Could Endeavour Harder
The Endeavour is the Champion of Champions' regatta in this country, and yet it came and went without barely a whisper. I searched high and low on the web to find out what happened and who won, and even the host organization, the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, seemed to have nothing about it. I heard on the grapevine that RS400 National Champion Roger Gilbert and crew James Stewart won the event after many years of trying.
To be fair to the RCYC in Burnham, I went back to their website a fortnight later and the results are now up there. But still no report. Having sailed at the event a couple of times, I can say that the welcome offered to the competing sailors is outstanding, with a great party laid on for the Saturday night and race after race on both days. Some of the club members are only too pleased to put teams up at their homes during the weekend, and really you can't fault the Burnham hospitality.
But I do think that, having designed and run such a great event for so many years, there is a responsibility to provide results, photos and a report at the end of it. Sailors around the country want to know if their respective champions put in a performance to make them proud. Winning the Endeavour is a big deal and Roger and James deserve their 15 minutes of fame. Roger has now won the RS400 Nationals for four years on the trot, so it is surprising he hasn't won it before, but he has been usurped by other talented hiking sailors such as James Hunt and Geoff Carveth.
For someone who normally wins more than one championship in a year, Geoff Carveth has had a disappointing year, missing out on the RS200 and 800 titles, although making a very impressive debut in the International 14 Europeans where he finished third. You can't keep him away from the Endeavour, though, and this year he hired out his services to the Europe class, crewing for National Champion Chris Gill and finishing ninth.
"It was superb racing," said Geoff. "We must have done 35 to 40 laps of sailing over the weekend, I was knackered at the end of it." Geoff hasn't done much RS400 racing in recent years and was staggered to see how much pace the winners and the runners-up, OK representatives Nick Craig and Keith Bedborough, who also are no strangers to the RS400. "They seem to have found an extra gear that no one else had," said Geoff. Out of the eight races, the top two teams won four apiece, with 49er National Champions Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes the best of the rest, finishing two points in front of Laser 4000 representatives Pete Barton and Robin Kenyon.
Geoff was so enamoured of his return to the RS400 that he borrowed one for the recent Inland Championships, but again found that the pace of Gilbert and Craig was too much, with these teams once more grabbing the top two slots, with Geoff coming in third. The boat set-up has changed, with people using a lot more mast rake, coupled with truck loads of vang tension. Even now, almost 10 years since the class was launched, people are finding new ways of making the 400 go faster, it seems.
Foiled Again
Boatbuilder Richard Woof has been the man responsible for popping out these RS400s from his West Country factory, although his real passion seems to be to drive high-performance dinghies to ever greater speeds. Not satisfied with resting on his laurels following the demolition of the 14 Worlds in Japan by his jockeys Rob Greenhalgh and Dan Johnson, he has been busy developing the next generation of 14. He's been working on the Morrison 12, which Woofy says will be a little narrower and straighter, with the daggerboard case a little further aft. This latter alteration is to counteract the change of boat balance induced by the huge square-topped mainsails that are now in vogue in the class. The extra roach - which is all added sail area for no penalty - creates weather helm, and so Woofy has redesigned the boat around this. Apart from that, the underwater shape is largely unchanged from the Morrison 11, the design that propelled Rob and Dan to their victory in Japan. He intends to retail the new boat at £9995 excluding VAT but including a set of sails, not a bad price for a little boat that packs a lot of state-of-the-art technology.
Development is moving on apace with T-foil technology, those wacky winged rudders that have become the must-have item in the 14 these days. Woofy says there are two distinct advantages to having wings on your rudder. "The first is pitch control - the wings dampen the boat's tendency to hobby-horse through the waves, with the result that you get more drive from the rig." To accentuate the dampening effect further, the rudder is mounted on a long gantry that extends a couple of feet behind the transom, and the wings are mounted adjacent to the trailing edge of the rudder.
"The second benefit is lift," explains Woofy. "Basically you want to use as much lift as your crew weight and hull design will allow you to use. We estimate we're using 50-60kg of lift with Rob and Dan. The downside is induced drag. This is where we've been working hard to find the right balance between pitch control and lift."
One of the significant discoveries is the effectiveness of an asymmetrically shaped wing (ie one that resembles the shape of an aeroplane wing - with a curved topside and flat underside) compared with a symmetric wing. Woofy says that the asymmetric version produces a better lift-to-drag ratio.
However, whatever shape you choose to make your T-foil, one of the big downsides as everyone found to their cost in Japan, is the T-foil's tendency to pick up weed and other unwanted objects. "There was so much flotsam in the water at Japan that you'd have to stop twice each leg to get it off," said Woofy. "The worst is downwind, as it doesn't come off in a gybe. At least upwind you can tack and you have a good chance of it coming off."
The other black art of the T-foil is knowing how far up the rudder to position the wing. Woofy explains his thinking: "They are mounted as high up as we can get them so as to interface at very low speed with the stern wave, but not so high that they come out of the water if the boat heels a few degrees." All this interfacing with the stern waves sends my inadequate brain into a tailspin, but apparently it's all about fooling the water into thinking that the boat that's passing through it is longer than 14 feet. Don't ask me to get any more technical than that.
Anyway, it's nice to know that even for the more technically minded many of these breakthroughs happen more by accident than by design. Woofy started out producing some versions of the T-foil at the base of the rudder, rather than halfway up which is now the vogue place to site them. But these early versions were reputedly very hard to sail with. "We had an accidental experiment when we towed the boat behind a RIB at high speed, and Rob was having enormous difficulty in ensuring the boat didn't capsize. We had to drop the tow half a dozen times." Woofy took that as a warning sign that perhaps there was a better way.
Woofy's method of testing is in fact very practical and very feel-based. Portland Harbour has tended to be the team's testing ground both for the 14 and the 18. Woofy will go out in the RIB with a quiver of different rudders to try, and the boys will change the different versions over out on the water. "You can remember the feel of one version because it's fresh in your mind, so you can reach some useful conclusions quite quickly," he says.
The other area where he seems to have made significant progress is in the rig, both on the 14 and the 18. His gennakers on the RMW skiff look noticeably smaller than the equipment used by the Aussies for example. Woofy has a simple philosophy on this. "My first priority is to get the shape right first, and then make it as big as we can without compromising the shape." This has gone against the grain of other design philosophies of simply chucking as much sail area up the rig as the mast will carry. The larger sail area route probably works at lower speeds, but at the high apparent-wind-generated speeds of an 18 or even a 14, it seems Woofy's principle of ‘shape first, size second' is the way to go. It is only his decision to make the square-top main even more square that seems to have gone against this less-is-more approach, but all in all he is created a package that for the time being seems pretty invincible. Woofy is particularly proud of the fact that Rob and Dan won two of their heats in Japan by a margin of just under six minutes. Not too shabby in a race lasting just over an hour and a half.
Another record that fell to Team RMW was the classic Bridge To Bridge Race in San Francisco Bay, where Rob and Dan, backed up by Sam Gardner on the bow, blitzed the 5.7 mile run in just 16 minutes 41 seconds. Even more impressive was that it wasn't a straight rhumb-line race either, with Woofy estimating they had to cover 7 miles of actual sailing distance.
Ship without a rudder
From talk about £1,000 rudders to a tale of no rudder at all, I heard a story about two fast-thinking sailors who rescued themselves and their boat from rocky ruin, through some deft emergency boathandling. Jack Norton and Suzy Russell borrowed a Laser 2000 for the National Schools Sailing Association (NSSA) Regatta earlier this year, and Jack describes what happened: "Racing in a Force 5, we were bearing away after the top wing mark. As we were doing so, the bottom rudder pin slipped out and the force of bearing away bent the top one at a near 90 degrees.
"As I was trying to pop the rudder back on, (not having realised that the pin was bent) we were steadily being blown on towards the moored boats, and the harbour wall. We then decided it would be a good idea to get away from there, so popped the rudder in the bottom of the boat and started sailing back towards the direction of the beach (into the wind). No rescue cover came so we sailed all the way back to the beach then drove into Weymouth for serious rudder repairs."
Luckily, Jack had learned how to sail rudderless while doing his pre-entry assessment to become a dinghy instructor, but without that knowledge things could have been a lot worse. It's good to practise these skills every so often, not only for those emergency situations but because learning to rely less on your rudder will make you a better sailor anyway.
