What a strange year it's been for wind. It seemed like every time we went sailing during the first half of the year, it was blowing hard. But the latter half the year seems to have been dogged by light winds. It's been absolutely dire. When the temperature drops below 5 degrees, there has to be a good reason to go sailing, and drifting around crouched up in the boat is not my idea of fun.
Last year was generally thought to be a pretty rubbish year for wind as well, so I think we're due a good spell of Force 4s and 5s. Of course I'm talking about weekend wind. No doubt the Olympically minded have been enjoying exquisite breezes from Monday to Friday but that's no good for us desk jockeys. I did some TV commentary with former Y&Y writer Digby Fox the other day, where we were commentating on a made-for-TV regatta tagged on to the end of the Laser Radial European Championships in Northern Ireland. It was an eight-boat, short-course, three-race series called the Radical Radials, but unfortunately the breeze was anything but radical. In fact it was virtually non-existent. But with a headcam on one of the sailors and the camera boats allowed to get right in the thick of the racing, it was actually very watchable. OK, it's never going to be Manchester United v Real Madrid, but to aficionados such as Yachts & Yachting readers there is still plenty to enjoy, watching some of the best sailors go about their business, regardless of the conditions.
One of the difficulties of doing commentary for a general broadcast medium like TV or radio is deciding what level of knowledge to pitch your comments at. Do you aim at the lowest common denominator and explain what a tack or a gybe is, or do you assume some level of understanding and just get on with it? There is no right answer, really, but it does frustrate me how some sailing programmes are forever apologising for the complexities of the sport.
Anyway, the nice thing about this commentary job was that Digby shares my views, and so we just got on talked. There were three Brits in the event - Steve Cockerill, Charlotte Dobson and Jon Emmett - although the winner was a young French sailor called Jean Baptiste Bernaz. In the fickle Ballyholme breezes it wasn't the most electrifying of racing to watch, but it was still impressive to watch some of the subtle boathandling involved, the aggressive roll-tacking in particular. The on-the-water jury handed out a lot of penalties to sailors who overstepped the mark with their kinetics, and there was a very fine line to be drawn between maximising your body movement without abusing the rule. It makes me glad to be sailing faster boats where such kinetics have a limited - if not detrimental - effect on your speed. The slower the boat, the more you need to be versed in the rights and wrongs of sailing kinetics. It is the perennial grey area of the sport for the Ainslies, Goodisons and Baldwins of this world.
Following my recent comments about the inclusion of the Radial in the Olympics, Jon Emmett got in touch to put me straight on my suggestion that 470 helming was the only place left in Olympic sailing for women weighing less than 68kg. Jon claims that there are many examples of Radial success where sailors have weighed between 55 and 68kg. I would argue that just because sailors have had success at a particular weight up till now, doesn't mean they will necessarily have the same success at Olympic level. Now that the Radial has gone Olympic, all the parameters for success will tighten up, and being close to target weight - wherever that may end up - is one of the biggest factors. Where target weight does end up depends a lot on how much the best sailors choose to weigh. This is a case of that old cliché: Which came first - the chicken or the egg? As a new Olympic class, past trends in the Laser Radial will soon go out the window and the sailors that emerge at the top of the pecking order will begin to define the new world order. The rest of the Radial fleet will then feel compelled to eat or diet themselves towards a similar weight.
The Finn is an interesting example, as the accepted wisdom has been that to be competitive you should weigh around 100kg. Iain Percy went through a massive weight gain for the Finn, from having dieted like crazy to stay light enough for the Laser. He never quite made 100kg but worked hard in the gym to reach a fighting weight of around 97kg. He was one of the lightest sailors but he won Olympic gold comfortably in Sydney. Ben Ainslie had to go through a similar weight gain when he embarked on his Finn campaign, but he never got much further than 94kg. However it didn't seem to hurt him too much, even in the windy stuff at Athens. Perhaps he and Percy have begun to redefine what the ideal weight is for the Finn. That is the power of being the best in your class. Where the winner leads, the rest will follow. And the same is likely to be true in the Radial.
Of course the proposed carbon top section might bring the weight down for the Radial, but we'll have to wait and see if that comes to fruition. Whether or not it does, there is no holding back the tide where carbon is concerned. More and more classes - both traditional and modern - are adopting carbon in favour of aluminium. DVDs have superseded VHS, CDs have taken over from records, and Girls Aloud have replaced the Spice Girls. Carbon is by no means the dominant material yet, but Seldén Masts' opening of their new £4m facility in Locks Heath is a strong sign of how much they are turning their attention increasingly to carbon manufacture. With a filament-winding machine and a new 20-metre autoclave, Seldén can now build and bake carbon masts not just for the dinghy market but pretty much anything that races around the Solent.
Carbon technology is really coming of age now. It's not without its faults. I reported earlier this year on how the top three feet of our 14 mast snapped off while sailing downwind in windy but not unusual conditions. It was a simple repair, however, and within a few days we were back on the water with the same mast, and have happily used it ever since. If you break an aluminium mast, that's it, time to fork out for a new one. So the initial added expense of carbon will in many cases pay for itself in the longer term.
The Flying Dutchman class is one that is pressing ahead with carbon masts, and the method of adoption is one that other classes would do well to note. Anyone who starts using a carbon mast must add 1.5kg corrector weights until 2008, at which point the correctors can be removed. This should make the sailors still racing with an aluminium mast feel more comfortable about racing on equal terms with their carbon rigged rivals, and after another three years the prospect of forking out for a new mast shouldn't seem so daunting. It is a great move for the class, which in its heyday was the raciest and perhaps the fastest dinghy of the pre-skiff era. Our greatest FD sailor was Rodney Pattisson, who won two golds and one silver at the Games. Pattisson took boat and rig development to an unprecedented level, and such was his aura of invincibility that he felt compelled to carry a spare rudder while racing. This was to give himself some measure of insurance in the event of a desperate and mean-minded competitor coming along behind him at the start and ‘accidentally' knocking off his rudder.
To give you an idea of just how good he was, he won the 1968 Games in Acapulco with a final score of just 3 points. An East German team took Silver with 43.7 points (they were using the old Olympic scoring system that I mentioned a couple of months back). It seems there are a number of stories that grew up around the Pattisson legend. Jerry Rook from Lyme Regis sent me this story about the multi-medallist. "He was an extremely crafty operator. At one of the Olympics when yacht electronics were in their infancy he turned up with his Flying Dutchman fitted with a Brookes & Gatehouse electronic wind indicator at the masthead and what we'd now call a VDU under the foredeck. There was uproar as firstly they tried to ban it and then realised they couldn't bring in such a rule change so quickly. Coaches and rule experts rushed about and various teams tried to copy the equipment in time for the Olympics. Rodney duly won his gold medal and then it leaked out that it could not work as there was no room inside the tiny-sectioned Needlespar mast for the wires as well as halyards! He couldn't care less whether the equipment was banned or not - the ruse was just to upset the opposition."
It goes to show you shouldn't believe everything you see. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw an Aussie Fireball crew take off down the run of a World Championships, except heading in the wrong direction on a trapeze reach. I was even less credulous when the same Aussies reappeared from over the horizon trapezing back into the leeward mark, except a hundred yards further ahead. That was 15 or so years ago, and it was my first experience of just how effective apparent wind sailing can be. These days of course, I am a sworn convert to this style of sailing in asymmetric classes like the 49er and 14. But last year's 505 National Champion Charlie Walters was telling me just what a difference the new bigger spinnakers have made to downwind sailing in the 505. Charlie says that in as little as 8 to 10 knots it can start to pay doing ‘big angles' down the run. Actually, he says it's very confusing because you can either run dead downwind in the old conventional manner or you can go ‘asymmetric', and quite often all the boats will arrive at the leeward mark with no discernible gain for either option. Charlie says it is a matter of knowing which method to apply for which tactical situation. The big advantage of going for the apparent wind option as you exit a crowded windward mark is that it makes it that much harder for the boats behind to get on your wind. If you run off dead square from the windward mark, you can be a sitting duck for the dirty air from the boats behind. Whereas the run used to be quite processional in the Five-Oh, Charlie says there is often more thinking to be done down the run than on any other part of the course.
