News Around the World
The final day of this year’s Cowes Week delivered a brutal reminder of how quickly the sheltered waters of the Solent can turn on you when a lot of wind runs into a lot of tide. These images will look very familiar to Admiral’s Cup veterans, but while Cowes Week is a superb regatta it is also a mixed-ability regatta and the effects of the rapid increase in windspeed that day caught many out with even IRC Class Zero being abandoned. While most of the small boats who started earlier made it back before the worst of the storm hit, tragically the skipper of an RS Elite dayboat was lost overboard and in spite of tireless efforts by rescue services couldn’t be revived
Paddle. You are in a race. Finish one day and try to do better the next day. When you are paddling that hard you have to keep your concentration to keep the intensity up. It is hard to understand, but you just keep focused, paddling or not paddling.’ The boat, built new for this attempt – more high-tech, much lighter
and incorporating everything learnt from the previous two efforts – was a great success. In terms of equipment, wave damage to his solar panels reduced charging capacity, forcing him to cut commu- nication to the bare minimum, further heightening his isolation. His water- desalinator also packed up early. His mood was not improved when the instruction manual advised him ‘to buy a new part’. As these challenges were overcome or shrugged aside, at least
those prevailing mid-winter westerly winds could be relied upon to shove Scott’s kayak toward its destination. Wrong. In 61 days he had only two where he enjoyed more than 25kt of tailwind. On one of them the following seas built to more than 5m and he was surfing constantly. ‘I hit 16kt sliding down a big wave. When you get con- ditions like that it is fun on a stick. I expected a lot of that, but it just didn’t happen.’ On the second to last day, with 30kt of tailwind he made a 40nm
push to get as close to shore as possible because a switch to east- erly headwinds was forecast. Slowly he began to allow the notion to take hold that he was going to achieve his goal at last. ‘Coming towards the end, you have to start switching mentally. It takes a lot of mental programming to get into that totally focused race mode and then, as you approach the finish, you have to start de-program- ming so that you can cope with being with people again. You are going from sensory deprivation into overload. ‘You have to let your senses wake up. Start smelling the smells
and become more visually aware, seeing the lights of New Plymouth. Registering these things all helped.’ Reflecting on his achievement, he says he learned his limits were
higher than he thought. ‘I did things I didn’t know I was capable of. But you also know all the best-laid plans go wrong. I would have to do it five or six times to really get it nailed.’ He allows a pause, before he breaks out in a big grin. ‘No, don’t worry. It’s not going to happen.’ Ivor Wilkins
24 SEAHORSE
AUSTRALIA Mods and rocker The Noakes Sydney Gold Coast Race was the season opener for many of us ‘down here’, sending the fleet north to the warm waters of Hamilton Island Race Week, and giving crews the opportunity to check if modifications done over our winter have made things, as opticians say, ‘same, better or worse…’ For three of the four big boats in the race their pre-season tweak-
ing has been modest, simplifying systems and maintaining reliability. Wild Oats XI and Black Jack, built in 2005, and Christian Beck’s InfoTrack, constructed in 2008, have all had plenty of time to assess what is viable and sensible. Wild Oats in particular has added and subtracted foils both vertically and horizontally, as well as shifting the mast position in search of the Boxing Day sweet spot. Mark Richards and crew will next be playing around with code zero con- figurations, to explore any gains they can find in ghosting conditions. Black Jack has stayed true to her original form, performing
superbly on the Mediterranean circuit as Esimit Europa 2, and this success continued with a line-honours victory on the 384nm Sydney to Gold Coast course, with Peter Harburg and crew sliding over the line less than two minutes ahead of Wild Oats. Mark Bradford, skipper on Black Jack, likened it to ‘a secondary
school science lesson with 100ft yachts… It’s just basic physics really, drag vs lift. Black Jack is the lightest 100-footer here, so in that sub-7kt at the tail end of the race we did well.’ For Comanche, under fresh ownership late last year, the tweaking
is just beginning. With a new programme of mainly coastal racing, over 200kg has come off already, all solid stuff due to the original capability for 12 muscular crew’s grinding input on a massive drive train, which meant the gearboxes had to be seriously robust. Comanchewas conceived to break ocean records under human
power alone, and so engineering a pedestal system for such a beast carried a serious weight cost. And in this world torque isn’t cheap. On a 50-60 footer, swapping pedestals for hydraulics, you come out with marginal weight differences – but here, with six pedestals and massive gearboxes, T-boxes and X-boxes that allowed so many individual functions now removed, it’s a pretty good start to the diet. Push-button technology now means they can also drop three or
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INGRID ABERY
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