1985. The sails of the future are being born. The GdV is in, with Lowell North

Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.

Lowell’s strange idea

Taken from the 1985 Journal of Sailing, Year 10, No. 06, July, pp. 42-43.

“If I knew the pressure the wind exerts at every point on the sail, I could build a better sail.” Lowell North, the legendary sailor/sailor, aboard the America’s Cup Victory, tells us exclusively. No one knew that the sail revolution would come from there. Historic moment.

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No one knows how he came up with it-the guy is too secretive to indulge in anecdote-but it is certainly “an idea,” this one, that could radically change sailmaking in the coming years. We are talking about the latest experiments that Lowell North, founder of the world’s largest sailmaker, is carrying out these weeks in California. Sailmaking is now an industrial business valued in the tens of billions. To grab this pie, the big sailmakers invest the best brains. At North, he, the Boss himself, has stepped in. The experiment we are going to tell you about, maybe it will be dropped or maybe it will turn out to be a bluff, we cannot know. Of course it has the flavor of science fiction. We reveal it to you in advance.

Heard about the availability of the 12-meter Victory and Magic, in training together in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles, Lowell North expounds on the idea. “If I knew the pressure the wind exerts at every point on the sail,” North says, roughly, ” I could build a better sail. Agreed, but how to get to that pressure? In the simplest and, at the same time, most complicated way. By mounting on the mainsail and jib dozens of tubes, tiny and transparent ones that, on one side receive the wind at the top of the sail, and carry it, on the other, to a very sensitive pressure gauge. Thus Victory sailed for a few days, a panel of gauges strapped under the boom near the mast, and he, North, sorting out the various gaits, noting, photographing, and consulting with Aldo Migliaccio, the sailmaker of the Victory who with painstaking work had assembled the very fragile tubes. While many smiled barely masking skepticism, North declared himself extremely satisfied with the experiment. Needless to ask him about the results, those are absolutely top secret, we will perhaps see the consequences in a few months in mass production.

All we are left with is the excitement, because excitement it is, of having seen perhaps the world’s most famous name in sailing, working like a little boy, with a pen on his ear, for hours on end, chasing his hunch that may have been wrong, but that made us realize, in those long boring broadsides on the Victory, why North ‘s name is that of a myth. Following him, one thought came to our minds. Remember who was, until yesterday, a sailmaker? A guy all flair and imagination, something between a tailor and an artist. Is that what comes to mind when you think of a sailmaker? Well, hear what a sailmaker of today does. Lowell North was born in South San Diego in 1921. He majored in engineering before beginning to dominate the sailing world, from the Star class to the IOR.

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“Lowell,” Paul Cayard, one of the greatest talents of the last generation born in San Francisco 26 years ago, once told me, ” never needed to be tactical, his boats were so much faster more to the point and so much more ‘engineered’ than those of his opponents that he would over-win by large gaps. So it was indeed to be but this time he really did it big.

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