Short Sightings — ‘Merlin’, SailGP, and Latitude 38

The Legend of Merlin Continues

Woody Skoriak was overseeing a haulout in KKMI’s Richmond boatyard, right next door to Bill Lee’s legendary Merlin. The boat is now owned by Chip Merlin, who raced her in the recent Rolex Big Boat Series and placed third in ORCA.

Woody commented, “Even on a dreary, rainy day the boat looked in beautiful shape to me, especially considering how old it is. And out of the water one can see how deep the keel is, with a huge bulb at the bottom. Nice to see a famous vintage race boat is being kept up so well!” She was launched at the same time as Latitude — April 1977. How many people have raced on Merlin since then?

New Zealand Wins First Season 5 SailGP Event

Peter Burling and the New Zealand SailGP team led most of Season 4 before being beaten by the Spanish in the finals on San Francisco Bay. The first event of Season 5 was held this past weekend in Dubai, with New Zealand starting out the season right where they left off last year, at the top of the leaderboard. The big surprise for the weekend was seeing TeamUSA coming in on the podium in third place after taking first in the very first race of the season. The three-boat finale finished with New Zealand in first, Emirates GBR in second and the United States in third. Three-time SailGP champion Tom Slingsby and Team Australia finished the weekend in fifth place.

The next event will be in Auckland on January 17/18, 2025. Full results are here.

The J/105 Whisperer on the Waterfront

We stopped by West Marine in Sausalito to pick up a couple of items and ran into Lindsay Browne in the back of the store where they hide Latitude 38. (Why do they make it so difficult?) While chatting with Lindsay, he let on that he’s known as the J/105 “whisperer” who helps tune up the fleet’s competitive boats. Chris Weaver has written a December story on the winners in various one-design fleets where we saw J/105 fleet champion Tim Russell of Ne*Ne give a shout-out to Lindsay (and others) for helping him get to the top of the fleet. You’ll see the December issue coming out a week from today on Monday, December 2.

Latitude 38 sales manager Nicki Bennett was recently touring the Bay waterfront and caught up with Cree Partridge of Berkeley Marine Center. He was by the magazine rack where he has free copies of Latitude 38 on display for you to pick up.

If you’ve been trapped inside during the recent rainy weather, it’s worth going down to your local marine business and picking up a copy of Latitude 38 to bring a little sailing sunshine home with you. You’ll likely run into a friendly face and a sailing story from folks like Lindsay or Cree.

Type your location in the address bar of our distribution map and you can find where to pick up a copy near you. Send a photo of yourself at your favorite Latitude 38 magazine distributor to [email protected].