ORC First impressions
This year’s Loro Piana Superyacht Regatta in Porto Cervo in early June was not only the first on the Superyacht calendar for the host, Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, but the first event after over a year of dormancy across the entire Med and Caribbean Superyacht circuit. Only in New Zealand at the Millenium Cup was there any Superyacht racing in this past year, so Loro Piana was a welcome step forward towards bringing these magnificent yachts back to the racecourse. Another significance to this event was the debut use of the new
ORC Multihull rule (ORCmh) for rating and scoring large performance cruising multihulls. The ORCmh team have been hard at work for three years in developing an accurate and transparent system to rate these impressive boats, which have exploded in popularity in the last decade and are getting more and more sophisticated – as well as faster – with each new generation of design. There is now a framework for the measurement, rating and scoring of these impressive boats with certificates available on a limited basis. As many of the owners have migrated into this genre from
competitive monohull racing they have high expectations for the performance of this new rule system. Not only does it have to
For example, in Race 3 after two and a half hours of racing the
corrected time difference between the first two boats – Highland Fling and Allegra – was only two and a half minutes. With help from multihull rating expert Simon Forbes the team then did some re- scoring using the well-established Mocra system, with the ORCmh results much closer in corrected time… An encouraging start but not surprising given the relative simplicity of Mocra. This was an encouraging first regatta but it also showed the
challenge in offering a satisfactory experience for all the competitors. Venues like Porto Cervo and hosts like Yacht Club Costa Smeralda
make for a good starting point, but it’s important that the handicap rule and scoring systems are up to the mark. Finzi says that to date the owners are supportive and everyone wants to co-operate in developing the new rule. The current fleet of big multihulls have more in common with the Superyachts than the regular ORCi mono- hull fleet, and so the development of ORCmh will for now more closely follow the template of the ORCsy (Superyacht) rule. The Sardinia regatta also highlighted some of the difficulties that
all handicap rules share. Firstly, some boats are better equipped than others, so it becomes necessary to make assessments for high-speed crew manoeuvre features such as powered versus manual spinnaker hoists and systems to raise and lower daggerboards while racing. Secondly, for the multihulls there is a per-
formance premium for being brave to a much greater extent than on a monohull. Occasion- ally in a superyacht race a crew will make gains by carrying a spinnaker when others demure. But in a multihull race flying a hull is fast, but it’s not for the faint-hearted or the ill-equipped. In three of the four races in Porto Cervo the boats who could fly a hull for sustained periods gained time. As the rule develops the ORCmh group may investigate ways to address this multihull-specific area. Finally, there is the issue of making sure
One by one they are slowly being won over… Irving Laidlaw’s latest Highland Fling 17 – a Gunboat 68 – sets up to weather of the Nigel Irens-designed fast world cruiser Allegra during this year’s Loro Piana regatta in Sardinia, which featured a new multihull division. After a long string of monohulls ranging from an IOR One Tonner to a diverse variety of larger boats, a first dip into unballasted waters was rewarded with three wins and a 2nd, deemed pleasant enough for there to now be a new Fling XVIII on the way – a Gunboat 80
recognise the nuanced differences in rated performance between different designs – which is no easy feat for multihulls with a diversity of rigs and appendages – but offer fair ratings based upon a simple list of options so as not to lose both the teams and race managers in too much complication. Although there was a modest turnout of four entries at Loro Piana,
ORCmh was nonetheless put to the test with a diversity of designs and a variety of courses and conditions during the four races conducted in three days of competition. Entries were all catamarans and included the 25m Nigel Irens/Nauta Design Allegra, built at Green Marine; two VPLP designs – the 18.50m Outremer 5X Give me Five and the Gunboat 68 Highland Fling 17; and the Morrelli & Melvin-designed HH66 R-Six. The first three races were about 30nm in length and sailed in
brisk 17-20kt conditions, while the last race had 8-10kt of wind on a course of 15nm. Being a new system, scoring was limited to All Purpose Performance Curve Scoring (PCS) only, although one course could perhaps have been better scored with the windward/leeward scoring option since it contained only about 20 per cent reaching. ‘I went with each of the boats during the regatta,’ said the ORC’s
Bruno Finzi, ‘and on the whole everyone was enthusiastic about the start we have made with this new rule. In my opinion the teams are also still learning how to push their boats because the time margins were getting tighter and tighter as the regatta progressed.’
44 SEAHORSE
that the boats are racing in a condition that matches their handicap certificate. Why is this a problem? Surely to do otherwise is cheating, isn’t it? ‘Not really, we are trying to make life easy
and fair for the competitors,’ says ORCmh group leader Andy Claughton. ‘These boats
spend most of their time as leisure facilities, with well-stocked freezers, large freshwater and diesel tanks, and the rest. ‘It is a major job if every morning the boat must be emptied to
get into “racing trim”.’ And of course size for size a multihull’s per- formance is far more responsive to changes in sailing displacement than a monohull of equivalent size would ever be. ‘Anyone who has had to negotiate the marina pontoons at a
J Class regatta will have seen the amount of stuff that gets man- handled every day,’ continues Claughton. ‘We want to have a system where it’s not only easy to leave the dock in the morning knowing your handicap reflects what’s onboard, but also that the whole fleet knows no one is pulling a fast one. ‘Checking freeboards at a regatta on a monohull is not straight-
forward – it requires specific knowledge and accurate measurement at specific points on the hull or shear. However, for multihulls the freeboards could be measured using ultrasonic sensors set into the underside of the bridge deck, which can be read remotely by the regatta team. This would provide a quick check that the boat’s displacement matched the declared inventory.’ Clever. Going forward ORC will use its well-established scientific approach
informed by competitors’ experiences to provide the racing the teams all want. Hopefully as events return after the pandemic we will see a growing number of multihull regattas raced under ORCmh. Dobbs Davis and Andy Claughton
q
STUDIO BORLENGHI
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