If a boat was a car
The forum on yachtsandyachting.com is a popular place for sailors to hurl good-humoured insults at each other. I've mentioned the ‘ugliest boat' thread before, which is running as strong as ever, but a slight variation on the theme that's also proving popular, is the sport of comparing dinghy classes to different makes of car. Some contributors take the opportunity to puff up their own class, with Laser 4000 sailors likening their beloved boats to Aston Martins and so forth. And others take the opportunity to take pot shots at other classes.
Doctor Clifford is one of the regular contributors to this thread, and I particularly enjoyed his list of comparisons:
· Stratos = an old Bedford van, struggling to climb a hill, belching out clouds of smoke
· Foiling Moth = a unicycle (not a car, but close enough!)
· International 14 = Circus clown car (they spend more time tinkering and putting them back together for another spectacular wipeout than actually sailing!)
· Wayfarer = Toyota pick-up (keeps going forever, regardless of how you treat it)
· Bosun = WWII tank (as robust, and performance to match).
But the Doctor saves his best for the Cherub, in his view "a 1993 Vauxhall Nova with re-tuned engine, wideboy stainless alloys, lots of bodykit (still in primer grey), outrageous spoilers (front and back) carbon-look filler cap, tinted windows, an exhaust you could kick a football up, no back seats - just speakers and a 'big bass bin', sports steering wheel, Recaro seats and lots of 'accessories' from Halfords". No greater compliment could a class wish for.
Lucy Lee makes a couple of double-edged, but very sharp observations. She likens the Oppie to a Citroen 2CV: "Classic first boat/car, rather outdated and quirky, daft non-boat/car shape but teaches you loads." And she reckons the International 14 is a TVR: "Capable of great speed and excitement, but not so reliable that you'd have it as your only method of transport!" As a Fourteener myself, I'd have to admit that was right on the money.
Another contributor, Rupert, reckons the Wayfarer is a Volvo estate and that Firefly team racing is best compared to Mini Coopers from the Michael Caine classic movie, the Italian Job. Great stuff.
Having had my first race in a 505 the other day, I'd have to liken it to an old Jag - getting on a bit (next year is the 40th anniversary World Championship), but still shows plenty of pace and style. I was crewing for Charlie Walters at the Hayling Island open meeting and there was more than enough wind to see what these boats can do with their bigger spinnakers, which were voted in a couple of years ago.
Racing downwind is surprisingly similar to sailing asymmetric boats, with everybody sailing big angles to build up the apparent wind and with the crew trapezing. This opens the tactical options right up, and in my mind is more interesting than running dead downwind with helm and crew sat on opposite gunnels. This is still the most efficient way for the 505 to get downwind in 9 knots or less, but on the day I was racing with Charlie it was gusting to 25 knots. It was a pretty wild ride.
The sheet loads on the kite were higher than I expected, but the biggest surprise was just what a hash I was making of the manoeuvres. I suppose you lose a bit of manual dexterity spending years just pulling ropes - which is all you have to do on a gennaker-rigged boat. On a 49er or a 14, it's just pulling one rope as hard and as fast as you can to get both the pole and the kite set. I did at least cut the thumb and forefinger off my gloves before I went out in the 505, and it was just as well that I did, as I'd have made even more of a meal of trying to clip the spinnaker guy on to the end of the pole.
Just as an aside, while I'm on the subject of fingerless gloves, why is it manufacturers make fully fingerless gloves, as opposed to the ones with just the thumb and forefinger exposed? I don't get it, because when have you ever tried to tie or untie knots with anything other than you thumb and forefinger? Maybe there are really dextrous people out there who can tie bowlines and sheetbends simultaneously using all 10 digits. But I doubt it. In my experience of fingerless gloves, all that ever happens is that the leather starts bunching up and leaving your fingers exposed, so that you end up slashing your fingers up, exactly the thing that you were seeking to avoid in the first place. My advice would be to buy the gloves with three fingers fully covered and only the thumb and forefinger exposed. The only possible purpose for having fully fingerless gloves is for nose picking. And if you have time to do that during a race then you really should really try sailing something a bit more challenging.
There certainly wasn't time for any such vulgar pursuits while Five-Oh racing. Fingers were fully engaged in trying to gybe the pole and so forth. It was my introduction to the ‘spiro' launcher favoured by many 505 crews, although for the life of me I can't see why anyone could like it. The system allows you to launch the pole from the sidedeck by pulling on a rope which hoists the pole out along the boom until the inboard end locates into a socket on the mast. Charlie says if we'd have been racing out in the big waves of Hayling Bay rather than in the shelter of Chichester Harbour, the benefits of the spiro would have become immediately obvious. It means that big heavy crews don't have to be standing up by the mast to get the pole on, all the while putting the boat in imminent danger of nosediving.
The downside of the spiro is that it is a big faff gybing the spinnaker, well for me anyway. Charlie must have got tired of my bleating about the merits of double-ended poles - well anything but a spiro actually - but it could just be a case of a bad workman blaming his tools. I believe Tim Hancock used to use a double-ended pole when he crewed Ian Barker to victory in the 505 World Championships, which must have helped with faster manoeuvres. The trouble with the centre-slung pole is that it needs to be considerably beefier than the single-ended option, and I think Tim used a cut-down section from a quarter-tonner keelboat! So there is a big weight penalty to pay for the ease of use of the double-ended pole, but it's still what I'd choose.
Apart from my gybing frustrations though, it was a grand day out in the Five-Oh. They are wonderful boats upwind, quite hard to get in the groove, but they sing when you find it. And while we weren't doing the speed of a 14 downwind, the exhilaration and excitement was definitely there. One of the peculiarities of the 505 rig is the addition of some tweaking lines which control the height of your trapeze attachment to the mast. Upwind, my trapeze lines ran straight up to the hounds, more or less around the same spot as the shrouds and forestay. But downwind, Charlie would uncleat a rope in the boat which would release a tweaker line at the hounds. Now my trapeze lines were running in a straight line to a point two or three feet above the hounds, more or less in line with the spinnaker halyard exit block. In effect, I was now acting as a backstay to support the mast against the pull of the spinnaker. This is an ingenious arrangement, although it is a little disconcerting to feel yourself springing up and down a few inches on your trapeze when Charlie has forgotten to pull on the tweakers for the next windward leg. Without the balancing force of the spinnaker, your trapeze wire is now pulling at an unsupported top section, so now is the time to pull the tweakers back on.
The tweakers are just part of a vast array of controls at the 505 helmsman's disposal. Having got used to the simplicity of skiff-type boats, it's quite an eye-opener to see the amount of string in the cockpit. Virtually everything is adjustable. The 505 has always been about technology, and Charlie's boat is a testament to the longevity of modern materials. It may be 10 years old but because Rondar built it almost entirely out of carbon, it is still going as strong as the day it popped out of the mould. Where the 505 is beginning to lag, however, is in its persistence with metal masts, although I suspect it won't be long before the class votes carbon back in. The 505 class pioneered carbon development as far back as the late 70s and early 80s, when the Americans were throwing huge amounts of money at trying to go faster. The carbon option was far from reliable in those days, however. At the 1982 Worlds in Cork, numerous carbon rigs came crashing down although one of the few that stayed up went on to win the championship, the boat sailed by Gary Knapp and Cam Lewis.
Lewis went on to skipper Team Adventure, the Maxi cat in The Race five years ago, among many other notable achievements. One of the key moments that helped Knapp and Lewis to victory in the 505 was when they saw a massive gust coming down the run behind the fleet. The quick-witted Lewis hooked himself on to the trapeze and walked to the back of the boat, to act as a temporary backstay. While the gust tore rigs out of the boats around them, Knapp and Lewis weathered the storm to complete the race with their mast intact. Such quick thinking is the sign of a truly great sailor.
So you can see why the 505 decided to get out of carbon masts all those years ago. Even in the mid-90s when the 14 started out experimenting with carbon, the masts barely lasted a few months before they came crashing down in a shower of black splinters. But now would be a good time for the 505 to reconsider its options - with just one proviso. And that is that there is currently a shortage of raw carbon available. With all the demands from the military and aerospace industries - particularly the launch of the new super-passenger jet the A380 - mast manufacturers are finding themselves quite low down on the list of priorities for carbon supply.
So if you've got a carbon mast and you see a big dark gust following you down the run, remember what Cam Lewis did and save yourself a few hundred quid. A replacement carbon mast could be quite expensive over the next few months. But hopefully this current carbon shortage is just a sign of its increasing popularity in many different industries and applications. In the longer term this should mean that production levels should increase and the cost of carbon should then start coming back down again.
