Opposite: the Juan K-designed VO70 Wizard reaches back from the Rock during this year’s Fastnet Race which her pro-am crew won overall. Like many other big canters the VO70s slip into the IRC rule easily and often with great success. The appendages are unchanged since Wizard started life as Groupama 4, but the sail plan has evolved to suit IRC with headsail sizes reduced and a lot of refinement of the triple-headed rig seen here – helped along by Enright’s experience of two VO65 campaigns. And in her original life as Groupama (left) as Thomas Coville enjoys ‘another’ rounding of Cape Horn – Coville was one of several singlehanded experts in Franck Cammas’s Volvo-winning crew
they happen and know whether or not you have a good chance of accomplishing your goals. It’s like having the answers to the tests before you take them.
to our rating to keep the boat competitive while capitalising on our newfound speed. We opted for two main changes. The first was to make the J0 our biggest headsail, which saved us a couple of IRC area points and eliminated a dreaded hank-to-hank headsail change, a manoeuvre that on a 600-mile race can easily make the difference between winning and losing.
The other thing we did was eliminate our soft sails and rate our A3 as our biggest spinnaker, a reduction of 40m2
. For two of our 2019
events we knew this would be a winner. The Caribbean 600 and the Transat don’t have a lot of VMG. The Fastnet can be another story, so for this race we figured we’d go back to the old, more VMG-oriented configuration and leave the J0 and the whisker pole on the dock. Some of this is gut instinct, but a lot of it comes from diligent use of the KND software suite for polar refinement and the explo- ration of historical weather on the courses we intend to sail. When you know the traditional weather patterns from old GRIB files, you study old trackers, you have your ratings and ratings of your competitors, you have your polars and a good guess at the polars of the other boats, then you can run all your races before
IRC permits a number of trial certificates each year and we tend to max these out with different sail combinations. The only other thing we looked at was refitting the water ballast for the Transat. But again that seemed too expensive and we opted to leave good enough alone.
The net result has been victories in our three big events for the year, the Caribbean 600, Transatlantic Race and Rolex Fastnet Race. We tried to set ourselves up for success before these races started, which we feel we did, but you still have to go out there and sail well… and a little luck never hurts. It’s the combination of all these things that’s made the boat so successful this year. Wizard has a good rating, yes, that was part of the reason it was acquired and we’ve worked on it ad nauseum. But it wasn’t the rating that got the boat to the Scilly Isles ahead of much bigger, faster boats in the Fastnet. It takes a good team, a good platform and lots of preparation before the start. We’re lucky to have such a committed team and we look forward to campaigning and optimising the boat for its future schedule…
That said, you probably won’t see the boat sailing windward- leeward courses in the Mediterranean – you’d be surprised how many people don’t do the background research and just hope for the best. A wise man once told me, ‘Hope is not a strategy.’ Charlie Enright, Barrington, RI
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