Grant “Fuzz” Spanhake is a New Zealand native who currently resides in Annpolis, Maryland with his wife and two daughters.
“Fuzz” gained early experience as an apprentice sailmaker in Auckland at Lidgard Sailmakers. In the mid-1980’s, Grant not only oversaw the construction of the sails for Sir Peter Blake’s entry, “Lion”, in the 1985/86 Whitbread Race, but he was a trimmer and helmsman on board as well. From that point on, his experience as both a sailor and sail designer have led him to participate in many successful campaigns and on many winning teams.
“Fuzz” is a veteran of six America’s Cups and four Round-the-World Races. Additionally, in 2004, he moved his knowledge and expertise into the Olympic realm where he has designed sails and coached several medal-winning teams, in the 2012 London Olympics. He has now been involved with five Olympic’s from 2004 – 2021 working with three counties (Greece, UK, & USA)
Starting in 2015 I started working with the US Olympic development team to groom young talent into future Olympic champions. This has been a highly successful program producing several world champions
Grant was a member of the North Sails Performance Research Group (PRG), advising and designing sails for professional teams such as Bella Mente Racing, Flying Jenny, Catapult, and Rebecca. Now he advises many different sailmakers (North, Quantum, Doyle)
Sail Analysis software
I developed a sail analysis software called “Sail Cloud”
This is a tool for coaches & professional sailors to help sailors from all levels understand sail trim.
Data is important.
As professional sailing coaches, we spend most of our days collecting, organizing, and analyzing sailing performance data.
But, as more and more data has become available to us, we found ourselves spending more time trying to clean and organize than we did coaching and sharing our analysis.
Being limited to desktop applications for our analysis meant that answers about a boat’s performance had to wait until we could spend a few hours at our laptops after the day’s sailing was done.
We were inherently chasing our tails. Providing answers about sail trim and performance after the fact.
We knew there was a better way to collect, analyze, and share data. One that was faster and simpler.
That’s why we built SailCloud.
For more information, or to work with “Fuzz”, please contact him.
GS Yachting 