Opposite: at least we don’t have to worry about which way we are going… Route du Rhum winner Thomas Ruyant (right) and co-skipper Morgan Lagravière training on Ruyant’s Finot/Koch Imoca 60 For People ahead of the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre. Left: now this is an autopilot… Sir Francis Chichester shows off the latest in wind vane self-steering – later nicknamed Miranda – which he has fitted to his 1960 Ostar singlehanded racer Gipsy Moth III
lug the stack from side to side, cook, do the repairs, talk to the media and so on. The computers are having all the fun, but
they don’t know it. I’m minded of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘Frank, I don’t think you should hoist the FRO, the cap shroud loads are above nominal, the rudder stock torque is critical and the black water system is blocked. Would you get to that first please.’ Which brings us back to question the
use of forward-looking Lidar to sense and map the waves. Should World Sailing draw a line in the
but these technologies have only become more sophisticated over time. The capa - bility now exists to look out from the boat, map the local sea surface and fold this into the autopilot software. In effect remove the autopilot’s blindfold. Currently there are no restrictions on
what inputs a pilot can take, nor seemingly on the budget to build and tune them. Employing Lidar to map the waves upwind of the boat would yield a further performance gain for the autopilot. Parity with a competent human might well be achieved at night as well as in daylight. But while all this stuff is great fun for
the boffins, the sailors are paying for it in two ways. Firstly with hard cash. Auto - pilots are a big deal for shorthanded sailing and you can spend a lot of money. There is now a barely controlled arms race in the Class40, despite early attempts to limit the cost of onboard electronics. The current cost of a hygiene level* pilot system for an Imoca is well north of ⇔600,000; a seri- ous programme must budget for this figure as the absolute minimum – plus the on- costs of a perpetual process of refinement and development involving multiple full- time performance and code specialists. Secondly, these complex systems take
time to build, install, commission and maintain. The editor abandoned his Class40 sailing largely because while he should have been sailing and shaking down the boat, it was at the dock getting the pilot systems up and running. Time you never get back. The more sensors and computing capacity you have onboard the more of your sailing days will be lost. The America’s Cup has absolutely drunk
the fly-by-wire Kool-Aid and the systems are so complex that the number of maintenance
days easily outnumber the sailing days. When I first started with Team New
Zealand going sailing was what we did. Two ACC boats, 30 sailors, two chase boats, and off we went for another six- hour day. We would average four or five days a week if the weather co-operated. Design team members were pressed into service doing the runners and so on. Also this made sure you were available for instant interrogation should the latest idea prove unsuccessful. There was no hanging out in mission
control watching the video and a hundred time-histories trying to work out what is going on. It was a simple time: are you higher or lower, slower or faster after the 10-minute test? Now the sailing team is the runt of the
AC litter, swamped by technologists of every kind. My guess is that they sail less than half their available time. Probably much less. Getting the boat ready to sail is like assembling a house of cards – a single misbehaving piece and the day is over. Even when you are up and running
ridiculous pitfalls can be encountered. One day with BAR we were foiling nicely away from Camber Quay, all systems go, when the boat crashed off the foils with all of the controls unresponsive. The reason: the IT guys had rebooted the boat that was sailing, not the one in the shed! Note to self, make sure you are logged in to the right IP address. The price of progress is that you will
spend less and less time on the water. But even when you are finally out there, what are you doing if the autopilot can sail better than you can? The computer gets to steer, plot your
course, do the weather routeing, while you, the brains of the operation, have to
sand and say enough is enough, autopilots can use sensors ‘on the boat’ but not remote data on the surrounding environ- ment? Stan Honey believes that the off- shore racing fleets need to be protected from this particular development, and that the language can be quite neatly framed. But an unexpected problem has stymied
the work on a submission. Unfortunately there is no agreement about where this language should appear: the Racing Rules of Sailing, the Equipment Rules of Sailing, the Offshore Special Regulations, the event Sailing Instructions? It seems the regulatory framework is unprepared for autopilots. Also similar issues arise with the use of
stored power. The current framework permits stored power for particular classes. Even to the extent that in the ORC Super - Yacht classes a small handicap credit is offered to those with below-par line speeds! However, grey areas are appearing all
the time as the capability of hydraulic systems increases. For example, multihull sheeting systems may include a sheet- release system to prevent capsize. This is permitted as a safety measure. But the system is only a few pages of code away from being a ‘super trimmer’ who can keep a hull flying better than a cold, wet and tired human. Should this be policed and if so how? It’s not that easy. For the America’s Cup boats the lines
of communication between the various onboard systems are physically checked by tracing the communication cables. Once signed off these are tagged with a seal. After one such check in Bermuda the port hull of one of the 2017 multihulls had ceased to function rationally. Four hours later we found that in trimming off the tail of the measurement seal the measurer had also snipped through a sensor cable… *a Martin Whitmarsh (ex-McLaren F1 and BAR Racing) term for something that’s good enough to put on the race car. It may not be perfect but it won’t lose you the race.
q SEAHORSE 35
EILEEN RAMSAY ARCHIVE/PPL
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