biff in a jibe in a competitive fleet of more than 40 boats from all over the world, you don't come back to finish 3rd and 4th in the race. If on top of it, you're sailing a boat that was built when Nixon was President and the puffs are over 35 and your chute is wrapped around the spreaders and your crew is completely separated from the boat, or you're sailing with your brother and sister and it's pretty cold and there's about 400 other reasons to just bail out the boat and wait for the next race, where I'm from you sail your throwout!! and you cave in from there and if it's windy again tomorrow I beat you then too.

But that didn't happen. The simple point of this piece is that on the second day of that regatta in Kuopio neither Tito nor Tommy nor their crews (who really had seemed like regular folks when we left the dock)...were in a world the rest of us were inhabiting. That day, on of the windiest days any of us had ever raced a Lightning Championship in, our boat finished the race 2 2nd and race 3 1st and we gained exactly 2 points on Tommy and 4 on Tito when both of them had been swimming. And I know for a fact that in that second race, Tommy sailed two full beats without any mast blocks.

I'm gonna end this now, but I gotta tell you, where I'm from we watch a lot of NFL film footage of legends of the Gridiron and they're always trying to articulate what makes a champion different than the rest of normal humankind. They use those deep epic voices and that direct-from-God music to paint their pictures and they do a pretty good job. but I don't need to watch that anymore. I was there in Kuopio. We planed past both those boats on their sides. I saw real capsizes. I know that water wasn't warm. You can see the pictures to prove they really went over. But then we watched them get back in those boats and sail right through almost the whole fleet.