SIGHTINGS a speed of light renovation "This thing is basically dominating my whole life!" Gilles Combrisson is talking about his renovation of Lightspeed, his beloved Wylie 39. "In English we use the pronoun 'she.' As a French person, we have gendered objects: A window is female, a dock is male, and the whole world has been gendered. English doesn't do this except for boats," Gilles explains. "We have given boats some sort of greater quality than being an object; they aren't inanimate — it's somewhere in between. They have an aura. All the people they've seen, places they've gone, the insane amount of money that people have sunk into them." For those of us who dote on sailboats, we wonder: How many hours has Combrisson spent eating, sleeping, and dreaming of the Lightspeed reincarnation? "Oh my God." He laughs, and we're laughing, because it's incalculable. Gilles put hundreds of hours in on the recessed windows alone. Combrisson runs his own small business out of his shop in Richmond, GC continued on outside column of next sightings page
liGhTSPeeD
Left: The Wylie 39 'Lightspeed' lookin' good out on the Bay. Top right: Gilles Combrisson in the midst of his incalculable hours spent working on 'Lightspeed'. Bottom right: Gilles' son has put in some time on the boat as well.
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trophy season California. Several of this year's class — who join the 114 current inductees — hail from the West Coast, including the Bay Area's Sally Honey, Tim Hogan from Los Angeles, who is the designer of the Cal line of boats, and William Lapworth and designer Robert Perry from the Pacific Northwest. Other inductees include Elwood 'Skip' Etchells from New York, Peter Holmberg from the USVI, John Kolius from Texas, John Marshal from New England, Charles Morgan from Florida and Richard Stearns III from Illinois.
Three
Bay Area Sailors Shine at Pan Am Games Bay Area sailors have
taken