News Around the World
particularly for New Zealand. Kiwi sailing success was built at least in part on a competitive edge that came from its innovative, practical backyard craftsmen, who figured out what made boats go fast – and built it all themselves. A new generation is having to find another way.
Ivor Wilkins
AUSTRALIA God and his dice Roger ‘Clouds’ Badham is the go-to guy for your forecast – at least Grant Dalton thinks so, Clouds being the entire weather team for Emirates Team New Zealand. We asked him what sort of advice he would give an international team competing in this month’s Rolex Sydney Hobart on a TP52… Roger Badham: The TP52s are in the toughest part of the Hobart fleet, and so they are sailing the environment as well as the guys right alongside them. And the decisions of winning and losing come down to minutes. Someone can be alongside you and they gybe because of a cloud line ahead, then gybe back which creates a 10-minute jump or loss, and that can be the race. It’s the same
normally occur in southern New South Wales. So things are changing, no doubt about it. But every year it is
according to what God gives us, you can’t say that just because the past seven races have been predominantly downwind this year will be downwind. What you can say is there has been a definite trend of more running and less reaching over the past 20 years. If the sailing team came here early enough we would do some
routeing with some archival data – not just with the window of 26-29 December, but from 15 December to 15 January for the past 10 years, to give more of an overview. Looking at average wind speeds, what sails would you favour, what code zero work is there, would you even carry a J4? You still couldn’t say anything about the race, but that is what you would do with the key decision-makers on the boat in liaison with the sailmakers. The reason it is difficult to give an overview of the race is because
it is over a two to three-day window, which is barely a hiccup on the spectrum of the summer here, and no matter what the statistics of the race tell you the fact is that a two-day window can bring any- thing… This can be a hiccup to what was a trend throughout that period, or it could be a cyclic event through that period. Typically in our spring we get a front every
second day, and by the time we get to Christ- mas the fronts are about every three to four days, so if it is a three to four-day cycle of a front, a trough line, a front, a high-pressure system then coming out, things heating up, then the next trough line front approaches. Within that three or four-day cycle it is very important where you start each Hobart race. You can start with a southerly front or you
Magnificent in many ways but the super-powerful VPLP-Verdier designed Comanche has proved too one-dimensional in its performance profile to threaten the relentless Sydney Hobart line-honours record of Reichel/Pugh’s 100-foot ‘canoe’ rival Wild Oats. In terms of the big picture for this ocean-racing classic, while the real contest on corrected time takes place among the bulk of the fleet in smaller monohulls it continues to be four or five maxis that hog all the media interest. One way to deal with this would be to (finally) allow multihulls into this race, as the Fastnet does; with line honours taken by another type of boat altogether the focus will switch back to the overall handicap winner – which is very rarely an attention-grabbing supermaxi. Problem solved, gents. Time to man up…
for the four or five Maxis, but with a lot of the other classes they are almost by themselves, just racing the clock. Firstly, what I do is give a team the overview of the race, that
it is roughly the same distance as the Fastnet, 600-odd miles, and will typically take two and a bit days – but this race is different from all the other races. The Bermuda race would be the closest, in that you are sailing due south and going across the axis of high pressure, so you are going from predominantly easterly quadrant winds to westerly quadrant, and it is highly likely you will be in a complex transition between the two. Then I would say that in the past 10 years things have changed
a bit, with us getting more onshore easterly winds with the westerlies forced further down the track. Right now the westerlies have been dominating to the point of being gale force in Bass Strait virtually every other day for two months. But we switch to summer towards the end of November, with the westerlies disappearing as the high pressure moves further south. So far this year the highs have been forced up by the strong westerlies across mainland Australia, and so we are seeing bushfires in Queensland instead of where they
28 SEAHORSE
can be behind that with a SE going NE, and the following day be running in strong nor - easters, then the next day you are into pre- frontal conditions before it happens again. And of course where you hit that makes a dif- ference. Up near Sydney late in the day it can become exaggerated with hot air ahead of it bringing 40kt; they don’t last that long, but 40kt gusting 50 can blow out a lot of your good kit early on… SH: How soon before the race could you advise a TP52 crew it would be bad in Bass Strait and further south? RB: With any accuracy seven to eight days out. The models go out two weeks before the race now, and you are into a cycle. But you are still not sure if the cycle will change as you begin to find the mood of the weather, and the way the whole southern hemisphere pattern is looking, in terms of whether it is a
four or five-wave hemispherical flow or if it is zonal. What you often find is these patterns set up and last for between
three to seven weeks at a time, and then bang, it changes. Then within a couple of days you have gone to a new set-up, with variations on a theme going through it. So two weeks out the models are starting to indicate what is
happening at Christmas time, and so you are getting a flavour for it… But you wouldn’t put money on it, so you start from there and every day you gain more confidence about what you are seeing. Typically the weather models improve every two to three years,
with a new development in the model, and so you find that it has more expertise in some areas, increasing the satellite data, or it may be higher-res two days further out then low res beyond that, so the models improve all the time. So often with the Hobart you get a good feeling as to the structure
of the race from eight to 10 days out, then from around six days out when you are into the really high-res part of the model you are suddenly aware of a front that wasn’t considered before, then this accuracy tells you there are now two fronts coming on 26 December,
ALAMY
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