It was hard to know what to expect with the 14 World Championships in Long Beach, California. When you're sailing a development class, past form is not a reliable indicator of possible success. Reigning world champions Lindsay Irwin and Andrew Perry would be leading a strong Australian contingent to the USA, and the previous world champions, Rob Greenhalgh and Dan Johnson, would be joining a squad of British sailors who had been hard at work developing new gear for this event.

Meanwhile a small but focused group of west coast sailors was also beavering away in a bid to bring the world title back to the USA. The last time the Yanks had won was in Bermuda 2001 when Zach Berkowitz and Trevor Baylis applied T-foil rudder technology to devastating effect, winning a windy regatta by a crushing margin. These days everyone is using T-foil rudders. You are not even the game unless you have one, because they make the boat higher and faster upwind and lower and faster downwind, with the added bonus of high-speed pitchpoling being relegated from an ever-present danger to an occasional hazard.

So the Americans would have to come up with something different. And they did, with Trevor Baylis once again at the centre of the revolution. "I wrote everything down from when Zach and I raced the boat in 2001," explains Trevor. "I took notes on boat layout, measurements, and wrote down a wish-list of things that I'd like to try if I ever got back into the 14. I liked the idea of doing another Worlds with Tina."

Trevor had campaigned the 49er pretty hard with his wife Tina in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and they only just missed on qualifying for a spot. Since then Tina more or less retired from sailing while she brought up their two young kids, although Trevor has done the occasional campaign - including a one-season assault on the 505 class when the Worlds came to Santa Cruz in 2004. Oh, and by the way, Trevor won that too, crewing for Morgan Larson.

So Trevor picked up where he left off with the 14 in 2001. "I'd almost forgotten I'd taken all these notes but I did a quick trawl through my laptop and up popped this Excel spreadsheet with rigging layouts and a few ideas that we hadn't time to try out for Bermuda." One of those was a gybing board. The gybing board is almost a standard piece of equipment in the 505 and Trevor believed it could work on the 14 too.

It was an innovation that had gone virtually unconsidered in 14 circles, certainly in Europe or Australia, and perhaps with good reason. After all, gybing boards are very fiddly, highly technical pieces of equipment, and they're difficult to make work properly. They have gone in and out of fashion for years in the Five-Oh, although Mark Upton-Brown and Ian Mitchell certainly used one this year to win the 505 Worlds at Hayling Island. That said, Upton-Brown is no fan of them. "They should ban them from the 505," he says. "You spend ages trying to get the angles right, and then the bearing surfaces on the board and the centreboard case wear out quite quickly, so there's a lot of ongoing boat maintenance involved."

Gybing boards are all about reducing leeway, by angling the front edge of the board slightly to windward by no more than a few degrees. When they work correctly they can be devastatingly efficient, enabling a 505 to travel through the water at the same speed as a conventionally-foiled 505 but sailing a couple of degrees higher. Pretty useful off a crowded start line. But when the breeze increases and the water starts chopping up, gybing boards can be a liability and so most 505 sailors raise their centreboards a notch (which switches off the gybing capabilities of the board) in around 10 or 12 knots. Anything stronger than this and the gybing board makes the boat slower than a conventional board.

So you might have thought that a boat as efficient as a 14 (which make about 11.5 knots to windward in a good breeze) wouldn't have much need for gybing boards as the leeway factor must be relatively low. Even so, Trevor didn't see much harm in giving it a try as like the 505s he could get rid of the gybe by raising the daggerboard. Why, by the way, do they call these things ‘gybing boards'? It doesn't make much sense to me, as ‘gybing' is not what they do, but anyway...

It should be said that the gybing board was just one of many things that Trevor applied his enormous brain to when designing his new 14. In fact there is hardly an element of the boat - not one block or rope - that he didn't question when planning this boat. The one thing he did leave alone was the fundamental hull shape, opting for a Bieker 5 which is pretty much the standard hull at the top of the fleet these days.

Apart from that, everything was up for grabs. The accepted wisdom when you're getting into a class that you don't know much about is to copy the gear that the top guys are using and learn how to use that properly, before coming up with anything new that other people might not have thought of. Trevor, however, bypasses that whole process and takes things from first principles. "The first thing I do is pick up the rules for the class and read what is and isn't allowed," he says. I suppose it's this ‘first principles' approach that enables Trevor to come in from left-field with ideas like the gybing board.

Trevor also has an engineer's confidence in knowing what he is looking for from the rig. For him, none of the existing masts on the market did quite what he was looking for. He doesn't think much to the skiff-style whippy-top rig that is used on the 49er or 18-foot skiff, for example, preferring to achieve an even amount of bend throughout the length of the mast. So he worked with designer Paul Bieker to come up with a mast section that got closer to that desired even-bend characteristic.

For sails, Trevor didn't go for any of the proven manufacturers in the 14 class but instead went to local west coast sailmakers Jay and Pease Glaser, a husband and wife team who respectively hold Tornado and 470 Olympic medals. It was the Glaser Tornado mainsail design that formed the basis for the 14 mainsail, a very square-topped vertical leech design.

Out went some accepted 14 gizmos such as the reverse vang which most of us in the 14 accept as a must-have tool simply to free up space for the crew in the cockpit. "I can't stand the thought of what it does to the mast low down, so we weren't going to have that." Bear in mind that Trevor is 95kg and 6'4 so he's not a small lad to be getting through such a small space, let alone with a conventional vang barring the way. Having said that, Trevor applied his engineering nous to come up with a not-quite conventional vang that worked in tension but didn't take up the usual triangle that most vangs take up. He tried to explain it to me on the phone but I think it's something you have to see rather than imagine.

One of the other trends of recent times in the 14 has been towards simplicity, with many crews opting for a set-and-forget rig. This is very admirable as there's nothing worse than having a load of controls to distract you while you're meant to be racing. But on the long championship courses favoured by the 14 fleet a lot can change with the wind and wave conditions. At Long Beach, Trevor was expecting races typically to start in 8 knots and build to 16 knots by the finish. Although the Worlds ended up being far from typical, he still felt the need for all eight of the different controls that he had led up to each trapezing rack. These included forestay and shroud tension, as well as the angle of gybe for the daggerboard.

For all the rope that went into the boat, it was a remarkably clean cockpit, and the level of thought that Trevor put into the operation of the controls was immense. For example, downwind you don't want the gybing mechanism working in the daggerboard - you want it aligned exactly fore and aft. So when Trevor went in to the hoist the gennaker, linked into the kite halyard was a system that automatically switched off the gybing mechanism. Very smart.

While Trevor is to be congratulated for his ingenuity, I asked him whether he thought the gybing board should continue to be allowed in the 14. After all, it's quite an expensive modification and - unlike something like the T-foil rudder which radically transformed the performance of the boat - it offers only a marginal gain in performance. Right now on the International 14 forum (www.international14.org/forum) a debate is raging as to whether the class should ban this technology.

Trevor takes this view: "You have to accept that the 14 is an open class, and gybing boards are part of the development process. When you sail a 14 upwind in moderate breezes in choppy water, it feels so good. The boat is probably two foot shorter than it should be but it still feels great - so much better than a 505 ever feels, for example - and that's because of all the development that's gone into it." To him, the gybing board is part of that ongoing march towards 14 perfection.

So after all this, you might be forgiven for thinking that Trevor and his wife Tina went on to win the Worlds. Actually they didn't. That honour went to class newcomers Howie Hamlin and Euan McNicol, an American/Australian combination who ordered an identical package to the Baylises. They sailed it with it for 30 or 40 days during the summer, and then raced a more consistent series than their team mates. For all their lack of experience in the 14, 53-year-old Hamlin is a former 505 World Champion (finishing runner-up at Hayling this summer) and both he and 30-year-old McNicol have helmed their way to 18-foot skiff world titles in their own right.

In some ways the Worlds was decided on the first day when a number of key players including the Baylises started early and were given OCS while Hamlin kept his nose clean and won the first race. "After that," says Trevor, "we started very conservatively because we felt our backs were against the wall." They even went back to restart in one race where they later discovered it was another boat that had infringed and not them. So the Baylises finished runners-up, just edging out the third sistership sailed by precocious young Shark Khan and Paul Allen. Even if they didn't win the regatta, Trevor's technical ideas were once again vindicated.

It was a disappointing regatta from the British perspective, except that Archie Massey and George Nurton proved that their new boat was far and away the fastest in 7 knots or less, and that was without a gybing board. The shame for them and the other Brits was that it had been such a light-wind summer in the UK that they never had the time to develop their speed in the breeze. It's always harder to find more power than to get rid of it, so congratulations to Archie and George for developing a world-class package in light winds. Probably time, though, to take a leaf from Trevor's book and stick a few more cleats on the side of the boat. That way they might stand a better chance of getting rid of the power when it's not needed.