Great Interview with Will Crump on North Sails J80 page.

The J80 team of Thomas Klok, Scott Collins, Will and Marie Crump topped the deep 29 boat fleet with style, speed and patience.  I was able to catch up with my old friend Will Crump to get an update on their team and how things have progressed in the last year.  With only a couple of events under their belts they seem to be just hitting their stride!

What do you feel were the big keys to your win at the Annapolis NOOD regatta?
Will: We really looked at the fleet and the race area with a great deal of respect. Despite speed in past regattas, we never considered ourselves entitled to a trophy which left everyone on the team working hard through every shift especially when we were out in front. The sailors in the fleet are too good to play defensively, and Annapolis is too cruel a location to give you consistent conditions you can count on.

What was your take on the current on the J80 course during the event?
Will: Dizzying. I thought Charleston would be the worst, and I have sailed Annapolis a lot. Conditions were more challenging in the current than I have ever seen. Each day was a full-on ebb with only one exception. The light air and the way the race course spanned the current diagonally made us really work hard to keep the boat on the favored jibe downwind.

Tell us a little about your sailing background?
Will:I have a pretty generic background. I grew up sailing in a small yacht club on the southern Chesapeake where sailing and racing were well supported but definitely a weekend and seasonal past-time. Our junior program was one-week each summer. Somehow I had the chance to sail on some bigger boats going to New England for Block Island Race Week, the Newport to Bermuda race and other events that gave me a broad exposure to racing in small dinghies and large keelboats. I had some great heroes from my hometown to look up to as well. Guys like Rives Potts had already proven to me small town doesn’t mean small skill.

Out of college I spent a few years working for J World in Annapolis for Jahn Tihansky who was a great sailing mentor. During that time I began to gain a better understanding of racing large one-design fleets which Annapolis is one of the greatest places in the world to find a variety of. After JWorld, I spent a short period of time working as a sailmaker for one of North’s competitors which gave me a good inside view of the methods of construction and the inner workings of sailmaking.

I left the marine industry in 2000 to get an MBA and focus on other challenges, but over the past 5 years I have started to get back into it as I’ve embraced the lessons I learned early on in competition and how the team skills relate to my business. It also helps to have some incredible family members to share those experiences with. My father says I “married up”, and he’s right. My wife Marie is one of the best sailors I know, and we really enjoy sharing those competitive moments together. Her brother Thomas is often the cornerstone of any sailing team we put together, and recently my sister has been a part of our sailing campaigns too. Last year we all crossed the finish line in the Newport to Bermuda race together and got to celebrate a historic win in as a family (among several families) on board Carina.

Tell us how you choose the J80?
Will: I can’t take the credit for choosing the J/80. My brother in law Thomas owns the boat and has been dreaming of one for some time. When the World Championship lined up in two ideal locations for him (Newport and Copenhagen, Denmark) he decided to go for it. I love the boat though. I was the tactician aboard the North American Championship winner in 1999 with Roger Kagan driving, and the boat is really versatile. Most one-design boats have a real sweet-spot when they are fun to sail, and everything else just seems like torture. The J/80 is not really like that. It excels in high breeze. It is tight and very tactical in the medium conditions, and it really performs well in light air too.

Tell us about your team?  How long have you been sailing together?
Will: From sailing the longest together to shortest, Scott Collins and I started sailing together 30 years ago when our junior program would put us two-by-two into lasers to learn how to sail. We sailed a Bemis campaign together that was successful at the regional level as teens along with sailing together on a J24 as a “junior crew” in our local club fleet, and he brings a real balance to the experience. He is a man of few words but on the water one of the best “wind talkers” I know.

My wife Marie and I met in October of 1997 when we started sailing J22’s with and against each other. We support each other through campaigns and have a routine that’s pretty nice. When match racing, Marie drives and I call tactics. We went to the final round of the Prince of Wales a few years back under that configuration, and we do the same on very large boats where her concentration level keeping the boat on the polars is very high while I call tactics in the complicated fleets.

My brother in law Thomas is an accomplished match racer. We met in 1999, and probably didn’t race together until 2001. He likes to remind all of us he’s the only world champion in the family since he won the student yachting world cup over a decade ago. I’m just trying to make sure he doesn’t rest on his laurels.

Who prepared your new J80?
Will: I have the most profound respect for Randy Borges at Waterlines Systems. I spent my entire sailing career in the 90’s admiring the boats that he prepared, and watching him fight hard to win races as a sailor. He really gets the fine line between science and art in boat prep, and he has a great gritty sense of what works at the practical level. Randy built our boat and prepped it, but two other people stepped in and gave us critical insight into refining how we set the boat up to sail for ourselves above the waterline. Tony Rey has been our coach on a number of occasions, and we enlisted his help to start measuring and marking the boat up after getting it out of the box. After that, Vince Brun came along and helped us further refine our set-up and adjust our attitudes.

Why did you choose North Sails?
Will: Speed makes a difference. It’s at the top of our list, but right there with it is quality of construction which translates into competitive lifespan, a very important factor in a one-design fleet that limits sail purchases. I have watched for almost 15 years as North has tested 3DL genoas for the J24 class without ever pushing the product out the door on the marketplace. North has the most experience in building sails of that kind, and it provides some big cost efficiencies when they can get it right for a one-design fleet. It spoke volumes to us that North was building paneled jibs while all the others were pushing “string sails” onto the market. These guys stay close to the quality of the product. If it’s not right to win and to last with quality controls in place, they won’t make the product regardless of how tempting the profit margins may be.

In addition to quality, we do consider ourselves new to the J80 so support was important. July 2010 was our first regatta together on the boat, and before that it had been 10 years since my last race on a J80. We wanted a sailmaker that would share information as we were figuring out how to get up to speed, and we have not been disappointed. Will Welles has been acutely aware of our program at all times and really stepped in to help measure his own boat up against ours. Vince Brun has continued to challenge us on what we know while working hard to learn everything he can from us about the sails so that they can be improved. North’s successful team approach is very obvious when we bump into other class experts like Allan Terhune who is also constantly sharing and interested in how we do. It’s pretty obvious these guys have something figured out when it comes to their rewards system as a team. Once you are in their customer list, brand satisfaction appears more important than your named sales guy.

What line of work are you in?
Will: I am a small business owner. I have a management consulting firm that provides a strategy offering to Fortune 500 companies struggling to manage data better. It sounds very technology centric when you use the word “data”, but it’s really about building high performance teams within these companies to tackle a mixture of traditional problems (data quality, analytics, etc.) and exotic new problems like acquiring data from new sources such as Facebook or Twitter to facilitate analytics in supply chain demand planning for retail campaigns. The key problem we might help a customer solve could be as simple as making sure you have product on the shelf to buy after you found out about the great retail deal through Facebook or Living Social.

We are a small team of cross-functional experts, and the way we operate is very much the way I see a successful sailing team operating too. Marie and I work together as well, and one lesson that translates well to both our sailing and our work is “confronting the brutal facts.” After each race, we have to be honest with each other about performance if we expect to improve. The same is true in the workplace and on the customer site. Frequently it’s that honesty about the facts that gets us the business and builds a strong relationship with the client.

How are you enjoying fatherhood? 
Will: Being a father is a rewarding experience I can’t even explain. We are lucky to have an 18-month old little girl who is happy and cheerful all the time while constantly exploring and challenging our parental skills. She has been a really nice advantage for us recently as she makes sure we don’t have enough time to overthink our preparation. We waited a long time, and we made a lot of sacrifices so that we could be in a position to get her sailing with us at some point. She really loves boats as a concept already, but we are eager to discover what we need to do as she gets older to create the bond and excitement around sailing. I’m pretty confident that in a dozen years when she starts actually recognizing the concepts of competition, she will be choosing the boat we race in.

How do you like living and sailing in Annapolis?
Will: It is an amazing town. I am a resident in a totally different way now having been gone for 10 years. We really loved living in Newport, RI. There is something majestic to the place, but Annapolis has a much more cosmopolitan way and surprisingly more one-design sailing. Our reasons for moving were to build a strong business in an area with the right resources for growth and to have a great environment for our daughter to grow up in. Each week we discuss that decision, and we have never once questioned it in the two years since our move.

Do you have a daily routine you follow to prepare while at an event?
Will: I spend about 30-45 minutes working through the weather forecasts. I usually take in between 3 and 5. Then I try not to pull the forecasts back out when on the water because that’s the time to keep your eyes outside the boat and learn quickly.

Also, I always like to have few moments with the rig before people get on board, and I never trust that I have it right. I always look for different ways to confirm that its set up straight or just right for the conditions.

When on the water, I try to really look at the other boats that are successful and learn quickly from their sailtrim. I find that the J80 is such a forgiving feel in the lower wind ranges that it is really easy to trim the main and jib wrong without getting a strong feedback in the helm. Visual confirmation from other boats is a necessity for me right now.

What kind of instruments do you use on your J80?  Do you use a speedo?
Will: Somehow I think this question is a setup from Vince who insisted we install a true speedo rather than only trust the GPS speed instruments. We have not had the time to get that installed yet, but we do miss it.

We use the most recent Velocitek instrument. The name escapes me now, but it is really a brilliant device. Its usability on the starting line is leaps and bounds better than anything else out there. We also use a Tactic Racemaster compass, and we have a Rockbox that we mount below deck. The Rockbox has a graphing function for speed that is really helpful off the wind.

Tell us about your plans leading up to the 2011 J80 Worlds?
Will: We plan to race the Swedish Nationals and then the Worlds. Our plan is very much inspired from watching Harry Melges win the Melges24 Worlds in Travemunde in 2003. He arrived a week ahead and practiced nearly every day for the week prior.

Will you sail with the same team?
Will: Thomas, Marie and I will all sail together. Scott has a family and business that can’t do without him for 2 weeks straight. We will have Will Welles sail with us as tactician/therapist/whipping boy.

Are you shipping your boat to the event?
Will: As I write this, the boat was packed this evening and sits in the driveway ready to drive to the ship in the morning to head across the Atlantic.  Marie and I have raced about a dozen one-design world championships between us, and we know that having a boat you are comfortable with is exceptionally important. For that reason, we were supportive when Thomas wanted to get a boat and ship it around for different events.