Justin Chisholm Profiles Leading Melges 24 Tactician Daniele Cassinari

Daniele Cassinari was introduced to sailing at the age of seven by his father, a local doctor who sailed Stars for fun at the weekends. ‘On occasion my father would take me out with him on the Star. I really loved the experience and still have very fond memories of those days. We were lucky enough to grow up in a house by a lake and pretty soon I had an Optimist to learn to sail by myself.’ Daniele’s older brother, Giovanni, had also been bitten by the sailing bug and was the first to try his hand at racing. ‘Whenever my brother raced, I would always go to watch him, either from the shore or begging a ride on one of the support boats. Then when I turned fourteen, I started to race the Optimist myself. I loved the racing immeditely and remember taking it all very seriously.’ A year later he travelled to Ireland for his first experience of big fleet racing at the Optimist World Championship in Dublin. Daniele has two overriding memories of that event. ‘Firstly I recall how bad my result was! Most of all however, I remember how strong the tide was in Dublin Bay. For a boy brought up sailing on a lake, it was all very strange and I had never seen anything like it in my life!’

Despite the trauma of the tides and the poor result, Daniele was now more than ever hooked on the sport of sailboat racing. At sixteen he graduated from the Optimist to the 420 Class, in which he won the Italian National Championship, before moving on to the 470 Class at the age of twenty. ‘Initially I helmed my own boat, but after a couple of years my brother and I decided to team up, with him steering and me crewing. Giovanni had just started his own sail loft and I used to work there a few days a week.’ The Cassinari brothers put a great deal of time and effort into their 470 campaign and all this hard work was rewarded, when in 1990 they won the European Championship – a result which Daniele still regards as his greatest sailing achievement. ‘In 1992 we stopped dinghy sailing to put all our effort in our sail loft. The business was growing so quickly that there was no time for us to campaign an Olympic class seriously.’ In 1995 they moved their loft to Lake Garda and soon after signed a contract with Quantun Sails. Lake Garda at time was very active with one-design keelboat racing and Daniele began to concentrate on these classes. ‘Beside the one design movement, IMS was also growing in Italy so I started building my experience in bigger boats either as a trimmer or tactician.’ Keelboat success was not slow in coming and in the space of a few years Daniele racked up two Mumm 30 World Championship victories, two Quarter Ton Cup wins as well as a victory at the IMS World Championship.

2002 was a year of change for Daniele, with his victorious Mumm 30 owner Maurizio Abba eying up the Melges 24 as his next challenge and the Cassinari loft becoming a part of the North Sails family. The commercial decision at least was a straightforward one. ‘Our business was and still is very racing oriented, so to be part of the strongest racing sail-making group in the world was a real no brainer.  The decision move to the Melges 24 proved similarly easy to make. ‘We sailed our first Melges 24 regatta in November in Hyeres, with an average wind speed of twenty-five knots. That was really so much fun and of course I immediately fell in love with the Melges 24. Since then I have spent so much time racing Melges 24’s and yet I still think it is the most fun and competitive sailing you can have outside of the Olympic classes.’ Daniele has spent the majority of his Melges 24 career racing aboard either Abba’s Alina or Giovanni Maspero’s Joe Fly and between these two campaigns has clocked up an impressive record, winning the European Championship in 2005 (he finished second in both 2003 and 2009), placing second in the World Championship 2004 and 2009, 5th in 2005, 4th in 2007 and 3rd in 2008.

Daniele believes that his consistent success in the Melges 24 class comes as a result of his dinghy and keelboat experience. ‘The Melges 24 is really a mix of the two. In medium light conditions it reacts like a keelboat but the more the breeze picks up, the more it behaves like a dinghy. For this reason I think to be a good Melges 24 tactician you must have good experience of both these types of sailing. The tactician role in the Melges 24 is not like on a bigger keel boat where he just moves from one side to the other. In this class he must get involved in sailing the boat and be able to ‘feel’ the boat.’ Daniele is quick to point out however, how important it is that the entire crew are able to ‘feel’ the boat too. ‘All the four or five people onboard are crucial to the boat’s speed, so everyone must be sensitive to movement of body weight and boat trim all the time.’

Although Daniele’s business requires that he sails a variety of classes, the Melges 24 remains his true passion. ‘I sail mostly offshore one designs like the Farr 40, Melges 32, X 35 and X41 as well as small one design like Melges 24 and Melges 20. Because of my business I also race with ORC, IRC and Open classes. The class I like the most is the Melges 24, not just because of the boat itself, but also because of the people and the class itself. No surprise then that he will be back on the Melges 24 circuit once again in 2010. ‘This year I’ll race all season with Alberto Bolzan (former Pilot Italia team) onboard Italian president Paolo Testolin and Gianni Catalogna’s boat. We plan to sail all the Volvo Cup regattas and the World Championship in Tallin.’

Clearly Daniele’s enduring enthusiasm and love for the Melges 24 class shows no sign of abating any time soon. ‘I believe that the Melges 24 class will be alive for long time more. We are seeing a big increase in the Eastern Europe right now. The attraction is still the same, sailing this boat is so much fun that it will keep making people happy for long time to come.’