Tuning Up

I did my first bit of two-boat tuning in five years the other day. It's crazy not to do it more often really, as the amount you learn in a short time is quite incredible. Tornado sailor Martin Sellars and I teamed up as a tune-up crew for serious Olympic aspirants Paul Brotherton and Mark Asquith, who had two new boats down in Cadiz that they wanted to test.

Cadiz is the venue for the multi-class Olympic World Championships due to happen in September, and this is where most of the fighting will take place for British Olympic Team places. Judging by my brief trip to the place, the sailing promises to be spectacular. The waves are immense, the biggest I have experienced in a 49er, but far enough apart - most of the time - that you can push the boat as fast as it will go downwind. We only experienced breezes up to 14 knots and that was big enough; quite what it will be like with another 5 or 10 knots on top of that I can only imagine. I hope the TV cameras are down there in force because Cadiz promises the most thrilling, high-quality racing that has ever taken place.

Dolphin Struck

A real bonus was to have our first sail out into the bay greeted by a school of 20 dolphins who wanted to do some tuning of their own against the 49er. Needless to say, we didn't put up much of a contest, and in any case we were too gobsmacked by the experience to do anything other than gasp as the dolphins leapt up and down next to our boat.

But on to the serious business of training, and Martin and I were doing our damndest to hang on to Paul and Mark on the tuning runs. We were blown away on the first couple of speed runs but then gradually Martin and I got used to each other, the boat, and the Cadiz conditions. We managed to hold pace with them quite a few times after that, and we like to think we even had the edge on a couple of occasions. The trouble with two-boat tuning is it demands complete honesty between the teams and even of yourself. It's easy to con yourself into believing you've had a great tuning run when in fact the breeze shifted in your favour, so you have to watch the compass pretty closely as you're going along.

When things get on top of you

The two things you notice in particular about Paul and Mark's style is how high they point and how heeled to windward they sail. In fact, these are two common traits that you'll find in a lot of top-class international sailors. So why don't we all do it? After all, when it comes to windward heel all you've got to do is either head up a little, ease the main a little, or get your bodyweight further out, and then hold that position with the rig on top of you.

The trouble is, the more you heel the boat to windward, the closer you are sailing to disaster. If the wind drops or heads you, you've got no time at all to react to the change in circumstances, and you could end up being 'tea-bagged' in the water. Sailing the boat flat, or even better - heeled to leeward - gives you more reaction time in changeable breezes.

So why bother sailing heeled to windward? One reason could be that the sails are now providing a slight lifting force, like a windsurfer sail does, as opposed to being heeled to leeward like a keelboat when the sails are now driving the boat deeper into the water. But I think the advantages here are pretty limited. Far more important is balancing up the rudder forces. On a 49er where the daggerboard position fore and aft is fixed and the amount of mast rake is set by a class rule measurement, there is a slight tendency for the boat to round up into the breeze when being sailed flat, so the windward heel helps remove some of this unwanted rudder drag.

If you're sailing a centreboard boat like an Enterprise or Fireball, this isn't such an issue as you can alter mast rake and centreboard rake as you please. But even in these classes, windward heel can sometimes pay.

Shock and awe

Anyway, Paul suggested a little exercise for Martin and me to try by ourselves out on the bay. All it involves is securing the tiller centrally in the boat with some tight shockcord tied out to each gunnel. Then the aim is to sail the boat as normally as possible in a straight line without holding on to the tiller. When you first start sailing like this, with only body weight and sail trim to steer the boat, it feels ridiculous. It's so difficult, with the boat spinning first in one direction and then the other, that you feel like giving up. But persevere for five minutes and you might start to get the boat moving in something approximating to a straight line. Martin and I got quite good at it after 20 minutes, except for the odd moment when the boat would suddenly bear away and take off downwind like an untamed stallion.

But mentally we were knackered. It takes massive concentration to keep the boat tracking like this, and quite a bit of windward heel (there's a hint there about how we should be sailing, perhaps), but when you untie the shockcord and pick up the tiller again, everything feels so easy! If there's a way of extending your comfort zone and learning the art of windward heel in a short time, then this is it. I thoroughly recommend this exercise for whatever boat you sail, unless it's a singlehander such as a Topper or a Laser which have massive amounts of weather helm designed into them. But for any boat with a main and jib, it will teach you a great deal about body movement and sail trim in a short time.

We didn't think it would be fair to use one of Paul's boats for the downwind experiment, and I'm not sure quite how it would work in a fast asymmetric like a 49er, but Paul believes the shockcorded tiller experiment is equally valid downwind for slower conventionally rigged boats like the 470.

Ship without a rudder

All I would say is, give this a try, but do it well away from the shore and particularly from other boats. I remember a time when we did some rudderless sailing (a more common but far inferior alternative to the shockcorded-tiller exercise) in 470s at Rutland. It ended up with John Merricks (the late, great Olympic silver medallist) losing control and spearing his 470 through the side of a club-racing Flying Fifteen. Needless to say, the Flying Fifteen owner was none too pleased, and quite how John managed to explain on the insurance form that he was sailing without a rudder at the time, I don't quite know.

Not that you could argue with John's prowess when he did have the tiller in his hand. He won the Fireball Nationals at his first attempt, crewed by Tom Saunt. That's going back some years, to 1991 when the event took place in Torbay. It doesn't seem that long ago, but it's funny to see the boats that we were racing back then described as 'Classics' now.

Classic idea

Class publicity officer Jonathan Bale sent me details of the Fireballs' latest bid to appeal to a wider group of sailors, by making any boat with a sail number of less than 14,000 a 'Classic'. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but broadly speaking the aim is to hold a 'race within a race' for the boats that are about 15 years old or more, at some of the open meetings and Nationals. This means that owners of some of the older (and cheaper) boats get a shot at winning their own trophy, as well as competing boat-for-boat with the newer, more expensive hulls. A simple but neat idea.

Something similar is happening with the 18-foot skiff class, which for years has been dogged by rival factions all battling for a piece of the pie, and let's face it, we're not exactly talking about a very big pie. It seems crazy that the older Bethwaite 18 designs haven't been allowed to compete on the same track as the Murray 18s, which are the only design currently in build. The problem is that the Bethwaite shape is sharper in the bow and flatter in the rocker, which makes her a rocketship upwind and generally faster than the Murray, although a good deal harder to sail too.

Grandfathered

I spoke to Richard Woof, the West Country boatbuilder who has been one of the prime movers in the UK fleet over the past few years. He explained the thinking behind a new proposal to 'grandfather' the older B18s and allow them to compete on the circuit. "If you have a B18 or an old Australian Grand Prix boat - as long as the rig confirms to mast height, sprit length etc -  then you will be allowed to race in this country and Europe for the foreseeable future, and the next two or three seasons. The only proviso is that those boats cannot be sold or revamped. There can't be a change of ownership."

This is because the older B18s tend not to be owned by the fastest crews, so they might as well be allowed to join in the fun - provided of course they don't start winning! The aim of the ruling is to prevent one of the more accomplished teams, like RMW jockey Rob Greenhalgh and his crew or the Danish team headed by Michael Hestbaek, picking up an old B18 and lavishing huge amounts of care and cash on making it faster than a new Murray.

This enlightened relaxation of the rules could well result in the biggest turnouts of 18-footers ever seen, firstly at Carnac in Northern France, and then at Weymouth during June, with between 30 and 40 boats expected to make the start line. Woofy's own boat, RMW Marine, will start as favourite and will expect to make amends for not winning the JJ Giltinan unofficial world championship back in January.

RSing around with the rules

Woofy is also known as builder of some of the successful RS one-designs, which have rewritten the book on how to run a thriving national racing class. However, one of their class rule changes - that of allowing RS200 sailors to hit marks or the course, rather than taking the 360 degree penalty prescribed by the International Racing Rules - has upset Tony Cropper. Tony, a Solo sailor, was running an open meeting for the RS200s and refused to allow the class rule for the event. His reasoning was that hitting marks is bad seamanship and somebody could end up dragging one of the course marks.

I have to say that the Racing Rules do not always work particularly well for all classes. I think they deal particularly badly with asymmetric boats and leeward gate marks for example, and where you believe the law is an ass, I think it is fair enough to go ahead and change the rules accordingly. But I have to agree with Tony on mark roundings. What's wrong with doing a 360-degree turn? It discourages barging at the mark, and offers a meaningful but not-too-harsh penalty. Where's the problem with that?