I answered an 11th hour call to race a couple of days in the Laser SB3 World Championships, to sit between skipper Paul Lovejoy and front man Sam Minns. Now, keelboats are not usually my thing, but here was a great chance to experience one of the most keenly anticipated events of 2008. With a fleet of 137 boats descending on Dun Laoghaire, it's hard to think of a one-design keelboat Worlds that has been bigger this year. In just a few short years the SB3 has become established as a modern classic. Where Tony Castro's previous design, the Cork 1720, has seen its best days, the SB3 appears to be going from strength to strength - partly because it's a bit smaller and can be launched off a trailer rather than needing to be craned in, which I understand is the norm for the bigger 1720.

My first day's outing with Paul and Sam went well enough, three top 10 places in our half of the draw putting us in 8th overall on the scoreboard. Not too shabby. Not that it felt easy, not by a long stretch. Upwind is a very different experience to the kind of sailing I'm used to. Tacking angles are so much higher in a keelboat than a dinghy, I can never tell whether we can tack and cross another boat or not. Not a great trait for a tactician! Downwind with the asymmetric felt a lot more like home, sailing the angles and varying between arcing it up for speed or soaking low for depth, depending on what the conditions or the tactical situation called for.
 
After an encouraging Day 1, Day 2 felt a whole lot different. We were battling for clear air all day, and although it always looked like there was more wind on the left, nothing seemed to come of it when we got there. The further back in the fleet, the greater temptation to sail into a corner in the hope of something better. Whereas sometimes the extra distance is justified in a planing dinghy even if you overstand the layline, I'm probably not telling you anything new when I say that it doesn't work in a keelboat (especially if you choose the wrong corner!). Put the bow down and your boatspeed might increase from 5.8 knots to 6.0 knots. Woo-hoo, hold on to your hats with the acceleration! Not. So overstanding laylines is an absolute no-no. Our ranking plummeted from top 10 to top 20, and my time was done in Dun Laoghaire. It wasn't a happy way to be leaving an event.

If there is any consolation at all, it's that no one found it easy in the SB3 fleet. With boats that travel at virtually the same pace as each other no matter how well or badly you sail it, especially in moderate winds, it can take a whole series before the cream rises to the top.

Geoff Carveth and his crew started the Laser SB3 Worlds as many people's pre-regatta favourites, so it shouldn't come as any great surprise that they won in Ireland. A cursory glance at the results would suggest they won it at a canter, finishing with 52 points ahead of the South African runners-up on 69. But nothing could have been further from the truth, as Geoff himself admits. "It wasn't until the last run of the last race that I actually allowed myself to believe we'd won," he says.

There were three teams in serious contention for the title going into the final race of a 14-heat series. "Dave Hudson and Dave Lenz were in contention, and there was a lot of pressure at the start. We were all together at the start, deliberately, with the aim of taking each other out. Dave Lenz and I got bad starts - Dave had to take a penalty and I had to take a penalty for a different incident with another boat - so we had a lot to do.  If the South Africans (Dave Hudson) came in the top three, they would win the event no matter where we finished. So all we could do was fight back as far up the fleet as possible."

At the first mark, Carveth and Co were in 35th place. By the leeward gate they had surged up to 6th. Game on! Geoff explains how they did it: "We felt that hotting up was the way to go, and we did find just enough breeze to do 10  plus knots on the speedo. Generally in the SB3, if you can get over 10 knots then it generally pays to go hot, so we sailed our own angles away from the fleet, at our own speed and our own waves, and when we gybed back in, we had a good lane of pressure and good waves to take us down to the gate."

Geoff bided his time up the next beat and then pounced again down the final run. "The breeze was picking up all the time, we hotted up again on the downwind leg. The race leader Colin Simonds was probably about 50 boatlengths ahead and we got right up behind him by the leeward gate. We got 2nd in that race, so quite a comeback, and a huge relief after the start we made to that race."

Geoff and his team - girlfriend Sarah Allan, Roz Allen (not sisters) and Roger Gilbert - had quite a lot to drink that night, such is the Anglo Saxon way of celebrating. It was a massive weight off Geoff's shoulders to win the Worlds. "That event was the toughest and the most tense I've ever experienced. There was never a point in the week where we thought ‘we've cracked this'. There was constantly pressure - beyond any other event I've done - where you could fall out the back door so easily. It's definitely the hardest fleet racing i've done in a long time. It was so easy to go backwards, you just need complete concentration and tunnel vision, just keep working forwards. As a team we took it very seriously, we were beyond the call of seriousness."

It surprised me to hear it, but Geoff gets more nervous than you could possibly imagine. His laid-back persona does a good job of disguising how nervous he gets. Leg-shakingly nervous sometimes, so he says. He was feeling it after three days of qualifying races at the SB3 Worlds. "After those first three days I could hardly walk, I was so tense from racing, my back, legs, shins, were so tensed up from racing upwind, it was as if I'd run a marathon. It was nervous tension. On the lighter wind days I'd think to myself, ‘you don't have to be tense, don't have to be hiking so hard, it's only light winds.'

Then again, Geoff reminded himself that Roz would be in a lot more pain than he was. After being knocked off her motorbike a year ago, Roz spent three or four months recovering in hospital. It was one of those ‘will she ever sail again?' scenarios. Gradually she has recovered from her severe injuries, although building up fitness and strength was another challenge. "I could see the pain she was in at the end of each day," says Geoff, "but she has worked so hard to get back into shape for this."

Geoff says Roz and Sarah worked the front of the boat to perfection, and the delegation of roles and the communication team was something they had thought about and worked on a good deal, with Sarah calling the gusts and Roz checking on the compass. This left Roger clear to focus on the boat-to-boat tactics and Geoff to concentrate purely on steering. While Geoff had a hard time giving up the idea of being final decision-maker and handing that responsibility to Roger, he reckoned having a clear division of duties was the better way to go. Clearly it worked.

So for someone who has won a few Solo World Championships, along with numerous nationals in too many classes to mention, how does winning the Laser SB3 Worlds rank? "The best ever. This was the biggest gathering of dinghy and keelboat talent we've seen in a while, with quite a few ex-Olympians, so yes, this is the one I'm proudest of."

Roz missed the prizegiving because she had a plane booked that evening to race back to Southampton in time to drive her RS800 up to Rutland for the Inland Nationals. In the end the poor forecast put her off going, so she could have got hammered in Dun Laoghaire after all. As for Geoff, Sarah and Roger - they did get hammered - but still had to get up at 5.30 in the morning to catch an early plane to East Midlands Airport for the RS200 Inlands, also at Rutland. Talk about gluttons for punishment. While Roger is the reigning national champion and the stand-out performer in the RS200, his ability to sail with a hangover did not match Geoff's, who won the Inlands with three bullets and a discarded 2nd place.

Geoff and Roger are two of a number of talented former RS400 sailors who pepper the front of the SB3 fleet, with others such as Nick Craig (recent winner of his fourth Endeavour Trophy, while Roger finished runner up) crewing for Mike Budd who had a disappointing close to the regatta falling away to 10th overall, and Craig Burlton who ended up 4th overall. Geoff believes this is no coincidence, as although the SB3 bridges the gap between the dinghy and the small keelboat world, he reckons the SB3 bears many similarities to the RS400. "You're displacement sailing upwind, they're both grunty boats, and then downwind you have to choose your angles depending on whether you're in planing mode or soaking for depth."


Despite his very successful career in the SB3, Geoff still sees himself as a dinghy sailor first and foremost. Aged 48, Geoff often gets asked when he's going to grow up and start sailing keelboats full time. This would be funny were it not for the fact that most of the time people are being serious. I know, because I get asked the same question myself. As far as I'm concerned, keelboats are something to take up when I'm too old for dinghies, and I hope that time's not coming any time soon. When I'm too old for keelboats, I'll take up golf, although that will depend on how strict they are about days out at the nursing home, I suppose.

No, far from giving in to the imminent onset of the big half century, Geoff has just bought himself a secondhand Bladerider and he sounds far more excited about that than anything else on his sailing horizon. "That's going to be my challenge for the next few months, and my goal is to compete in the Bloody Mary, although that might be a bit silly. We'll have to see where we've got to by then."

Meanwhile Roger Gilbert is planning on doing his first season in the International 14, crewed by Ben McGrane (recent winning crew of the Fireball Nationals). Roger forged a very successful Corinthian weekend-sailing career in the 49er, which culminated in a 30th place at the 2006 World Championships in the South of France, where he was crewed by Olivier Vidal. Considering at least the top 50 teams in those 49er Worlds were full time professional athletes, that's a very impressive record. But Roger, who won a Cambridge blue for rowing, is blessed with a ridiculously high cardiovascular threshold, and there's nothing he loves more than being able to sit out longer and harder than his rivals. He just wasn't getting the pleasure of the pain from steering the 49er (one of the coolest looking but physically easiest jobs in high performance sailing by the way).

So he bought a secondhand Merlin Rocket for the 2007 season and, crewed by his trusty old RS400 crew James Stewart, Roger set about winning the Nationals and many other major events in his first season, and followed it up again in 2008. Now he is looking for a new challenge and has settled on the International 14, even if steering one of these won't fulfil his ‘no pain no gain' mentality any more than the 49er did. Nor is he particularly interested in the development side of things. Roger is looking for a bog standard package that he can learn to sail and just feel confident in having reasonable boatspeed. With Roger and Ben both being 6'2 bean poles, they are going to have some impressive righting moment while still weighing a tad less than 160kg all up, which seems to be about the going weight for 14s these days - although the Aussies are mostly a good deal heavier.

As a class we're very lucky to be getting Roger and Ben - although I might change my mind if they start beating us on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure Roger wouldn't have even considered getting into the 14 if there wasn't a good production hull on offer, and in recent years that's something we've been sorely lacking. Going the custom build route has been the cause of many ongoing headaches in the 14 fleet, so it's great that Chris Turner - having got his 49er and 29er bread-and-butter production lines well organised after buying into Ovington Boats - is gearing up to produce some new hulls from the Pickled Egg design drawn by Phil Morrison.