Meet The Riggers Crafting Magic

Joe Lark, Alex Bowdler, Jerry Merrill, Carl Merrill, Sammy Hodges, Ben Quatromoni at Kingspoke’s containers. Sammy Hodges

If you’re looking for professional rigger Carl Merrill, poke your head into one of his several 40-foot metal shipping containers bearing the distinctive cross-stich logo of his company, Kingspoke. If Merrill or any of his fellow riggers aren’t at their workbenches fiddling with a high-tech splice or mocking up a complicated purchase system, check the local shipyards of Rhode Island’s Aquidneck Island. Chances are, wherever there’s a grand-prix machine on the dock or on the hard, you’ll likely find it getting the Kingspoke royal treatment.

In the context of US grand-prix yacht racing, the island—and Newport, in particular—is the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The city hosted the America’s Cup for 53 years and, on any given weeknight on Narragansett Bay, you might see classic 12-Metres engaged in a tacking duel under the iconic Pell Bridge, a group of TP52s training with coach boats nipping at their transoms, or two dozen Shields chasing each other around the cans, with Moths or wing-foilers darting about throughout the action. The island is also home to high-tech composite boatbuilders, speed shops, sail lofts and, of course, some of the best technical rigging shops in the US. It should therefore come as no surprise that when Merrill discretely hung Kingspoke’s shingle out in 2017 there was little to zero fanfare. That’s how Merrill rolls. 

A native of Lubec, Maine, the state’s easternmost town (and home to Quoddy Head, the easternmost point in the contiguous United States), Merrill started doing “a bit” of sailing at around age 10. When his family moved to Wakefield, Rhode Island, a few years later, he began racing, and continued at the University of Rhode Island, where he studied ocean engineering. His chosen field of study seemed to scratch an itch.

“I liked doing the engineering problem-solving, you know, putting stuff together,” he says. “That’s what drew me to ocean engineering—we got to make an autonomous submarine sophomore year, although there wasn’t a whole lot of hands-on work after that.”

He quickly realized that post-collegiate careers in his field were of the office type, and he “wasn’t super keen on that.”

With Rhode Island being the land of opportunity for aspiring pro sailors, Merrill promptly found his gigs, running various big-boat programs, including Glenn Darden’s Swan 42 and J/70, both called Hoss. His daily exposure to the fiddly problem-solving nature of high-tech race-boat rigging proved an excellent match for his engineer’s brain, which then led to him joining the grand-prix specialists at the established Gorilla Rigging, where he spent six years as shop manager.

Gorilla’s techie approach to many of the tip-of-the-spear yacht-rigging challenges was right up Merrill’s alley. After a successful stint here, Merrill sought a change of pace and committed to more program-focused freelance rigging, both textile and through bespoke hardware and systems—the work they produced at Gorilla during his tenure has its fingerprints all over Kingspoke today. His customer-facing approach ensured a steady stream of repeat and word-of-mouth new business, and the travel lifestyle suited his wanderlust. Before too long, however, he and his wife, Kristen, welcomed their first child, and his thoughts turned to settling down and starting his own shop. A bold move in a crowded specialist scene.

Lark finishes with the signature stitch. Sammy Hodges

He pared his core business to a few key clients: the Volvo 70 Wizard, the IRC52 Spookie, and Darden’s Hoss stable. The work was plenty to keep him busy, but by design not enough to dilute the service he brought to each program. He was building Kingspoke’s reputation from a small workshop until he got lured away one last time, signing on with the US SailGP’s shore team. If Merrill needed a reminder to stay at home and mind the shop, it arrived just after the false start to SailGP Season 2, which kicked off in Sydney, Australia, and was then quickly postponed when COVID-19 shut down the world.

The version of Kingspoke we see today took shape during this period as the shop became known as a reliable local source for its textile rigging, but also for its penchant for solving challenges using custom hardware. Merrill credits Spookie owner Steve Benjamin with providing him a platform for pushing boundaries as well as encouraging him to think outside the box.

“What was nice about the Spookie was that Benj was always into anything kind of crazy or radical, and from that standpoint was always super supportive, so we were able to experiment with a lot of stuff,” Merrill says. 

A view over the shoulders of Merrill and Bowdler. Sammy Hodges

An example that emerged from the Spookie laboratory is Kingspoke’s proprietary RLR Carbon Reeler.

“When we took delivery of the 52, none of the control lines had reelers,” Merrill says. “I thought, I can come up with something for that.”

The solution is an underdeck take-up reel that organizes control line and halyard tails below deck. The innovative bit is the use of a clutch mechanism that works in a similar fashion to a spring-loaded window shade—when you give a line a tug, it engages the take-up clutch and the spool spins, retracting the loose tail. Being carbon, they weigh next to nothing, and the mechanism is self-powered. The net effect is one less crew off the rail when you come around the leeward mark on two wheels—a compelling metric. The RLR has become ubiquitous on various 52 circuits, as well as on other larger grand-prix yachts.  

Joe Lark crafts a halyard lock strop as Drea Keswater builds covered soft shackles. Sammy Hodges

More importantly, the RLR has served to burnish Kingspoke’s reputation as a solutions provider, whether that solution is textile, carbon and epoxy components or machined hardware. One obvious trait of the rigging shop’s handiwork, regardless of the medium, is the elegant simplicity. Take, for example, a continuous control system with shock cord take-up, or a titanium PAC52 headstay strop through-deck fitting. Merrill’s instinct is to approach problems from the perspective of an engineer, and this results in systems and original designs that seem clever, innovative, and deceptively simple.

It’s a difficult concept to put into words, but consider the company’s logo, three crossed stitches—about as simple as you can get—but it’s a logo that can be whipped into the tail of sheets, halyards, and control lines. Having struggled firsthand with the simultaneous importance and difficulty of marking rope for traceability in the field (and having experimented with labels and clear heat-shrink, RFID chips and readers, and various other complex methods), the three quick whipstitches are, to my eye, well, elegantly simple.

I’ve heard it said that the best engineers are inherently lazy, which is not literally true, of course, but it speaks to the idea of thinking enough about a problem to solve it but not overthinking it and burdening the solution with unnecessary elements or complexity. This seems to be an unspoken ethos of Kingspoke, and it comes across in their work, their branding and their slick social media feed, which relies heavily on the photography of marketing and sales manager Sammy Hodges.

Carl Merrill and Alex Bowdler inside the TP52 Wizard. Sammy Hodges

“The social media component is certainly something that we’re widely known for within the sailing community, and we’ve definitely made a conscious decision to present the work in a professional way and to try to educate; it’s kind of the same reason people come to us for these custom hardware jobs,” Merrill says. “We have the opportunity to literally show the end user what goes into the process of choosing specific materials, sizes, color coding…all the details they might not consider until they see it visually.”

Aside from its social feed, Kingspoke’s marketing efforts are minimal, focusing instead on supporting top sailors, including Riley Gibbs, Bora Gulari and Anthony Kotoun. Word-of-mouth brings new business to the shop, but Merrill and his team are conscious of not getting over their skis or sacrificing service.

“Developing strong ties with our customers and their rigging projects lead to long lasting relationships,” Merrill says. “Customer retention for us comes down to service first, and also the willingness to take on random hardware passion projects, and to just being a trusted resource.”

Today, Merrill and his staff of around five work their magic from a warren of shipping containers, a setup that seems to suit their style, which eschews grandiose plans for industry domination in favor of thoughtful growth.

“It allows us to do what we want, when we want, and react to opportunities as they arise,” Merrill says. “I always liked the modularity of the containers from an architectural standpoint, and we enjoy building them out on our own.”

Such flexibility is freedom as well. Instead of moving into a giant space and hoping that “if we build it, they will come,” Merrill’s approach is more along the lines of “if they come, we’ll add a container.”

“We focus on having our book of customers and keeping them happy,” he says. “Growth comes from being able to expand what we offer them, whether it’s load cells or soft shackles, or by distributing blocks or furlers. When we can offer more products and become more of a one-stop shop, we grow organically. That’s the goal.”

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