Take Good Care
Career Ending Injury (C.E.I.) and Medical Repatriation Insurance are essential.
this summer. Dad couldn’t sail but he was on the dock and just so pleased to see the crew – he had a little tear in his eye, as did Ricko the skipper, I might add… SH: A 100-footer was a big step up with size and loads. SO: We were pretty comfortable with the technology. Wild Oats IX was a 60-footer and our first canting-keel boat which we raced the Admiral’s Cup with in 2003 as part of the winning Australian team. Even back then Dad was looking to go larger, so he spoke to the officials at RORC and said if he came back to defend the Admiral’s Cup he would do it with a bigger boat. They said that was fine, so we commissioned the 66-footer Wild Oats X from Reichel-Pugh… and then the Admiral’s Cup went back to sleep! SH: But you are still proud holders of the Cup. SO: We are. We’re not allowed to hold the actual cup itself, but we had a replica made which is on display at the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club and we are all deeply proud of that. SH: The 100ft Wild Oats XI’s 2005 Hobart win was a stunning statement, Australian innovation and engineering proving successful straight out of the box. SO: It’s a natural progression that started with the smaller boats, with McConaghy building the 66-footer, with Greg Waters at Central Coast Hydraulics and Guy Oliver’s Olectric team all involved, but more importantly they were adaptable to our thoughts. Everyone involved was learning at that time, so we worked together on things like the software but always with the emphasis on keeping weight down. Greg Waters tended to be very conservative with his hydraulic specifications and so it was always an arm wrestle with him about weight – which he ended up winning, by the way – but the result was we had reliability from the start. So with the shift up to the 100-footer we weren’t worried one little bit about McConaghys’, Olectric’s, Greg Waters’ or our own team’s engineering. SH: Where do the ideas on refining Wild Oats XIcome from… SO: It’s a combination between my father Bob, Mark Richards and myself, collaboratively coming up with thoughts on ways to do things better, to make the old girl go a little faster. She has had a few facelifts over the years and we are doing the biggest one now; we are a bit nervous but we are quite confident.
Cameron Appleton; currently one of the top racing strategists, America's Cup winner, multiple world champion tactician and 5-time winner of the RC44 Championships, knows the importance of Career Ending Injury insurance.
Lex Risk Solutions has been arranging C.E.I. insurance for top sailors and racing yacht teams involved in the America’s Cup, RC44, and Volvo Ocean races amongst others for many years.
Please contact: Roberta Cauchi Tel: +356 21324875 Email:
paquote@lexrisks.com www.lexrisks.com 18 SEAHORSE
In recent years we have also had help from Steve Quigley and from One2three naval architects, who did the engineering on our 27m motoryacht. Most of the guys involved in any structural engineering with Wild Oats have moved on as companies dissolve and evolve, but we have kept that brains trust close to us and we have full confidence in their work. SH: This collaborative philosophy is central to your team culture, isn’t it? SO: Very important. They tell us where the risks are and how we drive the concepts forwards… with safety and certainty. As soon as the boat arrived back in Sydney from Honolulu this year we started pulling it apart, servicing and checking the winch systems, taking the keel off to be X-rayed, plus we did all our own crack testing of critical components. SH: Which changes worked well and which ones not so well… SO: The work we have done has always moved us forwards, we have never gone backwards. But of course a great part of this is how to use a piece of equipment. Back when we removed the bow rudder and put in daggerboards, in the early days we overestimated how much we should use them, leaving them down too long offwind; in reviewing our modelling we took a little longer to learn the right lift/drag ratio to hit optimum speeds. A lot of this is feel, but with the science to validate that feel we have a great mix. It’s all about evolution, we learn something every time we take the boat out. SH: And the rationale behind the next modifications… SO: It all comes back to hull drag – we are always trying to reduce that. John Reichel says that there is an optimum amount of heel for the boat and if you exceed that you lose your form stability, and so we have to keep within those parameters. But with the surge in foiling technology we were observing all of this while having the debate about how we reduce drag. We know we have to get the bow up, particularly reaching and off the wind, getting the boat to ‘pop’ so it can start planing; we worked very hard on how to enable this without adding too much weight. SH: Which in practical terms means?
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76