A family affair for Star sailors
Fresh from the Star Worlds in Marblehead in the U.S. in the fall, Rob Cullen likes racing Star sailboats, and he also likes to beat his dad, who is in his 70s and still out there on the course in the hunt for that ever-elusive bullet finish.
Both Rob, 44 and his father, Allan, 72, are members of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and regularly race against each other in both club racing and at monthly regattas, where a few crack Star sailing teams from Seattle visit and race against 15 Canadian teams.
Father and son competed against each other in different teams in Marblehead in September at the Star Worlds, with Rob finishing 29th and top Canadian. His dad, who races with an American, came 71st out of a deep field of 84 teams from around the world, including Germany, Argentina, and the Scandinavian countries where the Star boat rules.
Cullen qualified for the Star Worlds by winning a district racing event that draws sailors from the U.S. Pacific Northwest. He says the Worlds are also open, meaning others can race at the event. There were five Canadian teams at the 2022 event.
Cullen races his two-person Star with James Hynes, while his dad teams up with Dave Martin. Other Canadian teams at the Star Worlds include Andrew Allan and James McDonald, Jerry Wendt and Bryan Milne, and Bradley Sheppard and Quinton Gallon.
Cullen hauls his boat across Canada and the U.S. to get to the Worlds, and also attended the last one held in Miami in 2016. His dad keeps a Star boat in Florida, as well, which came in handy when a major race is held there.
Racers pay $1,150 USD for the Worlds, but organizers have a rule that if you are under 30, the cost is only $150. It’s a way to draw more young people to the racing boat.
At the worlds, Cullen says he enjoys the start line, which can get quite busy with 80 or so boats vying for the best position as the horn blows to send the boats off.
‘I like it. I’m calm about it. I always seem to find a way through,” he says.
He grew up racing Lasers and did an Olympic campaign from 1996 to 2000, but didn’t make the cut because of some stiff competition in the fleet in those days. He had some successes along the way, winning Canadian events and some Laser titles.
Shortly after his Laser campaign wound up, he connected with Ross MacDonald and together they planned an Olympic campaign in a Star sailboat, a popular two-person, racing keel boat. But there were complications with the campaign, almost from the start.
The problem for Cullen wasn’t about changing boats. He says it wasn’t hard climbing from a Laser into a Star sailboat, which requires more setup before racing.
“It’s very technical. The amount of work you do on the dock is amazing.” Cullen often gets to Star events an hour ahead of time, to tune the rig for the weather conditions — like adjusting the upper and lower shrouds, and the mast rake, and check on the stays.
Cullen realized that getting into another four-year Olympic campaign immediately was going to be costly, and about eight months in he had to bow out. He says a new Laser at the time was about $7,000 compared with a new Star at about $80,000.
Meanwhile, he was struggling with his attempts to bulk up by regularly hitting the gym to reach the ideal weight for crew who need to scramble out on the foredeck more than the helmsman. The weight gain just wasn’t happening.
MacDonald would later join up with Ontario sailor Mike Wolfs and together they won a Silver Medal in 2004 at the Athens Games. It was Canada’s last Olympic medal in sailing, and the Star sailboat, a fixture at the Olympics from 1932, was dropped in 2012.
After losing it’s Olympic status, the Star sailboat lost some of its lustre. But keen sailors over the years have kept local fleets alive, and there are active pockets of Star racers around the country, including in the Toronto area and Vancouver, with crews who are still trying to tame that big mainsail and win at local, regional and world events.
“I didn’t have enough money,” Cullen, 44, a firefighter from North Vancouver who works in Delta, B.C., says about that lost Star sailboat campaign in his younger years.
“Ross (MacDonald) called me up and said let’s go to the Kiel Worlds and to Europe, and I didn’t have the cash.” Adds Cullen: “He gave me a week but I knew I couldn’t do it.
“The amount of sailing I learned in the eight months from Ross was amazing…he really knew how to sail downwind.”
He says in hindsight, maybe he should have begged and borrowed to pursuit his Olympic dream. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have mortgaged my future.”
At the same time, Cullen says he found himself in a circle of very competitive racers who seemed to have a little bit more than he could offer.
“The level of competitiveness in Olympic classes was very intense…I never got that experience when I was younger. I really didn’t feel I could live up to those standards.
“I had the drive but I didn’t know how to get it out of me.”
Nowadays, Cullen is philosophical about his life and accepts that he took a different way and says, in the end, he’s happy about the way things turned out.
When he left the Star Olympic campaign, he took some time away from sailing, joined a firefighter’s program, took a job and jumped into family life, raising kids. Cullen slowly migrated back to sailing, and joined up with the Star fleet.
And, of course, racing against his dad.
“I still get to compete and I still get to race,” Cullen says. “I love racing against my dad and I don’t think he will ever beat me.”
In fact, during a recent local regatta, during the first race, Cullen crowded the start line and forced his dad to take an over-early penalty. “I pinched the line and forced him over early and he ended up missing third place by one point.
“I won the race but I said “wait, I did this to my own dad,”” Cullen says with a laugh. Cullen’s father takes wins and losses in stride, and seems to measure success these days by how many more sailors he can recruit into the Star fleet, says his son.
There are five sailors in Vancouver who are racing one of Cullen senior’s old boats. Cullen says his dad has a certain method to building the fleet.
“He goes out and buys a boat and then hands it to someone and says “sail this and see if you like it.
“They say they like it and he says “okay, you buy my boat and I’ll get another one.”” It always seems to work, and the fleet grows by one boat each time.
A used, competitive Star sailboat can be had for as little as $4,000, says Cullen. He has bought a new Star sailboat for $22,000 USD, and prices can go north all the way to 70,000 Euros or more for a modern, new racer.