With the championship season all but wrapped up, and the autumn evenings closing in, we’re now entering the season of one-off special races. We’ve just had the Southport 24-hour race go past, and well done to Bolton for showing the greatest stamina to win the competition on the water. I’m sure many other teams would lay claim to winning the 24-hour drinkathon taking place at the water’s edge, but that is a part of the competition that goes unrecorded.
Then there was the Crewsaver Top Club, where Northampton Sailing Club prevailed. The winning team consisted of Peter Gray and George Hand, who raced their Mirror to 2nd in the Slow Handicap division; Tom Stewart and Chris Downham who won the Medium Handicap fleet in a Merlin Rocket; and Dave Wade and Richard Wagstaff took 4th with their Fireball in Fast Handicap. This is really shaping up to be one of the great events of the dinghy calendar, and I fully expect it to be going strong another 50 years from now.
As I write, the Tide Ride is about to happen, which unfortunately I have to miss due to America’s Cup duty down in Sicily. The scars of my woeful performance on Hayling Bar three years ago have just about healed to the point where I could face going back there again. Racing up and down on super-short courses on a strong-flowing current right in front of an audience cheering and jeering from Hayling Island clubhouse’s top deck are all ingredients that either make a good day a great one, or a bad day an absolutely terrible one. It is an extreme event that metes out double punishment on any small boathandling or tactical error.
Always raced on the top of the strongest spring tide, the current can sometimes run at 4 or 5 knots, and this has a huge effect on the wind. The last time I raced it, in the morning the current was sweeping the boat upwind on a conveyor belt. Once you made your final approach to the start line, you were committed, there was no bailing out. Sailing the 49er with Harvey Hillary, I mistimed our approach, got there too early, and was OCSed. Doh! The added push of 5 knots up your transom also made the wind 5 knots stronger, so we were easing sails, pulling on the cunningham and pulling up the daggerboard. Then in the afternoon, for the finals which we weren’t in because of our OCS accident, the tide was 4 or 5 knots with the wind, turning the last race into a light-wind, sitting-in-the-boat drift-around.
That’s the difference tide can make to racing. Obvious to those of us used to it, as many of us who race on British coastlines are, but quite unfathomable to those new to it. It’s interesting to see how much better British sailors cope with tidal conditions in international regattas, even at Olympic level. Peter Bentley has just returned from a reconnaissance mission for the RYA to check out the sailing waters in Qingdao, for the Olympics in 2008. And while the wind blew slightly stronger than the widely held prediction that there will be no wind at all, Peter said the waters were very tidal, which should suit the Brits more than most.
But the biggest issue of all was the amount of fog. Peter said there were some days when it wouldn’t be the lack of wind being the reason for not sailing, but that no one would be able to find the windward mark! Suffice it to say, Peter does not sound like a great fan of the venue, so after this first recce mission, the prognosis for the 2008 regatta looks no better.
Talking of the effect that current can have on sailing, I saw an online debate on the Scuttlebutt email newsletter about the so-called ‘lee-bow effect’. The big question - about whether getting your bow just the right side of an opposing tide, can lift you higher towards the next mark – has raged on for years. Those of a scientific leaning often tend to argue against the lee-bow effect, saying it doesn’t matter how your boat is pointing in relation to the direction of the current, it’s the same for everyone. Whereas, more often than not, those who choose to rely more on their practical experience of racing in tidal waters believe otherwise. I fall into the latter category. There are definitely times when ‘something’ is going on, and just because it can’t be justified in scientific terms doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Here’s another one for you. Wind weight. Some wind has more oomph in it than other wind. Steve Cockerill brought this up the other day when I was chatting to him at the Southampton Boat Show. He was umming and aaahing about whether to go Standard rig or Radial rig for the Laser Masters World Championships in Brazil. Steve says the last time he sailed in that vicinity, in another part of Brazil near the Equator, there was no weight in the wind. “It was blowing 15 knots, and normally you’d be maxed out on the Cunningham to depower the rig, but you didn’t need to. There wasn’t any power in the wind,” Steve said.
He spent the whole week sailing around with the Cunningham slack, despite the wind and waves. Hence his dilemma over the choice of rig. Steve is a former Radial World Champion, so he’s obviously very good, but being at the top end of the weight range for the Radial rig, he was wondering if there would be enough oomph in the breeze to justify his weight. It will be interesting to see what he has to say when he comes back home.
And yet some experts say 20 knots of wind is 20 knots of wind, wherever you are in the world, and whatever the climate. I suspect this is because they haven’t invented an instrument for measuring wind density. Delving back into my O Level Physics – for you young folk that’s like a GCSE but more difficult (ouch, I can’t wait for the email abuse on that one!) – I seem to remember that colder air has a higher density than warm air. There are more particles in a colder cubic metre of air. Oh crikey, I’m really getting out of my depth now, but assuming that to be the case, then surely on a cold day there are more particles hitting the sail than on a warm day. More things hitting your sail than less things hitting your sail has to result in more power, doesn’t it?
Anyway, my theory might be a bit half-cocked, but I got all the practical evidence I needed when I asked an America’s Cup sailor what he thought about ‘wind weight’. I can’t mention this guy’s name because he thought it might get him into trouble with his team about talking about this stuff to a loose-lipped journo. This is such top-level stuff that some America’s Cup teams may not even know about this.
My friend on the inside said that when sailing they talk about the very term, ‘wind weight’. They have a feel for what a ‘normal’ 20 knots feels like, and they call that 100%. If the wind is feeling a little soft that day, such as in Brazil, they might refer to that wind as 80% wind weight. And if it’s in a place like Sweden in the autumn, they might talk about a ‘heavy wind’ as being 110%.
Because America’s Cup teams log absolutely everything - boatspeed, true wind, apparent wind, water temperature, you name it – they know down to the n’th degree exactly what speeds they should be hitting for any given wind speed. But sometimes they’re coming in under or over those speeds, and they quite often put that down to wind weight. So there you have it, scientists – wind weight. Put that in your Bunsen burners and smoke it.
Anyway, I was talking about special events going on at the moment and – talking of Steve Cockerill – he has had such an amazing year in a variety of singlehanded classes that he was offered the right to contest the Endeavour Champion of Champions event on behalf of three different classes, if I rightly recall - the Blaze, the Streaker and the RS300. But because he was away in Brazil for the Lasers he had to pass the honour on to the runners-up in those classes’ national championships.
It will be interesting to see what effect a new boat – the Xenon – has on the outcome of the Endeavour, hosted by the Royal Corinthian on Burnham on Crouch. Traditionally held in RS400s, and other popular racing classes such as the Lark or Enterprise in earlier years, the class representative of the chosen boat nearly always prevailed. The great thing about the Xenon is that few if any of the competitors will have set foot in one before, so it might just make for a more level playing field. A similar but different event also coming up is the Lark Masters Championship. The inaugural event took place two years ago, and the next one takes place 22/23 October at Northampton Sailing Club. The Lark class has gone for the same age divisions favoured by the Laser class, with an Apprentice Master starting from 35 to 44, a Master 45 to 54, and the over 55s honoured with the title of Grand Master. This is another event that I had hoped to do, the class kindly inviting me to compete as a former Lark sailor from my university days. Prior engagements have kept me from coming, but prominent names such as Richard Estaugh and Mark Rushall are believed to be coming. A special add-on to the event is a Champion of Champions race where all past Lark National Champions will compete in a special race on the Saturday.
There is a new addition to the calendar which hopefully will become a bedrock of the autumn racing season. This is the Dave Ovington Memorial Trophy, which will take place at Grafham Water on 5 November, with an Ovington classes open meeting continuing with a further day’s racing on Sunday the 6th. A huge number of sailors have already signed up to take part, and it could well hit the maximum entry of 200 boats. Saturday’s racing consists of three races on two handicap courses for all single hull dinghies and keelboats up to PY 900, and PY 900 to 1100. Sunday’s racing will be for International 14, 49er, 59er, Musto Skiff, and B14 only. My old 49er crew Gareth Edwards is working the turntables for the Saturday night disco, and it promises to be a wonderful celebration of the great boatbuilder’s life. You can get further details from Grafham’s website, www.grafham.org, or calling the club on 0845 644 2548.
