Monster boats
I was lucky enough to realise one of my sailing dreams recently, to helm an 18-foot skiff. Tim Penfold, the owner of Link Associates, couldn't make it to the British leg of the Eurocup in Weymouth and asked if I could take his spot. I didn't need my arm twisting to say yes to that offer. Tim's brother, Will, had injured his knee too, so my 49er crew Nick Murphy took the front spot, with Matt Alvorado in the middle, doing his own job and also making sure we knew how to do ours. "It's easier than a 49er, you'll have no problem," he said.
I wouldn't have said we had no problem, but Matt was right in many respects when he said it was easier than the 49er. It is more predictable in its behaviour on the water, certainly, but the sheer logistics are pretty daunting. For a boat that is just two feet longer on the waterline than the 49er, it is considerably larger in almost every other respect. Just hitching up the enormous trailer on to the back of my Peugeot 306 brought home to me that this was skiff sailing on a different scale.
And when you put the pieces together on the shore, it starts to look truly scary. When you slot the wings in, the 18 measures 14 feet wide, and 30 foot long by the time you've attached the carbon spinnaker pole. The nastiest thing of all is the fact that you've got to pick this beast up between the three of you, and walk it down to the water. For the helmsman, that is by far the most strenuous part of the day.
Hyperspace
For the other two crew however, particularly the forward hand, the hard work has only just begun. Downwind, the sheet loads on the gennaker can be so big I was worried Nick was going to lift himself off his trapeze hook and fall off the rack. But probably the hardest bit of all is bagging the kite at the leeward mark. It just seems to go on forever.
The best fun about the 18 is working as part of a three-man team. The upwind coordination between three people is one of the most challenging aspects, and maybe one of the main reasons for Rob Greenhalgh's dominance of the fleet with his RMW crew. Do a little too much steering, or move a little too much mainsheet, or run around the boat too much and you can easily upset the subtle balance of the boat. But get all three components working together, let the boat find its groove, and it's like hitting the hyperspace button. When you find that, you don't want to touch a thing, but simply let the boat do all the work for itself. Once the boat finds its mark, it can achieve speeds of up to 12 knots upwind, which is a fantastic feeling.
Downwind, the 18 is capable of far higher speeds, and yet the sensation just isn't there, certainly not from the helmsman's perspective. The tiller is constantly loaded with lee helm, and it feels more like driving a bus than a sports car. The weird thing too is that quite often it seems like the worse it feels the faster you go. You have to get an outside reference point such as a static mark or looking backwards out of the boat at your wake to get any sense of just how fast you are travelling.
In terms of sensation of speed, I've had faster rides out of a Laser or even a Topper. It must be all about the proximity to the water and the amount of splash you create that determines how fast you feel you are going. The 18 is so smooth and your position above the water so high that it is like flying at altitude. Of course, it could feel very different in big winds and high seas, when just staying on the bus becomes a skill in itself, but that's something for me to find out about on another day.
Give and take
Even in lighter breezes, the closing speed of two skiffs is pretty awesome, and something not to be taken lightly. Everyone in the class seems aware of this, and there is a lot of give and take on the race course. One of the Aussies making the visit to the Weymouth 18 Eurocup, Tony Hannan, said he never protests anybody and nor does he expect ever to be protested. "You never push a port/starboard situation," he explains. "If you can let a port tacker go by dipping a couple of feet, you let him go, because asking someone to pull one of these things away in a breeze is too much."
Like the RS classes, the 18 fleet too has decided that hitting marks is OK. I was pleased to get some vigorous responses to my Rolltacks column questioning the wisdom of this rule change. Clearly the RS sailors like their set-up, and Pete Vincent's point about creating rules to suit the sailors rather than feeling hamstrung by the standard International Racing Rules is a very good one. Having experienced the 'hitting marks' rule - and taken full advantage of it myself - in the 18, I am still not convinced it reduces carnage and traffic congestion. The ability to hit marks often seems to encourage people to go for gaps that just aren't there, and my crew will tell you I was just as guilty as others in these situations.
Is the law an ass?
That said, I certainly agree with the general principle of altering the rules to suit your class or situation. The inside overlap rule for leeward marks certainly wasn't designed with asymmetric boats in mind. The rule works perfectly well for conventional spinnakers where the gybing angles are shallow and overlaps are normally established at a relatively late stage. But the inside overlap rule on gennaker boats means the inside boat can be overlapped from hundreds of yards away. Tactically, this means you have to have a very good reason not to do the gybe drop at the mark.
That rule you can just about live with, but Tony Hannan makes a good point when he suggests that in skiffs the onus on windward/leeward situations should be reversed. His point is that with an enormous gennaker to leeward of the boat, you have a big blind spot and you are reliant on the boat coming upwind to make you aware of their presence before it's too late. I've had a collision in the 49er before now, that virtually sank the other boat as it was coming upwind. Whether reversing the rule altogether, as Tony suggests, is a step too far is up for debate, but I would say it's certainly the case that the racing rules as they stand do not serve the newer, faster generation of boats particularly well.
Floating voters
The 18 has made one change that many would regard as controversial, that of not enforcing the buoyancy aid rule. This seems eminently sensible, as a bad capsize could find a sailor trapped underneath the rig or the boat, and a buoyancy aid pinning the sailor on the surface could prevent him from swimming down and away from danger. And if a crew man does get knocked unconscious or suffers from muscle cramp, then he has two other team mates to help keep him afloat. So on balance, I would agree that a buoyancy aid can potentially cause more harm than good in the skiff environment.
A further mandatory rule that the class has introduced is the carrying of a sharp knife on the port-side transom. That way, the crew or a rescue-boat team will know where to find it if someone is caught underneath a rig or a rack. We tried to pass the same rule in the 49er last year, and I don't recall why it wasn't passed. I think it was something to do with the 'what-if' scenario of someone getting mad with another competitor in a collision and using the knife on them. Sounds like a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water to me.
Admittedly there was a time when a Canadian 49er sailor did go mad at somebody, and jumped aboard another competitor's boat and slashed their gennaker sheets. But assuming that most of us are rational beings most of the time, carrying a knife seems a pretty sensible option to me. It almost certainly would have saved the life of the Tornado sailor who got caught under the trampoline and drowned at the Princess Sofia Regatta in Palma last year.
Probably the people that need it most of all are the high-performance singlehander sailors such as the Musto Skiff and RS 600 and 700 classes. Carrying a knife on your person seems like a particularly wise precaution here, where you have to be totally self-sufficient. Perhaps these things are worth discussing at your next class AGM.
Open the gate
Anyway, enough doom and gloom, but just a few more observations from the skiffs. We were racing in Portland Harbour, and as anyone who has done more than a little sailing there knows, it nearly always pays to aim for the wind bend and acceleration around Portland Bill. The trouble with this is that it can make the beats quite one-sided, and once everyone catches on to it, the races can become processional. On a normal, port-rounding course, this becomes a particularly bad problem when the right hand side of the beat is favoured. No one wants to tack off into less favourable breeze, so the race can turn into follow-the-leader.
One way of opening up the race a little more is to have a leeward gate consisting of two marks rather than the single leeward mark. This has become standard in 49er racing and allows for many more options at this crucial point of the race. I don't know why more classes don't do it. Match racing, in particular, could benefit. I was at Lake Constance recently, watching a number of big name skippers competing at Match Race Germany, and it seemed that here was a sport that could really benefit from twin leeward marks.
The trouble with sailing is that the nature of the sport naturally favours the leaders. Unlike cycling, where wind is your enemy and slipstreaming another cyclist is an acknowledged way of hanging on to a faster cyclist for only a fraction of the effort, the effects of sailing in disturbed wind only help the leaders extend their winning margin. So surely a race course should aim to offer as many fair opportunities for the backmarkers to climb back into the race. A match race is only worth watching when the two boats are locked in battle. There is nothing more dull than watching one boat lead another boat by a comfortable margin, so why not increase the opportunities to keep the race alive? Having one leeward mark plays right into the hands of the leader, whereas having a leeward gate would give the backmarker more of a fighting chance.
