News Around the World
New Zealand boardsailing coach Dave Robertson settles in for the long haul at the start of the 2014 Coastal Classic – a 120nm course. A support rib allowed Robertson to switch between foiling and non-foiling boards depending on sea state and wind strength... Even so that’s ‘quite’ a distance on mostly one tack...
name for a massive multihull superyacht, with five masts and acres of carbon fibre? A 3D Pacific trench sonar viewing system his team have developed to fit on your smart watch? No. Guy finished his dinner, moved the plate away, wiped his mouth with a napkin then looked at me and said, ‘Blue, we are working on a project for Paralympic sailor Ame Barnbrook. She races the Skud 18 with crew Brett Pearce, training against Liesl Tesch and Daniel Fitzgibbon – and she is looking to refine her steering system. Mate, you should go and talk to her.’ So I did. And the challenges for Ame are, well, I will let you decide. Born with the rare condition phocomelia means that Ame has no arms and just the bottom part of her left leg with a small foot and three toes, so helming the Skud takes a lot of skill and con- centration… Recent training against the London gold medallist and current world champions has Ame thinking of refinements in two key areas. The first is the Skud steering system. The current set-up is a simple servo assist joystick with drum motor and line operating the twin rudders. Aft-facing mirrors give Ame the opportunity to check what rudder angle she has, as the current joystick operation gives her no feedback through her toes. Another factor is if one rudder line is taking up on the motor, there is an opportunity for the other to become slack and then risk catching during a gybe – and that is where Guy Oliver and his team come in.
The work in progress is to try out a small streamlined ram system, minimising opportunities to snag any lines, plus to allow Ame better incremental adjustments – brief pressure with her toes creates a small rudder movement, longer pressure giving a larger rudder angle.
Class rules permit electronic systems onboard as long as they don’t extend past what a person could naturally achieve – and this system is still doing what Ame tells it. Any changes must improve both efficiency and reliability; having a steering failure that you can respond to quickly is one thing… it is another to be strapped into a chair, facing forwards with limited opportunities to react in a race when a 40kt+ front sweeps across Port Phillip Bay. The second area of improvement Ame discussed is the seat. The helm’s chair in the Skud has the ability to cant to windward, and Ame and Guy are looking at changing this from her current joystick fore-and-aft movement driving this to a sip-and-puff system, which controls the cant using her mouth via a tube.
18 SEAHORSE
That is the good news. The less good news is any position on any racing dinghy is never comfortable, but what if you can’t feel your back? Or legs? Or both? Sitting for any length of time means pressure sores develop, which then need to be treated – and these are always in critical areas of contact. And even if you do have the luxury of feeling discomfort, do you have the means or strength to move yourself? Again, I leave that to your imag - ination.
And there is more. Along with many fellow athletes Ame’s body shape changes – in her case her spine – so the shape of the seat needs to be capable of being adjusted over time to accommodate this. It would be great if the team had a designer or occupational therapists to create a simple, tough, composite chair that could achieve this (any takers out there? An AC team could create some remarkable trickledown here: email
blue@utarzan.com). But, as I discovered, many of the inter - national teams struggle in this area, with plenty of focus on the sailing systems but less time on injury prevention through supportive and smart seating.
With her boat currently on its way back from Canada, it is a good time to consider refinements to raise Ame and her training partners’ sharpness before Sail Melbourne and the European regattas next year. All of this of course costs money and none of this would happen without Raymarine and Guy Oliver’s pro bono time and components to get this project tested on the water, then onto the racetrack.
And now to the personal stuff. As a writer for Seahorse I am acutely aware that I have the opportunity to meet some remarkable people, all passionate about this sport.
Standouts include an evening with Olin Stephens, discussing the qualities of the unbuilt 1930s J-Class designs (he discussed – I listened), or witnessing Tom Whidden’s teenage-like energy bubble and fizz through the conversation as he talked of Conner, Blackaller and the 12-Metre era, or listening to Chris Nicholson and the crew of the Volvo 70 Campermoments after arriving in Auckland, drained after throwing everything at Telefónica but failing to catch them on the finish line on leg 4, then witnessing their elation after nailing the Auckland in-port race. Or any chat, at any time, with Loïck Peyron, or listening to Lijia Xu and her incredible
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