Paul the Builder

Half the battle of remote-control-sailboat racing is building the little yacht. Thankfully, I suckered this guy into building mine for me.

The DragonFlite 95 remote-control high-performance sailboat arrived in a big, long box at my home just as the COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives with stay-at-home orders. Here in Rhode Island, early March is nothing special in terms of outdoor activities, so once spring sailing got canceled, I adapted, teaching myself to splice and staying fit on my bike. Another thing on my quarantine to-do list was to build the DragonFlite, which sat for weeks next to my bedroom-turnedoffice desk before being moved to the closet, out of sight, for another day.

And then summer came. Real sailing returned. Day by day, my evenings got busier: Laser racing on Monday nights, family sails on Tuesday nights, and eventually, by late June, J/24 racing with the homies. All of this was good for my sanity but not for the DragonFlite collecting dust in my closet.

“Good winter project,” I murmured to myself one morning as I went in to retrieve a pair of underwear. But soon after this procrastination moment, there was a chain of events that would rescue the vessel from its abandonment. It started with a Facebook post about a new fleet of 20 DragonFlites that appeared at Sail Newport, our public sailing facility. And then another fleet arrived at the New York YC, just across the harbor. Hmm. Maybe I should build the darn thing, I thought.

I hemmed. I hawed. I recalled my experiences as a kid, building plastic models and how I never had the patience for the Testors plastic cement to dry before moving on to the next step in the directions. Ah, the

Photographer and remote-controlyacht racer Paul Todd assembles a DragonFlite 95. The essential tool, he says, is tweezers for tying knots.