When Paul Flynn decided to return to sailing after a decades-long absence, he didn’t follow the expected route. Instead, he bought Paradox – a 63-foot carbon fibre trimaran with offshore racing pedigree and the sort of speed potential that turns heads on any racecourse.
It was, by any measure, an audacious move.
Flynn, who originally discovered sailing in his 30s on Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, had enjoyed time on a modest Yingling keelboat— Olympic class, yes, but a world away from the turbocharged power of Paradox. After moving away from the lake, sailing took a backseat to life and family. It wasn’t until his early 50s that he made the decision to re-enter the sailing world—and when he did, he didn’t mess around.
“I always knew I’d come back to sailing,” Flynn explains. “I’d had the idea of buying a cruising catamaran, maybe something like an Outremer. I sailed on several likely candidates. But then a friend said, ‘You need to meet this guy.’ That guy was Clint Clemens, a trimaran fanatic from Newport RI – and he changed everything.”
Clemens introduced Flynn to the thrill of trimaran sailing by taking him out on his own 50-foot trimaran in Newport. That experience proved pivotal.
“It was just magic,” Flynn recalls. “I’d never seen anything move so fast and yet feel so comfortable, so friendly to sail. I was completely hooked.”
I check-in with Tudor Team Alinghi’s director for technical and sailing, New Zealand America’s Cup veteran Dave Endean – the man in charge of making sure that in AC38 the Swiss syndicate improves on its somewhat lacklustre performance in the last Cup in Barcelona.
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