Lake Ray Hubbard, on the outskirts of Dallas, is a honey hole for Texan jig-slingers dropping hooks for white bass, catfish and crappie, but it’s also a sweet spot for fish of a different sort. We’re talking Sunfish, sailing’s most iconic and colorful one-design dinghy. Hubbard is plenty big, but when 100 sailors schooled for their world-championship title, it was indeed one fantastic feast.
Neck-deep in the action was Rod Favela, a competitor wearing multiple hats as boat wrangler, parts supplier, overnight repairman, broker, and entertainer. Those who’ve been in Favela’s position with a hand in hosting a major class championship know well the mental load: Racing in a world championship is tough. Doing it while on the clock is exhausting. Doing both well is superhuman.
The simple Sunfish came to the recreational sailing masses in the 1960s with Alcort Sailboats. The production run was a long one, and with a few other short-run builders, the hatchery eventually landed at Rhode Island’s Vanguard Sailboats and then finally LaserPerformance, which relocated production overseas to China in 2016 and now builds in Portugal.
Over the past decade, LP has frustrated Sunfish stalwarts and dealers, particularly in the US, with supply shortages and batches of poorly built boats. Sourcing boats, as well as class-legal replacement parts, has been a nagging issue for the class, all of which has prompted the International Sunfish Class Association to take matters into its own hands by licensing new builders and stripping LP of its ability to produce class-legal race boats.
It’s been a messy relationship, and one that was even messier when it came time to supply boats to world championships. Historically, Sunfish class world championships were provided-boat regattas that put competitors in even boats and injected new boats into the host fleet, or even started new ones. The convenience for all sailors to just show up in any country and race was a big deal. LaserPerformance stopped providing boats after the Worlds in Italy in 2022, and the last two (Miami and Texas) were bring-your-own, which is fine for the natives but not for foreign qualifiers who rely on charter boats. An international field is what makes a world championship legitimate.
The Sarasota Worlds in 2020 was the 50th anniversary of the class, and it was here where Favela, Mike Brown and the Rush Creek YC in Heath, Texas, put forth their bid to host the 2024 edition.
“Me being an LP dealer, on the world ISCA board and a Rush Creek member, it was a natural path for me to be involved,” Favela says. “The regatta chair, Mary Ann Hopper, is a very good Sunfish sailor too, and I gave her hell for not sailing in the event, which, by the way, was very wise of her.”
Favela being Favela, a top-level sailor with an equal amount of human energy, he went all in for his hometown championship. “I’m like: ‘I’m gonna sail. I’m gonna bring the boats and I’m gonna charter the boats, and we’re gonna fix the boats and help organize and sponsor and race, and I’m gonna kick some ass,’” he says with his characteristic and infectious laughter. “And that was working fine until Day One.”
Favela’s Vela Sailing operation is a sailor’s one-stop shop in nearby Rockwall, Texas, and as the local Sunfish dealer, he was the hook to source charter boats, especially for the incoming cadre of hot-shot Latino sailors. He took it upon himself, and his business’s reputation, to make sure the inbound LP boats, built time zones away in Portugal, were up to world-caliber standards. He was on the hook for 32 of them, at no discount, plus 110 new Texas Edition sails from North Sails at $600 a pop.
“When I talked to LP about their commitment to the Worlds, I said, ‘Listen, guys, this is a good opportunity to improve your reputation with the Sunfish class,’” Favela says. “‘So how about we work together on getting the boats a little better? And what I mean by better is at least go back as close as we can to what a Vanguard-built Sunfish was.’”
For any dealer supplying boats to a major regatta, the charter business is high risk and time consuming. “The logistics have many sides, then follows quality,” Favela says. “You have almost zero time to fix a boat that arrives four days before the first gun, and you have a customer who is coming from overseas with very little time to test, try, and feel comfortable with equipment, so everything has to be perfect. It is definitely a high-stress situation.”
Of the 100-boat fleet for the Rush Creek edition of the Worlds, 51 were privately owned boats. Forty-nine were charters, including Vela’s stash of 34 brand-new boats. “We needed more charter boats than what we could offer, so we had to rely on the private charters,” Favela says, which meant connecting owners with overseas customers and also managing transactions and logistics on the back end. “But it was amazing,” Favela says. “Everybody rolled up their sleeves, boats came in on triple-stack trailers from every side of the country, and everybody worked super hard to pull it off.”
The Texas Edition hulls—with an apropos red, white and blue, and Lone Star graphics scheme—made it to Rush Creek after an anxious holdup at a TSA-bonded warehouse in Georgia. With all hands on deck, screws went in, gelcoat blemishes got patched, and the goods were delivered to the sailors for a week of high-level racing.
“They were solid,” Favela says, satisfied in the extra effort and diplomacy that resulted in 32 race-ready vessels. For good measure, Favela kept one for himself, another dinghy in his personal stash.
His fascination with the Sunfish draws from his youth sailing days in Venezuela. There were no Optimists at the time, only the Sunfish left behind from the Pan American Games, which have long fueled South America’s strength in the class. Today, especially, Latin American sailors are highly respected for their big-wind, big-wave prowess, gleaned from ocean sailing and government-funded programs that nurture elite sailors to the world stage.
“They are scary-good,” Favela says of the Central and South American Sunfish sailors. “The Pan American status gets them support. They don’t throw a lot of money at them, but there is enough financial motivation to keep them engaged, so the competition is fierce.”
And because Latin American Sunfish sailors train in ocean venues, they are intensely kinetic with the boat. In Texas, for example, past world-champion Jonathan Martinetti, of Ecuador, led the way with three Rule 42 violations—pumping and rocking.
“They are very loud and aggressive with the way they work the boat,” Favela says, “and it works, but only if you do it the right way.”
And if you don’t, you get caught.
The physical prowess of the hard-hiking Latinos with their thunder thighs, however, wasn’t as applicable in the flat water and unpredictable windshifts dished out on Lake Ray Hubbard during the Worlds. These were conditions for world-champion Conner Blouin, of Charleston, South Carolina. Blouin, Favela says, is “just gifted and fast.”
His forte is simplicity in the boat, and his risk-management mastery gets him around the racecourse with relative ease. “He sails so clean,” Favela says. “He is able to cut his losses quickly. He’s very into the chess game on the water, but with sailing the boat, he doesn’t bother with all the adjustments—he’s more like hoist, play with the gooseneck, trim, keep it flat, clean starts, and off you go.”
Blouin’s polar opposite is the Master, Paul Foerster, a three-time Olympic medalist and consummate tweaker of the Sunfish’s quirky lateen rig. Foerster is “the walking evolution of sailing,” Favela says. “He’s never satisfied with the status quo and always trying to find a way to do something better.”
Naturally, that comes from Foerster’s illustrious career in highly tunable boats such as the Flying Dutchman and the 470, but how does he possibly find more speed in such an absurdly simple boat that’s been tinkered with by great sailors for more than 50 years? He’s big on fine-tuning the Jens rig, Favela says, which is essentially a nuanced way to tie the spars by adding a second halyard position to depower the sail, allowing lighter-weight sailors to hang with the big kids in strong winds.
There’s a big Jens, a little Jens, a control Jens, and gooseneck shifts fore and aft—Foerster uses them all. “He knows what he’s doing,” Favela says, “and while most of the adjustments on the Sunfish don’t give you a giant edge, Paul is extremely fast and knows how to use them.”
Foerster also crushes dreams downwind.
“He has such a crazy ability of developing the feel of what works,” Favela says. “I’ve learned from him that the boat really responds by sailing by the lee—until it starts to hate it. It’s proven that the boat does better if you jibe rather than pushing it by the lee. If you can surf the Sunfish, and at the same time you feel you’re going by the lee—jibe!”
Favela is fortunate to have Foerster as a training partner and mentor, and that leg up had him in good standing after the first day of racing. With a 15th in the first race, he was off to a good start, considering the stress and distractions he had to deal with before he even slipped his dolly into the water.
“I have a mental blessing in that I can switch off my brain from the land business once I hit the water and start racing,” he says. “I remember the feeling at the first gun, when Mark Foster (the PRO) put the class flag up. Seeing everybody lining up for the start, I had this big smile on my face. And then, as I’m going upwind after the start, it was like, ‘Holy sh-t, I’m racing, like, wow, OK, now I gotta really do it.’ Everything that had happened, everything that everyone at the club had done for a year and a half, was finally real.”
Feeding off the euphoria, Favela knocked off a third-place finish and then a sixth, and found himself fourth overall in the standings. The unpredictability and randomness of the day’s easterly wind was right up his alley, and that he somehow managed top-20 finishes in the super-competitive world-caliber fleet was unexpected. That night, after cleaning gelcoat from his hands, his head hit the pillow hard, but his mind was still racing. “I was going over a story of myself, thinking that I cannot believe that for me to do well, it has to be chaos.”
The following morning, Favela was leading the day’s one and only race before losing it to Canadian Luke Ramsay, who would go on to finish second overall. Still, a second in this fleet was monumental, and he was still at the top of the fleet. All was good for the jovial Venezuelan-American spark plug.
But then the cold front arrived, and with it came a wind switch, a big breeze, and a tumble down the standings. Over the remaining days of the regatta, Favela piled on the points (38, 20, 23, UFD, 15, 19, 36). While he raises his hand and pleads guilty for taking big gambles and serving as mayor of Cornersville, Texas, perhaps the burden of work and play had finally taken its toll. Or maybe the youngsters and the wily masters of the fleet were getting sharper.
“In the Sunfish, the younger guys have the strength, maybe not the maturity,” Favela says. “But the sailors in their 20s and mid-30s, they have everything, the whole package, going for them. For those of us north of…not so much.”
There was also the sheer scale of the 100-boat fleet amassed on the lakeshore-bound racecourse, where clean air and open lanes didn’t come easily. “The fast guys go away very quickly in the conditions that benefit them for that race,” Favela says. “That group is the hardest in the Sunfish class because everybody is going at the same speed.
“So, a good start is more important when the conditions are more benevolent than on the extremes of the wind range because the whole mass is moving around the course at the same speed. The fastest Sunfish maybe goes 5.1 knots, and the slowest Sunfish sails at 4.9. So, horizon jobs happen based on geometry, not necessarily speed. So, if the conditions are not too variable, that mass remains together, like a big Roman army marching all together.”
While Blouin sailed away with the world title after sweeping the regatta’s final three races, Ramsay was a whopping 20 points in arrears, followed by six Latin American sailors and Foerster ninth as the top Grand Master (age 60 to 69). Fellow Grand Master Mike Ingham was 10th. Favela, at 14th, was the top Apprentice Master (40 to 49), a result that he’s certainly proud of.
“It makes me so happy that such an elementary boat can bring together so many countries to race at such a high level,” he says, “to see the team at the club, the family of Rush Creek working so hard to put together such a great event. It was a huge achievement to go hardcore racing with a great race committee, with a great crowd, and walk away thinking, Holy cow, if you finish top 10 of this thing, you are somebody. And kudos to those who did.”
