We couldn’t match that sailing shorthanded and that is also the reason why Superkote is the chosen fabric on Maxi yachts. If it’s too stable you’d have to trim it too much. In Australia when we sail offshore, the sea is often quite bumpy so we don’t really want fabrics to be too stiff. We do want them to be airtight with good porosity numbers and Superkote offers that in spades’.
‘We did a bunch of practice sails on our own off Sydney Heads on days with a lot of wind and waves to simulate what we knew would lie ahead,’ says Scholten. ‘Rig tuning was an important part of our preparation. On the very last race before the Sydney-Hobart there was a strong beat back with short waves, wind against current and the weakness of our rig setup was exposed big time. It wasn’t until Christmas evening – we were still out on the harbour talking to our sailmaker on the radio and trying to get the forestay tight with another extra two turns on the D1, that we felt comfortable that we could take on heavy seas and the jibs that we wanted to. It took some fiddling but in the end we really got it right and we basically locked it off. I remember us doing a high five because it had been a draining exercise. The forestay was tight, the mainsail wasn’t too deep. A tight forestay equals a straight mast and that isn’t ideal for light airs, but we were prepared to sacrifice a bit of light air performance for a very reliable rig in strong winds.’ Their choice of sails was also a source of competitive advantage despite the deliberately tight budget constraints they’d set themselves. ‘We went sailing with the original main and a No4 and nearly capsized,’ Scholten says. ‘The sailmaker advised us to go for a smaller main. It ended up 300mm short on the foot and 3m2 smaller.’ The change was dramatic. ‘It was almost like sailing with a full crew and the old main – and we gained six points on IRC,’ he says. ‘We also went for three reefs rather than two, which allowed us to shorten sail in smaller increments and eliminated the need for a trysail.’ ‘The big gain was that the rudder wasn’t overloaded,’ he says. ‘We weren’t having to play the main constantly to keep the rudder at minimal angle. In long races your priority is boatspeed and with the smaller main it was much more consistent. We were very worried about how it would go in light airs but the boat was so much lighter without a full crew so it was a non-issue.’ The jibs were carefully optimised. ‘We learned in our practice sails that we could use the No1 heavy up to 20kts if it wasn’t too bumpy,’ he
Above: testing at Contender Sailcloth HQ. The Jet Black variant of their highly regarded ZZ Aramid lami- nate sailcloth range was developed by Scholten’s team in Australia, where UV absorption properties are always a key consider- ation. Right: High modulus Twaron 2200 fibre is
incorporated in the warp and high modulus Technora
fibre in the fill
says. ‘When it was bumpy we could use the No4 up to 30kts by twisting it all off and putting two reefs in the main. We ended up able to sail close to the target speed with the No4 and the one mainsail from 12kts to 30kts and it’s very satisfying to know that you don’t have to go forward because they’re hanked-on jibs, so it takes forever to make a sail change.’ ‘The first reef we could do from the cockpit with a 2:1 tackline. The second reef we had to put the Cunningham on, so dropped the halyard to a mark, ran forward to put the Cunningham tight. We found we could actually do it without the Cunningham to stop it from flogging, just put the No2 reef line on and then put the Cunningham on. But ideally, Cunningham first. It was all about stopping the sail from flogging. All that was easy. We swapped reefs at the drop of a hat. You did it on your own, when the other crew was downstairs you could put reefs in and out easily. We never went to the third reef, but we must have used the first and second reef a dozen times or more. The third reef would have worked like the second but if the
conditions are that bad you could just drop the main altogether, reef and re-hoist, but it never got to that.’ On the first night of the Sydney Hobart their sail choices, tuning and practice paid off. ‘The wind range was big, from 20kts to 35kts,’ Scholten says. ‘We’d take a reef out, get smacked with 30kts plus and go back to two reefs, again and again. Nothing was really surprising about it other than it was very unpleasant. We were tired from all the lead-up and from an energetic start with the spinnaker up, spinnaker down. We were quite puffed after all that but settled into a watch system, two hours on, two hours off. We’d lie with our wet weather gear kind of open, lifejacket off, top layer off, try to get a bit of rest, then we’d swap. We’d even tack the boat on our own. It was just safer.’ Disko Trooper Contender Sailcloth sets the bar for the double handed Rolex Sydney Hobart, with a beautifully executed campaign plan for their J/99 and a very effective Contender Sailcloth sail inventory of ZZ Jet Black Aramid Laminates and Superkote spinnaker cloth package.
www.contendersailcloth.com
q SEAHORSE 61
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