Francis Meisenbach is a member of the Brooklin Boat Yard Design Team, but he’s spent a lifetime racing on sailboats of all sorts. He says of his days in middle school racing Optis, “It’s seriously the best way to learn about racing.” It was here that Francis began to understand wind, maneuverability, and the different elements of a sailboat and how it works.

From Optis, he moved on to 420s racing for the Harraseeket Yacht Club in Freeport, Maine, where the summer racing team was pretty competitive. When the time came to choose a college, Francis was looking for a solid engineering school, but he also wanted to find a reputable sailing program. He landed at University of Vermont where the sailing team is based on Lake Champlain in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains. Francis speaks very fondly of his days racing for UVM, “It was the coolest place to race sailboats. For months in the fall and spring, you’d get 25 knots of wind steady. I’d go to my engineering classes in the morning, then head to sailing practice and sail for three to four hours, then go home and study. Everyday, I’d ask myself, ‘How am I doing this?’.”

Most of the sailing at UVM was dinghy-based, and Francis admits it was a ton of fun, and the team was highly competitive (They made it to the top ten while he was there). After college but still in Vermont, Francis decided to move on to larger keel boats. He spent some time racing one-designs- Lightning, Etchells, and J24- and went to nationals in the Lightning class. Still, he kept wanting to move forward, so he began to pursue opportunities in ocean racing.

Francis completed his first Bermuda Race (Annapolis to Bermuda) at the age of twenty-five, and he was immediately hooked. He explains why ocean racing instantly appealed to him, “In dinghy racing, there’s only one goal and that’s to go fast. In ocean racing, there are always two goals- to go fast and stay safe, so there's a shift in thinking and performance.”

After Bermuda, Francis moved to Newport to be closer to racing opportunities when they arose. He eventually secured a crew position aboard Spartan, a Herreshoff 50- an iconic classic boat. On Spartan, he traveled to Europe and spent time in racing scene there which he says was “insane.” Francis speaks highly of Spartan and its crew and captain, “To see a boat that powerful and a crew of that size all pushing hard at one time, all relying on each other to do their jobs perfectly… when everyone’s doing well and in rhythm with each other, there’s nothing like it.” Though he loved crewing on Spartan, Francis needed a program that stayed closer to home. He found Black Watch, a classic boat that’s well-known on the classic yacht racing scene. Black Watch is a 1938 Sparkman & Stephens 68’ yawl, and is named after the military unit in Scotland founded in 1725.

Francis regularly races with the Black Watch crew performing a variety of duties including trimming and 2nd bow. Most days, though, you can find him in our design office or down on the dock with his dog, Bear, in tow.