News Around the World
No longer the fastest of the Beau Geste menagerie, not since Karl Kwok’s team acquired the MOD 70 Phaedo, but still the biggest, this IRC 80 was designed by Botín and built by Cookson Boats in 2013. A regular Hobart competitor, like Rambler 88 this lighter, smaller maxi causes real trouble for the less nimble 100-footers as soon as there is the sniff of mixed or fast-changing conditions
four from the crew list, which translates to a further 450kg of bodies, food and gear; even with the power systems added back in, Comanche is sailing 700kg lighter than before. Moving to hydraulic functions means power on tap. In last year’s
Sydney-Hobart race Comanche locked off the sheets at times and drove around Bass Strait to the wind angle, clearly not the most efficient way to sail the boat, and in that sea state consistently washed off speed. Sail changes were also agonised over long and hard, particularly about changing up from a fractional to a bigger headsail and then back again when predicted breeze hit – all of this showed when Wild Oats pulled close to 40nm out of them at one stage. Now there will be no compromise in making these calls. Sail co-ordinator Ryan Godfrey was a key player in the previous
Comanche programme and he is back onboard having pushed hard for furling sails, particularly the J1, their biggest sail. Comanche loves sail area and can suck up as much as you throw at her, but the original hanked-on J1 also involved compromise. It is a beautiful sail with a nice tight luff for upwind VMG with windward-leeward races, but for the majority of this programme the races are offshore, where dead upwind isn’t the priority. Now it’s all about speed and getting the underwater appendages working. Another key change was around the crew management, which
confirmed the nod to a furling J1. Now the sail can be used more up-range and set on a reaching strut, then holding onto it right into the red-zone before furling. This contrasts to the previous hanked- on J1, where you really had to consider your crossovers… as if you went up-range it was an absolute mission to get it off. Clearly the furling process still has to be choreographed well with
the new sail, as it is not a simple task to get this massive anaconda out of the sky then safely onto the foredeck, but at least you can deal with it with half a dozen blokes. Getting rid of the original hanked-on J1 when the sheets were cracked was a 20-man job, a nightmare at night, plus the sail had a lot of battens so it was hard to flake and had to be packed down below. Comanche is big, but the inside is not that big… All this wasn’t just a case of cutting a sail down, it involved getting another furler up to spec as the luff cable takes the headstay load,
26 SEAHORSE
which means a new 30-tonne lock was fitted in the mast just below the forestay. But Comanche now has the ability to use the J1 whenever they want. It’s no longer a do-or-die call. With these changes Comanchecan hold her own in the previously
difficult 10kt breeze range. Below that life still gets sticky because of the boat’s shallow rocker and massive form stability. When the frontrunners were 10 miles from the Southport finish the breeze shut down completely, which saw the leaders park up before a match race slowly kicked off between the two slender Reichel/Pugh 100s, with Black Jack easing ahead of Oats for the win. Comanche, the most powerful 100-footer on the planet, took another 20 minutes to cross the line. You can’t have everything. Blue Robinson
USA Man for all seasons There are few more well-rounded pro sailors active today than Gavin Brady. With roots in Auckland’s vibrant youth training programmes in the early 1990s, his trajectory through first local, then regional and eventually world match racing was fast and successful, espe- cially given the mostly local support that sustained him on his march up the rankings. A period spent in the USA around Annapolis then gave him access to this culture’s version of big boat offshore racing, and he started being hired onto various programmes as young and hungry Kiwi talent to support his match-racing habit. Then in 1997 he hooked up with Karl Kwok’s Farr-designed ILC
40 Beau Geste for the Admiral’s Cup, which was the start of a long and productive relationship with the Hong Kong-based businessman that continues to this day. This was also the year Brady joining the local Chessie Racing squad for the 1997-1998 Whitbread Race. One thing led to another and soon he was part of the first Oracle
America’s Cup programme, where he got along so well with Larry Ellison that even after the programme ended he was flying out to San Francisco to train Ellison in match-race sailing (Ellison in turn inspired Brady to learn to fly… although he never got as far as flying any of Ellison’s legendary collection of vintage war planes.) In the last decade Brady has relocated back to his native New
STEVE CRISTO
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