The Official Website for the International Tempest Association- The Sandbag

In memory of Ian Proctor, who created a wonderful boat in 1965 and recreated it in 1990.

A guide to selecting and enjoying the International Tempest.

BUYING A TEMPEST
TAKING DELIVERY
PREPARATION
TUNING
BOAT HANDLING
MAINTENANCE
LOOK OUT FOR ... TEMPEST, the full account, by Bob Bavier, Jr., of the IYRU Two-man Keelboat Trials in 1965, as a result of which Tempest was ultimately chosen as the new International Class.
LAUNCHING THE INTERNATIONAL TEMPEST CLASS, an article by Tempest designer Ian Proctor which appeared in the International Tempest Association's first (1967) yearbook.

Appendix C, THE CRUISING TEMPEST
Appendix D, SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Appendix E, BASIC DIMENSIONS AND MEASUREMENTS

GLOSSARY

Complete Sandbag in Adobe Acrobat format (it's about 5 megabytes)

PREFACE

Many people contributed generously of their time in helping prepare this book. I am particularly indebted to Don Cooper for his fine artwork, which was the basis for the computer-generated drawings in this edition. Also to Bruce Kirby for his design perspective in the foreword to the first edition, a fine tribute from one journalist-designer to another.

Several others were good contributors precisely because they were not familiar with the Tempest. Rob MacArthur and Homer Hagedorn provided editorial help and questioned many points they found unclear, which led to the development of the glossary.

Tempest owners also provided input and encouragement. Dick Bleier, Dave Duke, Wally Respess, Malcolm Lawson, Ed Hoyt and Jim O'Hara were particularly helpful.

I extend my deep appreciation to these people and the many others who offered their encouragement and assistance.

INTRODUCTION

I discovered the Tempest in the late 60s through a photograph. I'd never before seen grace and power so well combined in a one-design sailboat. And, I found when I first sailed one, it has more than just good looks:

It's comfortable. The flat cockpit floor makes boat-handling a dream, and there's no bruising centerboard trunk.
It's fast. It has finished first or second among keelboats at all four Yachting One-of-a-Kind regattas it has attended, and has dominated in heavy weather.
It's simple. One person can drive it off the highway, step its 20kg mast, and be sailing in about an hour. One person also can sail single-handed, even from the trapeze.
It's maneuverable. It can turn "within its own length."
It's stable. With more freeboard than other trapeze boats, crews find it comfortable "out on the wire." In fact, crewing can be more relaxing than helming!
It's versatile. Heavy crews aren't put at a disadvantage in light air, but husband-and-wife teams are common.
It's safe. The hull consists of watertight compartments, and internal flotation would keep it from sinking even if one of these were breached. (In a particularly heavy squall some years ago, one crew took advantage of this feature by deliberately pushing on their mast until they turned their boat turtle, and lounged on the hull while the storm blew past. Then, when they leaned a little on their keel, the boat righted itself and they sailed away dry!)
It's a tight one design--not just the boat, but also its molded parts. This has kept construction costs down, and helped prevent old boats from becoming obsolete.
It's standardized. Recreational sailors and top competitors, alike, have been using standard rig and hardware layouts for more than 20 years.
It's durable. Ten-year-old boats have won world championships, and 15-year-old boats remain competitive.
It's light and easy to trailer. Most owners don't bother with trailer brakes.
It's easy to maintain--and easy to keep on a mooring. Its cockpit floor is above the waterline, so water just drains out.
Finally, people of all ages can enjoy it. Two seventy-year-olds sailed in the 1984 North American Championship--one was the winning crew.

Here's a boat that you can use both for cruising and weekend racing. We think the Tempest compares favorably with other designs of its size. That's why we've prepared this guide--to tell you about our boat and invite you to share with us a great experience.

Dave McComb

May 1986

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

Bruce Kirby is well known as a magazine editor and the designer of many successful boats, from International 14s, the Laser, and the Sonar to the 12-Meter Canada I. He also has been a long-time "friend of the Tempest," a frequent competitor in the 1970s and North American Champion with Dave McComb in 1978 and '79.

Like Ian Proctor, I was a journalist who turned to yacht design, perhaps somewhat more gradually than Ian, as he became a very successful sparmaker along the way, while I was paying the grocery bills and mortgage with a few words here and a displacement calculation there.

Neither of us really left the world of words, and I'm sure we'd agree that there is a relationship between a story that comes out well--that balances and flows and is accepted by its readers--and a sailing vessel that floats and feels right and is capable of making those aboard happy, even if the greatest happiness comes only after the wet, cold and fatigue have been forgotten.

When the IYRU announced the contest to choose a new two-man keelboat for probable Olympic selection, I had designed only two boats--my Mark I and Mark II International 14s--and I was thinking about a third. But here was something most intriguing: a bigger two-man boat, with a spinnaker and trapeze allowed, and a keel mandatory. That could be one hell of a machine!

A few evenings were consumed with the only part of yacht design that is really exciting, and that is the conceptual sketches. Drawings of the two-man planing keelboat that began to emerge have been misplaced in the intervening years, which have seen one change of country, two changes of state, and six different houses. How the boat might have fared is not important now, as I did not have the wherewithal or sponsorship to bring it to three dimensions. But at least I was not discouraged from doing rough sketches of little sailboats in the hope that some day one of them would catch on. What I do recall is that the concept was far more like Tempest than it was like any of the other designs that were produced for the IYRU trials.

It was obvious at the Medemblik trials that Ian had come to the 22-footer from smaller boats, whereas many of the competing designers were moving the other way--down from bigger boats. As a dinghy designer, he appreciated the power of the trapeze, and was inclined to let it do its job of keeping the boat upright, while making the hull fine and fast and the keel of minimum weight.

Jack Knights, who had little design experience but a great deal of time on the water, came close with his Cobra, which was a plywood chine boat, designed to be lower in cost than the other entries. There were times when she showed well, but there was no doubt she did not have the all-round performance of Tempest.

Having taken a close look at the design parameters in the beginning, and then having followed the fortunes of the class as editor of a sailing journal, it was exciting to get involved many years later as a Tempest owner in the very good Noroton Yacht Club (Connecticut) fleet.

Only then did I realize just how good a boat Ian Proctor had conceived. Industry scuttlebutt had it that the Tempest was good in heavy air, but weak in the light stuff. Yet I found that with the right treatment she would get to the weather mark ahead of boats much bigger. And with her high sail area/ displacement ratio she would fly off the wind. As with many sophisticated designs, it had taken some years for owners and sailmakers to come up with all the right combinations. By the mid 1970s, the Tempest was a very fast boat in all conditions, and a ridiculously fast boat in heavy air.

During my Tempest career, I tried always to locate myself on the end of the tiller extension rather than the end of the trapeze wire. Glen Foster managed to have me suspended over the ocean for a few races, and he did quite well in spite of it. I suspect that for those younger and more agile, the end of the wire would be a thrilling perch, but I was quite turned on by the steering position.

Here was a boat that was very fast, while at the same time well-mannered. You could find yourself in trouble in heavy winds if you were careless. But a foolproof boat would surely be, as the British say, "a crashing bore." It was great sport being on the thin edge of the other kind of crashing.

But the greatest thrill for me was, like all the best thrills, a bit more subtle, a little slower and more deliberate. And that was taking a Tempest to windward in 18 knots of wind and a lump of a sea. Unlike a dinghy, which stops too fast, the Tempest could be poked up over the steep ones, driven through the smooth patches and eased across the valleys. Gently, gently, low and fast, miss the lumps, then poke it up high and very upright, grabbing a free piece of ocean and shoving it off to leeward.

Here was the thrill of dinghy racing combined with incredible drive and force--not a force born of mass and volume, but more like the thrust of a well-tossed spear or of Robin Hood's truest arrow.

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

t is now almost twenty-three years since I sharpened up a pencil to start work on the designing of Tempest.

When I say "start work" I do not really mean that. For one thing, I had been thinking about this boat for a long time before that, so the "start" was really much earlier. And secondly, it could not really be called "work" at all, because this was a boat I wanted very much to design and see sailing--it was a boat that I thought would be an ideal instrument on which helmsmen and crews could both show the skills of modern (1965) sailing. Looking at the Olympic sailboats of the day, I thought it was a boat that badly needed (I still do!). Designing Tempest gave me great pleasure.

There was another thing. All the racing sailboat designs I had produced up until then, about eighty of them, had been commissioned by boat builders or owners. But no one had commissioned Tempest. She was spontaneous. I could make her just as I wanted, without thought for anyone else's requ--irements or ideas and the only restrictions were the parameters stipulated by the IYRU--length, sail area, and the strange (but aesthetically satisfying) requirement that the ends of the hull should appear balanced.

There was one more enjoyment factor. The IYRU had invited designers from all over the world to submit two-man keelboats to trials at Medemblik, Holland. It would be competitive, challenging, intensely interesting to a designer--especially satisfying to the one whose boat did best.

That is how it began when I started to draw the first few lines of Tempest. Then, as always seems to happen when I draw a boat, as the design grew I began to imagine the pencil lines on paper being sailed by people, in different conditions of wind and water, different places, and then these people getting together, sailing races, national championships, world championships, maybe the Olympics. Most of all it was the people who would sail the boat who mattered.

The boat would, hopefully, be a good one, but boats on their own do not make classes and all that is meant by that. The boats have to attract the people to them and make them come alive and make them sail, and to organise them into a class and generate the spirit in that class.

What sort of spirit for Tempest? Obviously competitive--she was going to be that sort of boat, intended for racing, not picnics. But would competition be based on friendly but keen testing of sailing skills, or on bitter battles and everlasting expenditure on new boats, new gear, and exploiting loopholes in slack rules?

Class rules must matter. They can plot the way a class develops and that means they have a strong influence on the people who are attracted to the class and the character of the class itself. So the design and the rules should be co-ordinated and produced together, so that the structure of the boat is able to make the rules effective in carrying out their intention. Tempest was the only boat entered for the IYRU trials with the rules already drafted, though nobody actually took much notice of that.

Well, as things have turned out the Tempest Class certainly has the spirit hoped for when she was being designed. First to breathe life into Tempest was the great team of John Oakeley and Cliff Norbury sailing her to overwhelming success in the IYRU trials, but immediately after this Beecher Moore and Bengt Julin put their interest, influence and weight behind the project and it was wonderful to have their support, which has been given loyally ever since. There have been many others to whom the class--and myself--owe an enormous debt of gratitude. There are too many to name individually, but one cannot let the opportunity pass without mentioning Bruce Falconer, Cliff Norbury, Burkardt Wirz and Jack Sturton, all past Chairmen. Anna Templeton-Cotill must have special mention as a wonderful Class Secretary over many years, with tremendous powers of smooth and unobtrusive organisation.

Now to turn more specifically to The Sandbag, an oddly unbuoyant title for a book on sailing matters, but you see the reason more clearly as you read on. Though this is far from being a typical book on sailing, it is typical of the man who wrote it. Dave McComb, current Chairman of the Tempest Class and author of this book, is an extremely skilled helmsman and crew, with very special knowledge of the Tempest, yet with characteristic generosity and sportsmanship he passes this knowledge, gained over many years of Tempest sailing, on to all. What is more, not only has he written this book, he has also been responsible for organising its illustrations, production and financing.

You cannot read The Sandbag without savouring the enthusiasm behind it and appreciating the meticulous care with which Dave prepares his boat and sails his races.

I believe this book will prove interesting to anyone sailing in the Tempest Class and especially those just joining it (it would be useful to those in many other classes too). It may be called The Sandbag, but it certainly is not heavy reading.

To those who may be new to the Tempest Class when reading this, may I say welcome and I hope you will enjoy the boat--I am sure you will enjoy the spirit of the class, of which this book is a good example.

Thank you, Dave, for writing it.

Ian Proctor

Duncannon

September 1987

Website design by Tarmacsoftee