Rob Weiland
Sam Laidlaw’s Faroux design BLT heads off-piste at this year’s Quarter Ton Cup which was won by sailmaker Ian Southworth’s local team onboard another Faroux design, Protis. BLT is one of six Faroux Bullitt design variants racing again, though all the boats are far superior in build and finish quality than they ever were when winning the original Cup several times in the 1980s. Laidlaw’s Bullitt was discovered a few years ago in Tahiti, from where she was shipped back for ‘many thousands of hours’ of restoration at Gavin Tappenden’s Composite Craft. This is not a fleet to be approached lightly, with the first non-professional team finishing down in 10th place this year out of 17 entries. But it is fertile ground for connoisseurs of sailing porn
Poles of contention
A consequence of the ambition of the leading rating systems to include rather than to exclude is that almost anything gets rated and raced. Whether it is the archetypal ‘Flintstone’ craft or something dramatic not intended to touch the water, but with foils, all are raced together and often for the same trophies… claiming fair competition.
And so we see measured, rated and raced without much oppo-
sition an amazing variety of craft and equipment, further complicated by the use of a variety of scoring systems, from single multiplier Time-on-Time scoring (IRC, PHRF and so on) to ways that hardly any- body bothers to fathom but we are happy to accept, with labels such as Performance Curve and Implied Wind, based on the fact that boats never perform the same and so should never rate the same because conditions and courses never are the same! There- fore heavily relying on the scoring system input, like for each leg of a race distance, bearing and wind direction. But, while accepting all this, at times we do get terribly wound
up about at first sight trivial rule changes and their rating effects. A recent example of this is the, mainly Australian, uproar about IRC introducing a rating tax on ‘sheeting headsails over or through devices exerting outward pressure on a sheet or clew at a point from which, with the boat upright, a vertical line would fall outside the hull or deck’. The lingo is from the Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS 55.3), it translates to ‘the use of whisker poles’. There hardly is a more ancient way of improving sheeting angles
than using a pole to push a sheet or clew outboard but somehow, in making progress, we lost sight of this one to the point of labelling this practice as unseaworthy or unnecessarily expensive. Up until 2020 RRS 50.3 (c) allowed sheeting headsails to a whisker pole but the Equipment Rules of Sailing (ERS) did not…
or to be precise did not use the term sheeted, just stating that a whisker pole is a spar attached to the mast spar and to a headsail clew. The result was effectively that a pole guiding a sheet could not be a whisker pole. Having a pole with one end on the mast and the other on the
clew might be OK for a headsail poled out to windward but not that useful on the leeward side. Then again, also in 99.9 per cent of the windward cases, technically the pole is on the sheet and just jammed tight up against the headsail clew… We just ignored the ERS, as we so often do. To confuse us further, once you use your spi pole to pole out a jib to windward it is no longer a spi pole but a whisker pole. For decades in rated racing nobody was really interested in the
use of whisker poles to leeward, let alone in rating such use. Early on, because nearly all yachts carried overlapping genoas, a whisker pole used to leeward connected to both mast and headsail clew was a puzzle nobody thought to be interesting enough to set. But with modern non-overlapping jibs so trim-critical when reach-
ing, and offshore and reduced crew racing getting more popular, in turn driving the development of light and fast boats, like for the Volvo Ocean Race and Vendée Globe (both races with a lot of reach- ing and with no restriction on the use of poles attached to the mast), it was inevitable we would see headsail reaching being perfected using all kind of outriggers and that this would trigger copycat ideas for rated racing. Seeking the boundaries of the ERS-RRS combination finally
resulted in questioning the logic of ruling that the clew of a headsail has to be attached to the whisker pole. So RRS 50.3 (c) became RRS 55.3 (a) and various ERS definitions
were adapted by introducing the word ‘connect’, defined as: ‘To bring together or into contact so that a real link is established by
SEAHORSE 41
JAMES TOMLINSON
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