‘Actually progress there is slow. There
are not often the reaching conditions to test, and you can’t carry too many of these sails. Plus the Super Series does not help because the races are all upwind-down- wind. There is still a lot of development to go with these 52s for other courses. ‘Meanwhile, the reason these boats go
so well against the fleet is that there is this constant evolutionary development that does not exist with the one-off IRC boats. ‘Our boat does not have a major weak-
ness, but the others are closing in. There are 14 TP52s here now, all with very similar ratings. With trough lines, when you are slowed right down or parked, then boats seven or eight miles behind you that you had easily on time are suddenly right beside you and you must wriggle away again to get back the 15 or 30 minutes you need. ‘In the last Hobart Envy Scooters (my
2016 Ichi Ban) and Quest both closed on us like that. At Tasman Island Gweilo, with the same rating as us, who had been as much as 10 miles back, closed to within two miles, but we wriggled away for a win. And now… well, we started our 2020 Hobart preparation just a few days into January but the runway has got a lot shorter so the pressure will be on.’ One of the key weapons in the Ichi Ban
arsenal is Will Oxley, a skipper/navigator and marine biologist who has completed more than 260,000nm of ocean racing including five round-the-world races and 19 Sydney Hobarts, seven of them with Allen including the last five on the trot.
60 SEAHORSE
Oxley skippered Compaq in the BT
Global Challenge 2000/01, for the 2011-12 Volvo Ocean Race he was the navigator aboard Camper (Emirates Team New Zealand). He was the navigator for Team Alvimedica in the 2014-15 Volvo Race, the same time he published an e-book entitled Modern Race Navigation: Expedition Soft- ware in Action (updated in 2017). In 2019 Oxley was navigator aboard the Volvo 70 Wizard when she won the Fastnet Race and back on Ichi Ban in the Hobart for yet another win. In lockdown he is embarking on a new book, The Role of the Navigator. Oxley provided this insight into a part of Ichi Ban’s winning formula. ‘We started on our preparation for the
2020 race just a few days after our 2019 win. In terms of sail selection and planning, for us in a typical year that is a continuous year-round process. Now this year we will be doing much more historic data analysis and much less sailing. ‘On Ichi Ban we use Expedition which
is logging data every second. We break that data into 30-second or one-minute blocks. We discard data that is bad, and then we steadily build up the database. We look at the sails we had up, and we focus on areas where we think there is a crossover between sails, and we decide which sail performs best at which angle. So then we end up with a sail chart. ‘As we have more sails than we can take
we focus on the overlaps and which sail can cover another. Then we keep drilling down to make a final decision on just
which sails we will take for a race based on the specific forecasts. We spend the whole year doing that – with the new generations of sails the crossovers are getting more extensive. But every sail still has a sweet spot, so to make good decisions you have to focus quite narrowly on just how much time you are likely to use a particular sail in that sweet spot. ‘A polar, being technical, is a set of nice
curves, but of course now they are not curving, they are very spiky – much more spiky than before, in fact. And every one of these calls relies on the quality of the data we have. ‘On Ichi Ban we use three different
software packages which are now well integrated: FaRo, the instrument package, which decodes all the instrument data, managing maths relations and outputting numbers on the displays; Expedition, the English-speaking world’s default navi - gation software; and KND, the sailing performance analysis tool. ‘Anything we can put a sensor on we do.
Plus there are manual things that are going on, that I input into the KND onboard assistant, such as a change of sails, or the new ones just hoisted. Before the race I also input things like the number of mast shims, where the base of the rig is. On Ichi Banwe can change the mast rake quickly, for which we take a rating penalty and because of that it’s even more important we under- stand what is working best there. ‘Then there are multiple pressure sensors wherever there is a hydraulic function,
KURT ARRIGO/ROLEX
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