One of the things that has been creeping into top-level professional sailing like the America's Cup and the Olympics is a new science known as notational analysis. This has been in existence for some time in field sports like football and rugby, and involves observers watching the patterns of play in a game and noting the movements of every individual on the pitch. You sometimes see a very basic form of notational analysis in some of the national newspapers, where they use a few illustrations to show how a team, let's say the England Rugby Team, put together a sequence of moves that led to Jason Robinson breaking down the left wing and scoring a try.

Notational analysis at its highest level involves watching back through hours of video footage, perhaps from different camera angles, to piece together the match's progress from the smallest details. Now, with the advent of GPS technology, it is becoming increasingly prevalent in sailing.

At the Sail for Gold regatta in Weymouth last year, a specialist company called Traxu fitted GPS units to the top 20 boats in the Gold Fleet finals of a few classes like the Laser and 49er, and after racing you could watch their traces around the race course and see what the winning moves were. They even put the units on the Yngling fleet and fortunately the Traxu software also gives you the facility to watch the race in fast forward mode. Now the Musto Skiff class has begun playing with a system that makes the technology even more accessible. Rick Perkins has been using one of the new Velocitek units that were on display at the Dinghy Show recently, and using some free software that has been written by a clever software developer from France.

After competing in the Musto Skiff open meeting at Rutland a few weeks ago, Rick downloaded the stored data from the Velocitek unit to his computer and ran it through the software. The level of information available is very impressive indeed. Rick gave me a demonstration of the software which, modestly enough, was from Race 5 which Rick happened to win.

When you watch his track, you can see that Rick ducked the fleet on port tack and broke out to the right-hand side of the course. He then hits a bit of a header, tacks on to starboard and lifts up nicely toward the windward mark. After another couple of tacks he rounds the windward mark and immediately gybes before setting the kite to take advantage of the same right-hand side advantage that propelled him to first place up the beat. What you can also do with this fancy software is set Rick's track to appear in different colour codes depending on what speed the boat was doing at the time. For example, when the boat is doing more than 10 knots you could make the line green, for more than 5 knots you could choose yellow, and for less than 5 knots you could select red. Then you start to get a sense of where the boat is really going fast or slow.

When Rick bears away behind the fleet at the start, he accelerates to over 10 knots as he sails on a fast reach. Then it's a 7 to 8 knots of boatspeed for straight-line sailing upwind, but for the tacks and gybes it drops below 5 knots and so the colour changes again. Rick hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of what this powerful software can do, but a GPS unit combined with this kind of software seems to offer a very cost-effective solution for doing some post-race analysis. It gives you an objective viewpoint that normally only a third-party coach could give you.

Obviously this type of technology will get a lot more interesting when there are a few more GPS units on other boats, but what Rick has also done in the meantime is overlay his track from two different races at Rutland to compare his route, and he says they are surprisingly similar. If you want to look at the software for yourself, go to www.mustoskiff.com. And if you go to www.traxu.com you'll see a link to some races from last year's Sail for Gold regatta. Rick believes we should all be allowed to carry GPS units on board during racing, and I have some sympathy with that. After all, a GPS unit is not really going to tell you anything that will give a practical advantage while racing. So he reckons the upcoming Musto Skiff World Championships in Lake Garda may allow competitors to use them if they want to. Which seems pretty sensible when your regatta sponsor is none other than Velocitek!

I think it would be great if we could race with onboard GPS units, but my only doubt would be at the Olympic level where the post-race analysis uses for GPS might create a technology gap between the ‘haves' and the ‘have-nots'. Of course, that's not very patriotic of me, because Skandia Team GBR would definitely be one of the beneficiaries of such a rule change. It would be an interesting experiment to try for a year on the Olympic circuit though. If it could be proven to be of equal benefit to the poorer nations as to the established nations, then GPS technology would be a great addition to high-level sailing.


The other big emphasis in Olympic sailing right now is making it more media friendly, and GPS tracking technology could really help to bring the racing to life. GPS tracking has become the lifeblood of round-the-world events like the Volvo Ocean Race and Velux 5 Oceans, and it has played a big role in recent America's Cup, never more so than the one that is underway in Valencia now. Go to www.americascup.com and watch the racing there on their Go Live! system.

This has been particularly useful in the America's Cup fleet racing where you're watching 12 boats sailing up the beat. Out on the water it's pretty difficult to see who's in the lead, but with the Go Live! software playing on your computer you can see the ‘gain line' changing colour as a new boat breaks into the lead. You can also see the theoretical distance in metres back to the other 11 boats, with the pecking order changing every time a windshift sweeps through the course. It would be fantastic to have that kind of software in action at the Olympics next year, although with the predicted light winds, perhaps it would be better to go off and make a cup of tea. Then you could watch it afterwards in fast forward.

Bang for Buck

Working at the Cup recently in Valencia, I got the chance to meet Paul Bieker, who is a key part of the BMW Oracle Racing design team but who was only too thrilled about the chance to talk Cherubs and International 14s for a change. As the designer of the very successful Bieker 14s and more recently the GT60 Cherub hybrid being made for the women's skiff evaluation event in Hyeres, I was keen to hear what he believed the perfect women's skiff would be if he had been given a clean sheet to start from. After all, the GT60 is still very much designed around the existing Cherub rules. But Paul said that he really believed the GT60 was pretty close to his view of the perfect boat for the job.

"Now, he would say that, wouldn't he!" you might be thinking. And of course he does have a vested interest in seeing the GT60 succeed, but Paul seems an unassuming, honest guy to me, so I tend to believe him. After all, he's earning a nice wage from his America's Cup work, so he hardly needs the money. He is genuinely excited about the GT60's prospects, and if not the GT60, at least something exciting for the women to sail in Weymouth 2012.

I also wanted to ask him his views on where International 14 development should go. His Bieker 5 design has won the past two World Championships, and in last year's event in Long Beach, California, the top three places were filled by B5s fitted with gybing board technology. I've never sailed with a gybing board in any boat, but it strikes me that it adds a lot of expense and complexity without adding much of the fun factor.

On the other hand the T-foil rudder, for which Paul was also responsible, is an expensive item but at least it enhances the boat's performance in a major way. It effectively makes a 14-foot boat behave more like a 16-footer. So I wanted Paul's view, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he shares the same view. "I think the T-foil rudder was a good development," he said, "but the gybing board? Well, I've got one on my own 14 but I have to hold my hands up to that one. It is a lot of extra expense and a lot more maintenance for really only a minimal performance gain."

I remember Mark Upton-Brown saying the same thing after using a gybing board to win the 505 Worlds at Hayling Island. It helped him win the event, but given a choice he'd rather the class discarded them. This brings me on to a wider point, that any class should look at the design and the rules of its boat and make an assessment about whether or not the rules are encouraging the best ‘bang for buck'. Gybing boards, I would suggest, do not provide good bang for buck, and on a related but very different note, I've never understood why Optimist sails have those fiddly little sail ties all the way along the boom. It makes the sail more expensive to make, it takes longer to rig up, and in any case a loose-footed sail would probably be faster and more versatile. To me it seems like a no-brainer to get rid of the sail ties.

The best positive example of change that I can think of is when the Fireball class decided to relax its rules on the way the cockpit was constructed, such that boatbuilders could pop the hull out of the mould more easily. Overnight they were able to produce the Fireball for about a thousand pounds cheaper without affecting the performance of the boat in any way. Every class committee should put its class rules through the ‘bang for buck' test and ensure their sailors are getting the most fun and the best value for money from their sailing.