News Around the World
to make amends for that first race, and so I pushed really hard. In doing that I nearly tipped it in a couple of times! I went right over the front and will have some sore ribs for a while – thank goodness for the WIP vest as that copped a real hiding today… I pushed it hard and was upside down swinging around on the wire and only just kept the boat upright. Plus I lost my hat! SH: And how are the foiling A-Class holding up? Strong? Reliable? GA: Generally yes. With the foiling aspect the boats have gained 5 or 6kg in extra structure around the daggerboard cases, beams and transom area. These boats are strong but still fragile. If you slip and hit the side of the hull hard you will delaminate it. If you do something crazy with your steering you can break a rudder stock or blade; you have to respect that these are the ultimate high- performance singlehanded catamaran, and apart from a Moth there aren’t too many boats that would give an A-Class a run for its money in flat water and breeze. We are doing 16-20kt upwind here. And though we haven’t yet
touched 30kt downwind racing we have in training, and that is fast enough when you are standing right on the back corner of this thing. SH:Before pre-starts you were usually back adjusting rudder rake?
Team New Zealand skipper Glenn Ashby has fun on the way to a 10th A-Class world title. The America’s Cup holders took on the 2018 worlds as a team effort; new boards for their sailors arrived just in time for some quick testing before getting the nod for the regatta. Interestingly some competitors have reverted to using a boom with the now universal deck-sweeper sails; the no-boom configuration is less draggy but also harder to set up and trim
GA: I was setting the overall rake of the daggerboards and the pitch of the elevators, because if you have too much rake on the boards and too much lift on the rudder the boat can get pretty draggy and loose… In perfectly steady conditions you can jack the boat up high, sailing it accurately, and make use of that gain. But the boat becomes much harder to sail when you are high, particularly in puffs and shifts, as the sideways loading of the foils changes dramatically with the increasing then decreasing aero-loading on the rig. When you are starting to get up close to the tips of the dagger-
boards that really affects the pitch of the boat – so you have to sail a little more conservatively with your settings when it is puffy and shifty. You can take a really big speed gain if the stars align, but you can also get really out of whack and start touching down… in a soft, or not so soft manner. SH: Similar to setting up a Moth? GH:Exactly. With the Moth I would have a few upwind and downwind runs before the race then check the settings, all the time pushing the limits and capsizing, then scaling back my gearing and settings a notch to get the ride height and trim that I can get away with. The A-Class is very similar, with several up and downwind runs particularly in different wave angles to work out what I can get away with, what is ultimately consistently good versus top-end good. SH: These races are so short for the frontrunners… something like four minutes from the start to the top mark. How early are you planning the next upwind leg while you are still sailing downwind?
26 SEAHORSE
GA: In shifty conditions you would be halfway down a run and planning the next beat depending on what phase the breeze is in, knowing that by the time you got to the bottom mark that pressure would be there. And so you would gauge which end of the gate you want and if you need to tack early or carry on to make the gain. Upwind I am happy to tack quite often to stay in the lane, four or five tacks yesterday up the middle. I don’t mind throwing the boat around to stay where it’s good, because if you go the wrong way you go there bloody fast! So that is just old school yachting really. SH: As the fleet cross the finish line I can hear plenty of humming from some of the foils, but your foils are silent… GA: Excellent. That means I have sanded them properly. SH: You are known and respected for being a very down-to-earth, approachable and modest sailor, which fits in well with New Zealand sporting culture. Where did the younger Glenn Ashby get this? GA: I guess it is how I grew up really, with parents and grandparents in Central Victoria, then we moved to Bendigo and joined a yacht club there. We had no flashy cars back then, I didn’t have my first new sail until I was 15, always using secondhand gear. My parents were pretty clear about always making the best of what you have. SH: Which sounds like the ETNZ philosophy for many years. GA: Yep, true! I have been very fortunate to work with lots of teams over the years – including the remarkable Oracle USA 17 trimaran project – but through all this really my philosophy has always been that you don’t make a big song and dance about things, just put your head down and work hard. Then hopefully the results will come and you don’t need to say anything. SH: Both the Cup boats and other high-performance boats have become extraordinarily fast, and for some professional classes helmets are now mandatory –as on Cup boats and the Superfoilers. Where does comfort and wearability bump up against usability on smaller boats such as an A-Class or skiff? GA: It really is a interesting question and one that is often difficult to answer. Without a doubt companies like Forward WIP and most other sailing clothing companies are creating impact and safety gear now. The classes you mentioned plus the GC32s, foiling kiteboard and foiling windsurfers, are going much faster, making wipe-outs much more extreme. Most of the time when you come away from the A-Class or Moth
you get flung away from the boat and ejected pretty hard… but into the water. So at the moment it is really about personal preference as well as very condition dependent. Here I am wearing shin, elbow, shoulder and kidney guards in
full-on conditions, plus helmet in any breeze-on or when I am out by myself trying something new. But the biggest one for me is still sun protection – I reckon here there is a case for a good-sized peak on the helmets. Someone should really look at that. SH: Ears – covered or open? GA: I prefer to have my ears uncovered, but on the Cup boats I am comfortable with everything covered and twin earpieces in, just like a racing driver. On a Cup boat the external noises are so great you can’t hear yourself think unless ears are covered at those speeds! Blue Robinson
USA Not entirely... Differing points of view, when expressed respectfully, can often lead to progress. In this way some of the personal views expressed by Seahorse columnist Rob Weiland last month on the state of US big boat racing set off veteran boatbuilder Barry Carroll when he read his copy of the magazine while flying back to Rhode Island from a meeting with designer Mark Mills in Dublin. Barry had also been in Lymington checking in on production progress at Fibre Mechanics on the Melges IC37, a project he has been managing for New York YC for two years now. ‘Some of Rob’s comments did surprise me – not the first term
that came to mind, but publishable,’ he said. To recap, among Rob’s opinions in a column entitled Watching the show, were obser- vations on why ‘handicap racing of big boats in [the US] has shrunk
GORDON UPTON
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