Mark Chisnell's Blog, page 7

One Down on the WMRT...The first event on the 2011 Wo...

One Down on the WMRT...



The first event on the 2011 World Match Racing Tour ended last Sunday, and the second – Match Race Germany - kicks off in Langenargen this coming Wednesday. Sometimes Match Race France is a good indicator for the overall Tour and sometimes it isn't - in 2009, Adam Minoprio won in Marseille, and then won it all. Last year, Matt Richard beat Ben Ainslie to take Match Race France, and we know how that turned out in the final act at the Monsoon Cup. But I still think we can draw a few pointers from what went down in Marseille last weekend.



First up, it was a great, winning performance from Damien Iehl, who's clearly put the work in over the winter. He looked slick, calm and polished – not always Damien's MO. And while Iehl has won an individual Tour event before (not to mention the ISAF Match Racing World Championship in 1997), his best overall Tour result is a lowly eighth. He already looks a solid bet to seriously improve on that this year – and the fact that he won in Germany in 2008 can only be a confidence booster going into next week.



Torvar Mirsky was a little unlucky to lose to Bertrand Pace in the semi-final in Marseille, but I thought it crucial for the Aussie team that they toughed it out to get the third place from Jesper Radich in the Petite Final. Mirsky and co. gave up far too many soft points last year by losing finals and petite finals. If they want to make a serious challenge in 2011 this is exactly the sort of performance they need to deliver – bouncing back from a tough break in the semi's to take the extra three Tour points available for third place. After a second and a third place overall in the last couple of years - and with new financial support from The Wave Muscat - these guys can no longer posture as the young pretenders running their operation on the whiff of an oily rag. It's time to deliver, and Torvar knows it.



Jesper Radich and his new look Adrian Lee and Partners Racing Team looked just that – new. The performances were a little uneven, and a bad final day cost them dearly. But they're a class act with two of Adam Minoprio's Black Match alumni aboard – Dave Swete and Nick Blackman – and I think they will have a lot more to show us once they've sailed together a bit more.



But if Jesper Radich has problems to smooth out, it's nothing to compare to what faces Ian Williams and his Team GAC Pindar boys. After being reunited with his 2007 World Tour winning tactician, Bill Hardesty, and a honking pre-season - wins at the Congressional Cup and then the Spanish Open - Williams was the form guy coming into the Tour opener. So leaving Marseille with a tenth place and just two Tour points will have put a serious dent in their confidence. They need to bounce back fast, but with Extreme Sailing Series commitments forcing them to miss Germany, they will have to wait till Korea to re-establish their challenge. Fortunately, Korea has previously been a very happy hunting ground for them - beaten finalists last year, and the year before.



I'm looking forward to seeing Matt Richard back in action, joining the Tour in Germany after missing France due to his RC44 ride. Matt's a terrific match racer and it will be interesting to see how this more measured approach to the Tour works for him. In 2010 he threw everything bar the kitchen sink at it, doing almost no other sailing, only to see a season-long lead unravel against Ben Ainslie in the quarter finals in Malaysia. Perhaps combining the Tour with some other sailing will help him keep it in perspective, and produce his best performances when he really needs them.



Meanwhile, the tv team are geared up to do another two hours a day of live coverage, plus pre- and post race shows from Germany. So it will be another busy week for everyone involved in the Red Handed tv gig. I was intrigued to see Mark Turner question (via Twitter) the wisdom of live coverage (oc_markturner: "Interesting comparing live sailing today to see what is worth doing or not. How many viewers I wonder?"). If you don't know Mark Turner, he's the impresario behind Offshore Challenges (now OC Thirdpole), whose Extreme Sailing Series seems to rely more heavily on the spectator experience than television, for a return to its stake-holders.



Obviously my views are next to worthless in any objective sense, given my involvement with the WMRT as a commentator. And what I'm about to say ignores the huge resources being thrown at the next America's Cup in an effort to make it mainstream sports television. But some recent experiences nudged me into making a comparison between sports broadcasting and what's been happening in other parts of the media jungle.



The recent experience was directly publishing my two novels as eBooks onto Amazon's Kindle platform. The first, The Defector has risen to the top of the charts for freebie thrillers in the UK, while the sequel, The Wrecking Crew, is still climbing the paid-for charts in its wake.



I've a long way to go, but I took as role models writers like Scott Nicholson, who's already busted the doors down in book publishing. Scott's ridden roughshod over the traditional gatekeepers in New York and London... and all the way to the top of the Amazon Kindle charts. Like me, he's published his own books directly to the Kindle. And we're just following the lead blazed by bands like the Arctic Monkeys in leveraging the opportunities provided by the internet.



Just as perfectly good, sale-able writers found themselves previously locked out by the traditional print publishers, so live sailing has been largely shut out of the mainstream media by the gatekeepers of broadcasting. But just as it does for indie writers, bands and film makers, the internet provides sports with an opportunity to find a niche and a market – just look at Danny MacAskill's awesome trials bike videos; nine million views and counting on YouTube. MacAskill broke through into the mainstream a few months ago, but when did you last see this stuff commissioned by NBC or the BBC?



Will sailing generally, or the World Match Racing Tour specifically, succeed in the wake of the Arctic Monkeys, Scott Nicholson and Danny MacAskill? It's too early to say. Should we be trying? Of course we should, and it's a shame that Mark Turner's not willing to throw his own hugely entrepreneurial talents into the ring. After all, competition is what drives us to be better. Just ask Ian Williams.

Formats and Fouls

So, the America's Cup has begun a new era in the stewardship of Larry Ellison, Russell Coutts and BMW Oracle. And the hope for those involved in professional sailboat racing is for a brave new world of media friendly sport – in which television will play an integral part.

For the dedicated fan, the cognoscenti, this may well mean wall-to-wall television coverage, every minute of every race, regardless of its importance or relevance. But personally, I think we need to look at making the majority of the racing we put on tv a little bit more special.

There's lots that could be done to improve the coverage – Formula 1's model of a statistical, onboard-audio-and-camera-fest is the obvious one, but I think we need to look at something more fundamental first.

The thought comes out of the latest Louis Vuitton Trophy regatta in Sardinia. The point was raised in a recent Scuttlebutt that there was just too much of it – that two weeks racing, with the days sometimes extending from 10 in the morning to late in the evening was just too much. I wouldn't disagree, but I think that the more important conclusion is that too little of the racing was meaningful.  

The second biggest sporting event on the planet is underway in South Africa, FIFA's World Cup. It starts with a group stage, where the 32 teams are split into groups of four – everyone plays everyone else, before the top two in each group go forward, and the bottom two go home. It's generally reckoned that you need to win one and draw one of those first three games to proceed to the last sixteen – at which point the competition changes to a win-or-go-home format.

The consequence is that from the sixth or seventh day of a month long, once-every-four-years competition, spectators are seeing do-or-die games. And that's what most spectators want - sport that counts. In contrast, how long was it before some must-win action developed in La Maddelena? It was well into the second week. 

Matters weren't helped when Bertrand Pace and his Aleph team spectacularly crashed into Azzura, and suddenly they had to do all the racing planned for four boats with just two. Combine this with a venue where there was either too much wind, or too little until a late afternoon seabreeze - and it felt like nothing much ever happened until late in the day, both metaphorically and literally.

I suspect that the problem is giving the teams, the sailors, too much say in the proceedings. Ask the participants and they will, naturally, want to guarantee themselves as much sailing - and their sponsors as much coverage - as they can get. The result is formats with endless round robins and repecharges. But spectators want completely the opposite – lots of meaningful matches, where people go home if they aren't good enough.

The idea of not asking the sailors about the format is probably a non-starter, when the event organiser for the Louis Vuitton Trophy is the WSTA (World Sailing Team Association) - owned and run by the teams. But if the LVT was managed by Formula 1 supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, I suspect we'd already be looking at a format without the full round robin. Perhaps splitting the fleet into smaller groups for round robins, or even going straight to head-to-head matches. It would cut down the amount of sailing they have to get through with a limited number of boats, and it would make each individual match much more meaningful and exciting.

The problem would be getting teams to turn up for a regatta with all the travel, salary and other costs, when they might get sent home after a couple of days. To do that, you need to be offering something of great value as a prize – and that means cash, big money...or prestige… say, the America's Cup for instance.

So much for formats – next up is a more technical point, but one that's worth exploring. I think it's time to look at options for an off-the-water, video umpire. A recent test was run at the Korea Match Cup, a World Match Racing Tour event (disclosure of interest - I've been blogging for them). In this test, the on-the-water umpires raised a flag and requested a second opinion from a third umpire in the tv booth. He would then look at the replays, and give an opinion on a number of issues – mainly contact seen by the onboard cameras and perhaps missed by the on-the-water umps – and then radio his opinion back to the guys on the water. They could take it or leave it.

It's a good start, and nice to see the Tour innovating, but for the really big events like the America's Cup the technology exists to go much further. The latest position fixing equipment will place both ends of the boats and the marks to within millimetres, at very fast update rates. So why not use that to help decide overlaps, buoy room at mark roundings, alterations in course and so on? It's potentially a lot more accurate than the current system which relies heavily on the umpires being in the right place all the time – and that right place can change very fast, and will only change faster when the boats get bigger and quicker as seems to be the plan.

It's possible that off-the-water umpires using a virtual positioning system could be used for every call – but it might add even more drama to do what they've done in many other sports, and give the competitors the opportunity to call on the video umpire on just a couple of occasions per race. The initial penalty, or otherwise, could still be made from the on-water umpires, and then if one of the teams didn't like the decision, they could use one of two or three challenges.

The difference between sailing and the other sports I've cited is that the game continues while the video umpire deliberates. But it often takes a while for on-the-water umpires to respond to a protest flag, and the sailors are quite capable of sailing on while the decision is made. Any penalty is rarely dealt with by the sailors before the next mark or the finish. One additional rule would help deal with this - disallowing references to the video umpire from any point after the two lengths circle of the final mark.

It might work, it might not, but I think it's definitely worth trying...

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Ch-ch-ch-changes…

It's over… finally. Just like that – you wait ages for an America's Cup race, then two come along at once. All of a sudden, everything has changed. The Bertarelli era is over (although the dust has still to settle), and the Ellison era has begun. 

It's time to move on, but quite what the transfer of power might entail is still more obscure than what might happen after the next UK election. The leaders of BMW Oracle are understandably focussed on enjoying their triumph, leaving the field open to rampant speculation on what the future might hold for the Cup - everything seems up for discussion, from how many hulls, down to the more traditional speculation about the venue.

For what it's worth, my view is that great sport is about exceptional people doing extraordinary things under unbelievable pressure. I don't want to take anything away from the guys that built and sailed those two incredible pieces of technology, but if the 33rd America's Cup produced anything similar to those links, it was invisible to this casual television spectator. 

If Larry Ellison and his team want a commercial America's Cup, they need to put the action up front and centre. And perhaps - if the views recently expressed by Ellison to the Wall Street Journal and to the ABC are anything to go by - that's what we're going to get. It seems that Ellison's first choice is a commercial, accessible, all-action Cup in San Francisco Bay.

I've always believed that the most consistently dramatic part of match racing is the pre-start, so that's where a spectator-orientated Cup should focus. A match in the Bay would provide the opportunity to switch to very short courses, perhaps just a single lap, one mile (or less) windward-leeward, with the 'race' winner decided on a best-of-three-sets basis. It would put all the emphasis and pressure on those five minutes in the box – and I think that if you went for a change like that, it wouldn't much matter whether the boat had one hull or three, planed upwind, downwind, or not at all.

It would also reduce the importance of the design contest, and hence allow teams with a much wider spread of budgets to be competitive. In turn, that would create a more open competition, and traditionally the Defender hasn't been good at allowing that to happen. But if anyone has the confidence (and the record to back it up) to believe he can lead a team to defend the Cup against all-comers on a level playing field, it's Russell Coutts. And this is the game that Larry Ellison was talking about in his interview with ABC - mentioning team budgets of US$2-4 million, and a regatta determined primarily by racing skill. If it happens it would be the most dramatic change we've yet seen in the sport of professional sailing.

Throwing the cards in the air and starting again has been a popular pastime for event organisers of late – Knut Frostad's mission to drag the Volvo Ocean Race kicking and screaming into the 21st century has been on-going and well-documented. In the last week we've passed another minor milestone in this process, with the announcement of the first two stop-over ports for the 2011-12 edition, with another one to come on March 3rd. 

The first leg will end once again in Cape Town, while the trans-Atlantic crossing that heralds the return to Europe will finish in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. It's a long, long way south of previous trans-Atlantic finish ports, and will give the strategists plenty to think about, with a high probability that the Azores High will be parked on the great circle route. It might also hint at a North American port some way south of the previous Boston stop-over...



It'll be interesting to see where Wednesday's announcement takes us – straight up the English Channel to a Scandinavian finish? A stopover in Lorient is what the French reckon - and seems much more likely, with Groupama already having thrown their hat in the ring with an early race entry. I suspect that would leave the Irish a bit miffed after the great show they put on in 2009. The rest of the route will follow between now and the end of March. 

The other 300lb gorilla of the pro sailing circuit, the Vendee Globe, has less room to manoeuvre – changes to the fundamental principle of solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world are a little hard to imagine. But the attrition rate in the 2008-09 edition – only 11 of 30 starters finished – has also led to some serious soul searching. The result has been that IMOCA, the officiating body for the boats, has taken a long and serious look at the Open 60 rule. 

There are some significant changes, many of them focussed on safety. But the most dramatic is probably the decision to try and limit the power, and hence the speed potential of the boats. For the die-hards, this has long been the raison d'etre - Open 60 should mean what it says. But for good or bad, a failure rate of over 60% in that last Vendee Globe has brought a philosophical end (it could be argued that the practical end was reached some time ago) to the open era of the Open 60 class. 

The new rule limits the air draft (the height of the rig) to 29 metres for any boat measured after the 1st July 2009; while boats measured prior to this can't exceed their original air draft (or 29m, whichever is the higher). And the rule goes on to specifically limit the maximum righting moment, for boats built after the same date, to 32 tons*meter – with a similar grandfathering condition.

If you need any evidence of the importance of righting moment to these offshore racers, cast your mind back to the last edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, when skipper, Ian Walker, and the crew of Green Dragon were vocal about the boat's speed problems -  all laid at the door of a lighter bulb.

It was lighter because the all-up weight of the boat was fixed, and the design and build of Green Dragon left them with a heavier hull weight than the competition. To keep the boat under the overall limit the weight had to come from somewhere, and it came out of the bulb. In short: the more weight you put into the hull, the less you ended up with in the keel. 

This put an expensive premium on the time, care and attention lavished on the design and build of the hulls. It made it tough for teams that were either late to the game or short of cash (or both), leaving them building in a hurry, unable to research the lighter structures required to be competitive. This issue was addressed by the rule makers for the new version of the Volvo Open 70 rule. The keel weight is limited to 7,400 kgs, while the overall weight of the boat has been raised. 

If the rule makers got the sums right this will allow a lot more teams to build down-to-weight boats with the maximum amount of lead in the bulb. It should level the playing field by reducing the cash-for-splash design and build contest. Let's hope that - once the boats start getting built - this turns out to be the case. I'm all for level playing fields.

If we accept that righting moment is of such primary importance, then the Open 60 rule changes could throw up an interesting scenario for the next couple of seasons, because of the grandfather clause. Some of the old boats are significantly more powerful than the rule now allows – particularly the Juan Kouyoumdjian designed Pindar. Alex Thomson recently bought this boat to replace the Finot-Conq drawn Hugo Boss. By reputation, both boats have more power than the rule now allows, but it's generally accepted that the Juan K design is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the class – the word on the street is that the boat has a third more righting moment than the new limit.

It would be too turkey-voting-for-Christmas-ish to expect the designers to tell anyone that they should buy an old boat, rather than take a new one from their drawing board. But Pascal Conq of Finot-Conq did say in a recent article, 'Some of the 2008 boats are likely to be perfect for 2012, particularly as the new rules impose a limit on the power allowed.'

Thomson was quoted in a recent Seahorse story, 'Then there are the new rules that limit power, so if you believe that you want righting moment, which I do, then it makes sense to buy the most powerful boat you can. The new boats have righting moment limited to 32 tonne-metres. Pindar has a bit more than that.' 

Eventually, refinements in other areas of design will outweigh the advantage of raw power that Pindar, the old Hugo Boss and a few others now have – but in the meantime, it's an opportunity to make some hay while the sun shines. Next winter's Barcelona World Race will be the first test of this theory, and may well represent Thomson's best chance yet of taking a major title. 

It seems I just got from the America's Cup to the Barcelona World Race, via the Volvo Ocean Race and the Vendee Globe. There's no shortage of stuff going on in the forest… ch-ch-ch-changes…





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Not RAK nor Rudders

Just like buses, I haven't written on the America's Cup for 18 months, then a couple of blogs come along at once... But it's not the appeal court's decision to rule out RAK, or even rudders, that brings me back to the topic. Nope, you can get everything on that and more from the ever reliable Cory Friedman. Rather, I'm returning to the Cup because of the World Yacht Racing Forum held last week in Monaco.



I've read some rather sinister interpretations of what this event was all about, i.e. that it's intended to rival ISAF as an organisational body for sailboat racing. Not yet. Right now, this is simply a conference for those involved in professional sailing; a place to network, air some dirty laundry, vent some spleen and generally discuss the issues affecting the sport.



Number one amongst those issues is the America's Cup, while close behind is bringing some order to the chaotic multiplicity of events besetting sailing - Nick Fry, CEO of the Brawn GP F1 team, and keen amateur sailor, described it succinctly as, 'a bugger's muddle'.



If ISAF doesn't get its butt into gear on this issue, the Forum may well become the place where the first plots are laid to rival ISAF's administration of the professional sport – but that's both another topic and, I suspect, a year or two down the track.



So, while the Forum's organisers had scheduled a discussion on governance, it was the America's Cup that had the headline grabbing final session – the Russell and Brad show - both Coutts and Butterworth made a presentation, and then joined a panel for a debate.



Most readers will know that the pair are old friends, and they made it quite clear to the gathering that nothing in the last two and a half years had changed that - by turning up more than a little worse for wear after a big session the previous night. The sub-text being: it ain't our fault, we're still mates.



The event has been reported elsewhere and I don't intend to go back over that ground. Rather, I want to return to the questions asked by my previous blog; how do we stop the America's Cup getting derailed like this again? And if we can't, can we build the professional sport without it?



The Forum shed some light on the first part of this problem, at least if BMW Oracle win, with Russell Coutts mounting a defence of the ability of the Deed of Gift to manage the Cup; '…Mutual Consent, the two most beautiful words in the Deed of Gift.'



And in his latest article, Cory Friedman argued that there's no need for any change, the Deed of Gift will do the job; 'New York's courts have demonstrated that the Deed is just fine as it is…'



I beg to differ; while we may have got the right answers, it's taken nearly three years to get a match that should have been held less than a year after the 32nd Cup. And in that time, the impact on people and businesses has been huge. Even those involved with the competing teams have had to live with a level of uncertainty that most of us would find unacceptable – no idea which school the kids are going to be in next week, never mind next year.



Formula 1 teetered on the brink of a bust-up and an incredibly damaging split last summer, but had the mechanisms in place to bang heads together, and the whole thing was settled in a matter of weeks. In comparison, the Deed of Gift and the New York courts don't seem like much of a management system to me.



I still think we need to put a mechanism in place to prevent this kind of complete breakdown, on occasions where there is no mutual consent between the defender and challenger.



Russell Coutts did go on to allude to this issue in his presentation, saying that their legal advice was that changing the Deed of Gift to try and get a solution would be costly, time-consuming and not necessarily successful – any solution would have to reflect the desires of the original donors. It's far from guaranteed that the court would look favourably on a proposal for, let's say (my example) an independent dispute resolution body.



There is another way, which Coutts explained afterwards, and that's using a commercial contract (with a massive financial penalty) that forces certain conditions for the defence of the 35th Cup on the winner of the 34th, when they enter the initial contest. Those conditions might include preservation of the same independent management system, along with clauses that roll the whole thing onto the 36th and 37th matches, and so on.



I'm no lawyer, but I suspect that there are still no guarantees that this won't end up back in front of the New York judges. Nevertheless, it would go a long way as a holding action, until the court might be convinced to put something more permanent in place.



So far, so good, but what if Alinghi win? Brad Butterworth didn't mention the issue, I didn't get the chance to ask him about it afterwards, and his protestations that they would seek consent with the challengers on the future seemed a little feeble to me, at least in comparison to Russell's. But then, I could be inaccurately pre-judging Alinghi on past history, or it could have been that Brad was struggling more with his hangover…



What of the hope that I expressed in the previous blog; that a united challenger group could hold out for long-term, structural change if they stuck together? Paul Cayard left the Forum to try and get agreement on a new set of rules for the 34th Cup, before either Alinghi or BMW Oracle win the 33rd, and self-interest makes them a good deal more entrenched in their views.



I wish him luck; personally, I didn't detect a great deal of real, heart-felt mutual consent – Butterworth professed Alinghi's preference for multihulls in the next Cup, while Coutts and BMW Oracle seem to want a return to monohulls. The rest of the potential challengers didn't seem much more in agreement, but you can judge for yourself in these clips on the different issues; where and when, the type of boat, and a protocol for the 34th Match.



I suspect that the way that this will play out is that both Alinghi and BMW Oracle will pick a compliant Challenger of Record, and set up the next Cup in their own image. If BMW Oracle win, it may well include a solid plan for a long-term fix to stop this happening again, with some sort of independent professional management put in place. If Alinghi win, it probably won't…



But I'll finish by returning to my second question; if we can't stop the America's Cup periodically blowing up in our face, then can, or should, sailing try to build the professional sport without it?



The answer from the World Yacht Racing Forum is that many people already are – Mark Turner's OC Group and Knut Frostad and his team at the Volvo Ocean Race are prime examples of talented, energetic people trying to deliver sailing as a commercially viable sport, with or without the Cup.



But can those events prosper in a world where someone can come along and drop a couple of hundred million dollars on grabbing some of the biggest names, and much of the precious media oxygen that sailing is afforded in the mainstream?



Knut Frostad made the point at the Forum that one successful sailing event will drag the rest up with it – and I think he's right. But that event needs to be a sailboat race, not a legal soap opera.



And many other sports survive with no shortage of rich guys spending to win; they own plenty of football, gridiron or baseball teams. But those sports have a strong governing body in place to protect the commercial viability of the game.



So whatever happens, or doesn't happen, in Valencia in February, I suspect that governance will still be a very hot topic at next year's World Yacht Racing Forum – both for the America's Cup, and the sport as a whole.





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It's a Challenge... and an Opportunity

It's been a while since I last ventured onto the topic of the America's Cup – and with good reason. Another thirty instalments of Cory Friedman's inestimable blog on the various court manoeuvrings have come and gone, with precious little in the way of clarity or progress in the New York court on which the action centres. 





Unsurprisingly, I'm still just as weary of the whole thing as I was back in April last year. So, don't panic, I'm not about to start a tack by tack analysis of court performance, still happy to leave that to Mr Friedman. 





Instead, I wanted to point out that we may be about to turn a corner, from where we can see in the distance (and perhaps only briefly, before the confused fog of unconstrained legal warfare rolls back in) a glimmer of sunlight uplands.





The possibility of an America's Cup match actually happening in February 2010 in Valencia looks to have tipped solidly this side of 50-50 – enough for BMW Oracle to start packing up in San Diego, anyway. 





So at the risk of pointing out the obvious; if Blinghi race in February then one of them is going to win. And when they do – regardless of any further legal recourse - a representative of another yacht club will need to be standing beside the winning team's principals with a new challenge in their hip pocket. 





This is the traditional method for the new defender to control the next America's Cup match: line up a yacht club who will challenge on previously agreed terms. The new defender is bound to accept the first challenge after their winning yacht crosses the finish line – so it's important to have this organised in advance of the final race. 





It was a system which failed horribly for Alinghi when the New York court decided that their 'hip pocket' challenger – Club Nautico Español de Vela (CNEV) - wasn't actually a yacht club, giving rise to the current situation.





Now, we all know that the delivery of this next hip pocket challenge will almost certainly not be the end of the 33rd America's Cup. There remains plenty of potential for further legal challenges, for more appeals, affidavits, memos, depositions, oral argument, and so on, and on, and on.... 





But regardless of all that, the making of the next hip pocket challenge will be an important moment – because the nature of the document will tell us a lot about the intentions of the new defender for the 34th match. And it will be the first time in about two and a half years that anyone outside Blinghi (and the good judges of the New York court system) has had any say in the future of the event. 





So – what will be in those new challenge documents? What might be under negotiation right now, in smoke-free backrooms, for the future of the America's Cup?





If Alinghi win, it seems unlikely that their plans for the 34th America's Cup will vary greatly from their much maligned, original blueprint for the 33rd. The word on the street I was walking down the other day was that they've got a newly bona fide, bomb-proof CNEV lined up as the challenger again, and so we could be right back where we started - just two and a half years older. And looking forward to the number of Cory Friedman's court reports reaching three figures.





However, if BMW Oracle wins, things could be different. They've talked a good game for how they might run the next Cup, but that hip pocket challenge will be the real test – what will it say about the 34th Cup?





I'm not the first person to think that any new challenge document needs to fix the Cup once and for all. It needs to ensure Deed of Gift altering, court approved, full and binding change – the kind of thing that will put the Cup on a sound footing as a 21st century professional sport. 





Team Origin's principal, Sir Keith Mills, has recently talked about just this sort of thing - but what he hasn't said, is what he'll do if he doesn't get it. 





Personally, I'm starting to think that if the new challenger agreement provides for no lasting change, then maybe it's time for Sir Keith and all the other potential teams to think about walking away from the Cup, just letting that ugly old silver ewer go...





If nothing else, that threat might provide them with a brief moment of influence on the Cup's future – but only if the challenger group act together.  If they do, there's a chance, just a chance, that Blinghi can be pressured into fundamentally changing the way the America's Cup is played.





And boy, do we need it. It's the second time in twenty years that the Cup has been hauled off to the court room to the detriment of almost everyone involved, and we can be sure it won't be the last, unless the Deed itself is modified to stop it happening again. 





The 33rd Cup that we're watching, this monstrous battle of technology, lawyers, wallets and wills is actually much closer to the origins of the Cup than anything that happened in Valencia in 2007. Sad to relate, but this is what the Deed of Gift bestows on us as a Cup match, and unless the court approves changes to the Deed, it will revert to type every time it gets an opportunity. 





But a professional sport needs to offer all the stakeholders – sponsors, competitors, spectators, officials - continuity, security and a viable long-term business model. And it can't do that while it's being blown around by the whims, obsessions and largesse of the super rich. 





So, unless the new defender is going to apply to the court to change the game so it cannot be railroaded by the next rich guy to come along (which I accept would be like a turkey voting for Christmas), then perhaps the sailing community just has to let it go, let the Cup be what it is, and set about building the professional sport without it.





It won't be easy, the America's Cup can, and almost certainly will, carry on doing what it does best - pitting the financial behemoths of the time against each other in what will remain a headline grabbing arena. 





What's so bad about that? About having this vast endeavour going on every time there are people willing to pay to play? It will enrich some of our number, and who knows, maybe someone will make a discovery that will define a new golden age of sail, make oil-fired container ships obsolete and help rescue us all from melting ice caps. 





The problem is that somehow the sailing community will have to get the message across to the mediaverse that this wild and wacky race doesn't define the professional sport of sailing any more than cheese rolling defines athletics. 





But as I said, that isn't going to be easy - I just pitched a major media organisation to provide reports on the upcoming Louis Vuitton Trophy in Auckland, and was turned down for the simple reason that it wasn't the America's Cup. Same people, same boats, wrong trophy. Turning that attitude around is going to take time, and it's only going to happen if everyone outside Blinghi can get on the same page and agree what the alternative is… 





But that's really for the future, in the first instance, the select group of people funding and organising the group of putative challengers have the big decision to make. And the moment they have to start making it is when the winning boat crosses the line to end the 33rd America's Cup on the water. 





It'll be a challenge, but it's also an opportunity.





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It’s a Challenge... and an Opportunity

It’s been a while since I last ventured onto the topic of the America’s Cup – and with good reason. Another thirty instalments of Cory Friedman’s inestimable blog on the various court manoeuvrings have come and gone, with precious little in the way of clarity or progress in the New York court on which the action centres. 





Unsurprisingly, I’m still just as weary of the whole thing as I was back in April last year. So, don’t panic, I’m not about to start a tack by tack analysis of court performance, still happy to leave that to Mr Friedman. 





Instead, I wanted to point out that we may be about to turn a corner, from where we can see in the distance (and perhaps only briefly, before the confused fog of unconstrained legal warfare rolls back in) a glimmer of sunlight uplands.





The possibility of an America’s Cup match actually happening in February 2010 in Valencia looks to have tipped solidly this side of 50-50 – enough for BMW Oracle to start packing up in San Diego, anyway. 





So at the risk of pointing out the obvious; if Blinghi race in February then one of them is going to win. And when they do – regardless of any further legal recourse - a representative of another yacht club will need to be standing beside the winning team’s principals with a new challenge in their hip pocket. 





This is the traditional method for the new defender to control the next America’s Cup match: line up a yacht club who will challenge on previously agreed terms. The new defender is bound to accept the first challenge after their winning yacht crosses the finish line – so it’s important to have this organised in advance of the final race. 





It was a system which failed horribly for Alinghi when the New York court decided that their ‘hip pocket’ challenger – Club Nautico Español de Vela (CNEV) - wasn’t actually a yacht club, giving rise to the current situation.





Now, we all know that the delivery of this next hip pocket challenge will almost certainly not be the end of the 33rd America’s Cup. There remains plenty of potential for further legal challenges, for more appeals, affidavits, memos, depositions, oral argument, and so on, and on, and on.... 





But regardless of all that, the making of the next hip pocket challenge will be an important moment – because the nature of the document will tell us a lot about the intentions of the new defender for the 34th match. And it will be the first time in about two and a half years that anyone outside Blinghi (and the good judges of the New York court system) has had any say in the future of the event. 





So – what will be in those new challenge documents? What might be under negotiation right now, in smoke-free backrooms, for the future of the America’s Cup?





If Alinghi win, it seems unlikely that their plans for the 34th America’s Cup will vary greatly from their much maligned, original blueprint for the 33rd. The word on the street I was walking down the other day was that they’ve got a newly bona fide, bomb-proof CNEV lined up as the challenger again, and so we could be right back where we started - just two and a half years older. And looking forward to the number of Cory Friedman’s court reports reaching three figures.





However, if BMW Oracle wins, things could be different. They’ve talked a good game for how they might run the next Cup, but that hip pocket challenge will be the real test – what will it say about the 34th Cup?





I’m not the first person to think that any new challenge document needs to fix the Cup once and for all. It needs to ensure Deed of Gift altering, court approved, full and binding change – the kind of thing that will put the Cup on a sound footing as a 21st century professional sport. 





Team Origin’s principal, Sir Keith Mills, has recently talked about just this sort of thing - but what he hasn’t said, is what he’ll do if he doesn’t get it. 





Personally, I’m starting to think that if the new challenger agreement provides for no lasting change, then maybe it’s time for Sir Keith and all the other potential teams to think about walking away from the Cup, just letting that ugly old silver ewer go...





If nothing else, that threat might provide them with a brief moment of influence on the Cup’s future – but only if the challenger group act together.  If they do, there’s a chance, just a chance, that Blinghi can be pressured into fundamentally changing the way the America’s Cup is played.





And boy, do we need it. It’s the second time in twenty years that the Cup has been hauled off to the court room to the detriment of almost everyone involved, and we can be sure it won’t be the last, unless the Deed itself is modified to stop it happening again. 





The 33rd Cup that we’re watching, this monstrous battle of technology, lawyers, wallets and wills is actually much closer to the origins of the Cup than anything that happened in Valencia in 2007. Sad to relate, but this is what the Deed of Gift bestows on us as a Cup match, and unless the court approves changes to the Deed, it will revert to type every time it gets an opportunity. 





But a professional sport needs to offer all the stakeholders – sponsors, competitors, spectators, officials - continuity, security and a viable long-term business model. And it can’t do that while it’s being blown around by the whims, obsessions and largesse of the super rich. 





So, unless the new defender is going to apply to the court to change the game so it cannot be railroaded by the next rich guy to come along (which I accept would be like a turkey voting for Christmas), then perhaps the sailing community just has to let it go, let the Cup be what it is, and set about building the professional sport without it.





It won’t be easy, the America’s Cup can, and almost certainly will, carry on doing what it does best - pitting the financial behemoths of the time against each other in what will remain a headline grabbing arena. 





What’s so bad about that? About having this vast endeavour going on every time there are people willing to pay to play? It will enrich some of our number, and who knows, maybe someone will make a discovery that will define a new golden age of sail, make oil-fired container ships obsolete and help rescue us all from melting ice caps. 





The problem is that somehow the sailing community will have to get the message across to the mediaverse that this wild and wacky race doesn’t define the professional sport of sailing any more than cheese rolling defines athletics. 





But as I said, that isn’t going to be easy - I just pitched a major media organisation to provide reports on the upcoming Louis Vuitton Trophy in Auckland, and was turned down for the simple reason that it wasn’t the America’s Cup. Same people, same boats, wrong trophy. Turning that attitude around is going to take time, and it’s only going to happen if everyone outside Blinghi can get on the same page and agree what the alternative is… 





But that’s really for the future, in the first instance, the select group of people funding and organising the group of putative challengers have the big decision to make. And the moment they have to start making it is when the winning boat crosses the line to end the 33rd America’s Cup on the water. 





It’ll be a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity.





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Buy Spanish Castle to White Night





Mark Chisnell ©

Transat Jaques Vabre - Mid-term Report

It's been a great first week in the Transat Jaques Vabre – after a fascinating 'risk versus reward' dilemma was set up for all the skippers as they left Le Havre eight days ago, bound for Puerto Limon in Costa Rica.



It was the kind of situation that makes race commentators salivate. And a week later, the pay-offs have been harsh, with two sailors pulled off a stricken boat (BT - Sébastien Josse/Jean Francois Curzon) in the North Atlantic, and with several others limping from damage.



The start last Sunday saw a weather map with a series of brutal low pressure systems traversing the Atlantic, but much further south than would be normal for this time of year. And all of them targeted the straight-line route to Costa Rica. We can split the fleet into three groups, according to their reaction to this problem:



Northern Exposure



1876 (Yves Parlier/Pachi Rivero) and Hugo Boss (Alex Thomson/Ross Daniel).



These two took the most northerly route, closest to the track of the low pressure systems. In theory, it was the fastest way to the Caribbean, but with lots of risk of damage in some pretty horrendous conditions. Alex Thomson has some prior for taking chances, and I vividly remember watching Yves Parlier pour it on in the Southern Ocean in the 2000-01 Vendee Globe, until finally, his rig came down. So, no real surprise seeing either of these boats take this option.



Walking the Line



Safran (Marc Guillemot/Charles Caudrelier Benac), Mike Golding Yacht Racing (Mike Golding/Javier Sanso), Groupe Belle (Kito de Pavant/Francois Gabart), Veolia Environement (Roland Jourdain/Jean-Luc Nelias), Aviva (Dee Caffari/Brian Thompson) and BT (Sébastien Josse/Jean Francois Curzon).



The largest group chose an option that also took them close to the low pressure systems, but attempted to dodge the very worst of the conditions – threading the needle between safe and fast.



South Park



Foncia (Michel Desjoyeaux/Jeremie Beyou), Akena Verandas (Arnaud Boissieres/Vincent Riou), Artemis Ocean Racing (Sam Davies/Sidney Gavignet) and W Hotels (Alex Pella/Pepe Ribes).



W Hotels were only just part of this group, after taking a while to make their minds up. The rest of this final bunch headed south early and hard, taking the long way around while endeavouring to stay away from the low pressure systems, and minimise the risk of damage.



The fleet have been re-converging quickly over the past 24 hours, and this is a reasonable moment to analyse how these choices played out. First, let's look at the damage reports. I should add that this is just the stuff I've seen in the news, some issues might not have been reported, and others I might have missed…



The northern pair took a hammering, with 1876 doing six knots on the morning of the 16th November, after a long period of damage control. Hugo Boss escaped the storm in reasonable shape, but then had the misfortune of hitting something in the water - so at the time of writing, Thomson and Daniel had also slowed down to figure out their choices. Let's call this a 50% attrition rate.



The middle group faired better, BT's demise was spectacular, but Veolia Environnement also had to pit-stop in the Azores to make repairs - so that's 33% of the group losing serious time to damage.



Meanwhile in the south, the only boat that I've seen report significant repair work has been Artemis – which sets the damage rate at just 25%.



It's an old and very tired adage, but for all that, 'to finish first, first you have to finish' is still true. More of the southern group came out of the storm in good shape for the rest of the race, than did those to the north. But those who went down the middle and did survive in good shape saved a lot of miles, and now the top three from this bunch have a solid lead over the rest of the fleet – Safran, Mike Golding Yacht Racing, and Groupe Belle.



It's a tough tactical decision – if you go north you are playing roulette with your race. The latest studies on rogue waves show how random and frequent these phenomena are – stick yourself and your boat in a place where these things can pop up, and you are throwing dice on the outcome. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's game over.



But the statistical element of this also makes it a tough choice to go south. If a large enough number of boats take the riskier northern option, it's extremely unlikely that they will all suffer race-ending damage. It was inevitable that the last men and women standing in the north would be leading, with a week or so of racing left for those in the south to play catch-up.



The most interesting aspect of this (for me, anyway) is that Michel Desjoyeaux chose to go south. The two-time Vendee Globe winner is probably the leading offshore racer of his generation. And I think the critical point to take away from this is that he chose to concede the lead, while retaining as much control as he could over the outcome of his race.



And what I'll be watching for as we go into the second week is how much Mich Desj and his partner, Jeremie Beyou, can make up of the 300 mile deficit that Foncia has allowed Safran to establish. I still wouldn't put it past them to make it onto the podium.



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Mark Chisnell ©

A Golf Day

Ian Walker - one-time skipper of the mighty Green Dragon - offered me the poisoned pill of speaking at the recent North Sails Golf Day, a fundraiser (to the tune of over £7k, a few hundred of which came from auctioning Spanish Castle to White Night) for the John Merricks Sailing Trust. As an incentive, 'you can plug your book' he said, 'and take the piss out of me, if you like...'



So, I think I found a way to do both, here's a short extract from the speech - I should preface this by saying that Ian was one of the better (if not the best) of the writers in the Volvo fleet:



I'm going to tell you about one of Ian's rather less successful email efforts, one that should have made it into the book, but didn't. It started well enough, in fact, I was quite excited when I first read the email, and I quote (a slightly edited version):



'Before my Grandfather passed away he gave my mother some handwritten letters written about his shipwreck on the Falkland Islands as a boy, probably around 100 years ago.



'I keep copies of these letters and from time to time, I read about how he had to swim ashore as the ship went down. Well, this morning at first light, we were tacking to pass around the Northern edge of the Falklands, and I found myself dodging the unmarked reefs. Every mile we had to sail on starboard tack to clear the island was a mile lost to the opposition as we needed to head east.



'Wouter (Verbraak, the navigator) and I checked the chart and found a very tenuous passage inside some islands and through some reefs that would cut 10 miles off our course. Wouter was very confident in the accuracy of the charts - saying that the British Navy would have surveyed every inch of these islands - and after consulting with Damian and Neal we decided to take it on.



'I have to admit, the thought of explaining how a second member of the family had become shipwrecked on the Falklands had crossed my mind, but with some short tacks and some weaving we safely found our way through.'



Fantastic, I thought, what a great story for the book – I was always looking for stuff a little out of the ordinary that would give us some background on the sailors, a little insight into the personality - this spoke of generations of hardy Walkers traversing the South Atlantic and struggling against the travails of the sea. And all tied together by the coincidence of Ian narrowly escaping the fate of his ancestor on the rocky shores of the Falkland Islands.



It even had a nice visual touch - if I could get hold of the original letter, then perhaps we could scan it in, and use it as an image in the book. So, as soon as I got to Rio I got in touch with Ian, discovered that the original was in fact in the possession of his mother, who was tasked to bring it out to the next stopover.



And when I got sight of the letter in Boston, it was everything I had hoped for - Ian's great-grandfather was Captain Albert Wadsley. As an 18 year old cabin boy, he'd sailed south with a cargo of Welsh coal on the Fonthill, a wooden, three-masted schooner.



The letter was written on the 12 April, 1897, about three days after the events related. It was an amazing hand-written account of shipwreck, and I quote again, this time from Albert.



'Our Captain, seeing she was too far gone, ordered the yards to be squared in so she would drive high and dry up on the sands… taking a pretty heavy list to starboard breakers curling in on top of us, smashing in most of the starboard bulwarks and carrying things off the deck…'



Gripping stuff, except for that bit about treacherous sands…



Now I've been to the Falklands and from the bits I saw, you'd be pretty hard pushed to find some sand to run aground on. So I read a little further, and low and behold, it turned out that those treacherous sands were in fact the coast of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.



Not the Falkland Islands at all.



In fact, it's over a couple of thousand kilometres from the Falklands, and you'd have to go about 500 kilometres out of your way on the rhumb line to Rio to hit it.



So, needless to say, that was the one that got away – the email didn't make it into the final cut for the book.



The one other thing that Ian suggested I could do today, was to say a few words about Johnny Merricks, the reason we're all here, and hopefully the reason we'll all be gathering for many years to come.



There's always one particular moment I remember about Johnny. It's not the best story, and let's be honest, there are some crackers. And it's certainly not the funniest, nor is it going to tell us why he was so blazingly fast upwind in a breeze. But it might give us a tiny bit of insight into why we're all gathered here.



It was the autumn of 1996, back in the day when I was still drinking in the King and Queen of a Friday night. I'd had a busy summer, been away most of the time sailing, and had topped it off by achieving a very long-standing ambition, with my first novel published by Random House a couple of weeks earlier.



I headed down to the pub to catch up with people as you do, and found Johnny propping up the bar, as he did. I hadn't seen him since he and Ian had won their silver medal in Atlanta. I fully expected him to bask in the glow of congratulations as people rolled into the pub – as most of us would have done. But not Johnny, as soon as he saw me come through the door, and before I could get a word out about silver medals or Olympic Games, he said with that unique grin of his…



'Hey I heard you got your book published, congratulations, how's it going…?'



And that, I think, is the reason we're all here, it didn't matter what he achieved, Johnny Merricks had that first thought for other people.





www.markchisnell.com





Mark Chisnell ©

Fastnet – Thirty Years On

Thursday, August 9th, 1979 - baking hot air was rising from the grain fields of the Great Plains of North America, while across Canada, cold air flowed south from the pole. As the two met the hotter air lifted over the cooler and started to churn. It happens all the time – perhaps there's a thunderstorm. But on this occasion, the anti-clockwise rotation of the air built and gathered strength, the signature formation of a northern hemisphere low pressure system, or depression. The nascent storm moved east, dropping an inch and a half of rain on the city of Minneapolis, whipping waves and whitecaps across the Great Lakes. On the Friday, it flexed its muscles and claimed its first victim - killing a woman in New York's Central Park, as roofs were blown off houses and trees knocked down across New England.



Weather forecasters tracked the low out into the Atlantic, where it rode the westerly jet stream towards the Bay of Biscay – a name synonymous with bad weather, but not usually in August. And the summer storm did jink to the north, funnelled between the Azores High and another, much larger depression that had stalled just west of Iceland. Sucking up energy, it accelerated towards the Western Approaches of the British Isles - and there it collided with an unsuspecting fleet of 303 yachts, sailing in the Fastnet Race. In the space of twenty four hours, fifteen people died as twenty four crews abandoned boats battered by sixty knot winds and forty foot breaking waves.



Thirty years later, Stuart Quarrie is the blazered Chief Executive of Cowes Combined Clubs, the event organiser for Cowes Week, one of the world's biggest regattas with around a thousand boats and 8,500 competitors. It's an appearance that might fit his job, but belies his appetite for excitement. In 1979, Quarrie was a young instructor at England's National Sailing Centre in Cowes, and the Fastnet Race was the climax of the summer's racing. Living where he did, and doing the job he did, it was inevitable that when the start gun went, Quarrie would be amongst the two and a half thousand or so sailors on the 608 mile course. He was racing with two other instructors from the school, one of whom - the skipper, Neil Graham – would, like Quarrie, go on to a successful professional sailing career. They had four students with them aboard the OOD34 Griffin, a new racing boat designed by an American, Doug Peterson, and built in the UK by Jeremy Rogers.



The fleet headed west from Cowes, along the south coast of England to Lands End. There they turned north-west towards the Fastnet Rock off the southern tip of Ireland, which they were required to round before returning to Plymouth, via the Scilly Isles. It was the section of the course to and from the Fastnet Rock that was the most exposed, and this is exactly where the storm's late turn to the north caught the fleet unawares. The forecast fresh gale of 34 to 40 knots turned out to be much, much more, with winds claimed at anything up to 70 knots. There's a big difference between the two – the Beaufort Scale, which was designed to allow sailors to judge and report wind conditions without benefit of instruments, also describes the effects ashore. A force eight gale of 34 to 40 knots will break twigs from branches – but a 60 knot, force eleven storm will uproot the whole damn tree.



At sea, that same storm produces what are described as exceptionally high waves. How big is that? Well, big enough that small to medium sized ships may be lost to view. That means waves up to 50' high in a sea completely covered with long white patches of foam, where wave crests are blown into froth. And that's the dispassionate, scientific description of the Beaufort Scale, rather than my hyperbole. The unsuspecting Griffin was trapped in this maelstrom along with most of the rest of the fleet, and when she was caught by one of those waves big enough to hide a medium-sized ship, Stuart Quarrie was at the helm. As the wave crashed over the boat, it plucked him off the wheel. If he'd had time to think about it, he would have anticipated the shocking jerk around his rib cage as his safety harness came up tight. But the hook on the lanyard straightened (like others that night) and when he surfaced, choking out mouthfuls of water, there was every reason to believe that the boat would be gone. It wasn't.



Stuart Quarrie was luckier than most, Griffin had capsized in the same wave that had taken him overboard and was now upside down and dead in the water – just yards away. With her navigation lights buried underwater, the only reason he could see the boat in the black night was because the little light on the man-overboard buoy had fallen from its harness and was now bobbing around. Quarrie started to swim with all the strength and none of the technique of a man five yards from winning an Olympic freestyle gold. Struggling back on board, he has a vivid memory of Neil Graham exhorting everyone to bail, then changing his mind barely a breath later, and yelling to abandon ship. Water had filled the cabin, the deck was just inches above the sea. The crew left Griffin for the life raft, and had drifted no more than twenty feet away when the yacht sank.



The liferaft turned out to be a place of temporary sanctuary. It was less than an hour before it was capsized by another wave. The force of the roll ripped the canopy away and although the men got it back upright, they were now sitting in a giant life ring, completely exposed to the seas, to the wind, rain and cold. With one of their number dressed in just a t-shirt and jeans – he had been changing when the boat capsized – the situation was grim. But Stuart Quarrie's luck held, their flares were spotted by a French yacht, the Lorelei, a 36 footer owned and skippered by Alain Catherineau. Getting the men of the Griffin off the raft in those conditions was anything but simple, and it took several attempts to get the Lorelei alongside. But Alain Catherineau kept his head, and an hour later the last man was hauled off the raft – his hypothermic hands pried away from the handholds. After two hours in the water in a t-shirt, he was fortunate that the Griffin's story avoided the tragic ending of so many others.



There is an odd postscript - two years later, the Cowes police phoned Quarrie to say that they had his credit card wallet. Strange - he wasn't aware that he'd lost it. No, the police explained, this one had come up in the nets of a trawler, still in Griffin's navigation table, where Quarrie had placed it at the start of the 1979 Fastnet. The chances of that wallet finding its way home are only slightly slimmer than the combination of luck, courage and good judgement that allowed Stuart Quarrie to survive that night in the Irish Sea. The nightmares went on for five years. And almost thirty years later he still has the wallet, and he still maintains contact with Alain Catherineau – Yachtsman of the Year in 1979.



This is one of dozens of similar stories from that horrific night in the Western Approaches. I've picked it because I've sailed with and against Stuart quite a bit over the years and, well, because it has a happy ending. Many of the other accounts that are brought together by John Rousmaniere in his excellent book, Fastnet Force 10, don't have that advantage. And it's those tragic tales that much of the media attention has focused on these past few days, as the thirtieth anniversary has approached. But at the time, it was an altogether different story that I heard as a young dingy sailor.



When that vicious low pressure system subsequently made a landfall, lifting over the highlands of Britain's west coast and dumping another deluge, it was the final straw in a sodden summer that cut short our family camping and sailing holiday on the shores of Lake Coniston. The faithful, if short entries in my Motor Boat and Yachting Diary 1979 show absolutely no recognition of the disaster unfolding a few hundred miles away. It's much more concerned with the fact that we were going home early, and with subsequent preparations for a local regatta. I don't know whether this was an omission, or because news, even bad news, was much easier to avoid in those days. But our sailing community was pretty insular - huddled as it was around a muddy-coloured stretch of water just inland from the bleak North Sea fishing port of Lowestoft. I wouldn't knowingly meet anyone that had been in that 1979 Fastnet Race for another seven years. And so the actual stories of tragedy and triumph, the bravery and the failures passed me by at the time – but I did hear one story, which I've never forgotten.



Its star is Harold Cudmore, an Irishman with a marvellous line of blarney and an almost frighteningly stereotypical twinkle in his eye. Cudmore was a top dinghy sailor in the late sixties and early seventies who successfully switched to racing bigger yachts for their wealthy owners. At the height of his powers he would say that he could walk into any chosen pub or bar, and come out with the money to build and campaign a boat. In 1979, he was hired by Hugh Coveney to call the tactics on his Ron Holland designed 44 footer, Golden Apple of the Sun. Holland himself had also chosen to sail on Golden Apple, and they had brought on board Rodney Pattison, who – until Ben Ainslie came along - was Britain's most successful Olympic yachtsman, with two golds and a silver. Golden Apple, golden boys – the yacht had painted on her stern the last stanza of WB Yeats poem, The Song of the Wandering Aengus , which gave up both her name, and that of one of her team mates in a three boat Irish team – Silver Apple of the Moon.



They were contesting what was then one of the sport's leading events, the currently defunct Admiral's Cup. But for a long while this was the unofficial world championship of offshore racing. Three boat teams from the world's sailing nations met in the Solent for a biannual series of races through and around Cowes Week, culminating in the Fastnet. In 1979, the Irish were having a good year - at the start of the final race they were leading eighteen other teams. And early on the morning of August 14th, with the storm reaching its peak, Golden Apple of the Sun was the first of the Admiral's Cup yachts around the Fastnet Rock. Sailing under the spinnaker (a powerful but unpredictable sail at the best of times in those old offshore boats) Cudmore, so the story goes, had a man strapped to the mast with a flare gun. The instructions were simple; if we start to lose it, shoot the flare through the spinnaker.



The intention must have been that the sudden reduction in sail area would allow the helmsman to regain control of the boat and avoid a destructive crash, or broach as the technical term would have it. What nerve, what bravado – men and women were abandoning yachts all over the Western Approaches, and here was the piratical, nerveless Cudmore, hurtling through this awesome storm with the spinnaker set and only a flare gun between death and glory. The appeal to a teenage boy disconnected from the tragic realities of that storm is obvious.



Seven years later I was sailing with Harold as part of a British America's Cup Challenge, of which he was skipper. In 1989, I navigated aboard Jamarella, member of a winning British Admiral's Cup team managed by Harold Cudmore, who sailed the Fastnet with us. And even then, I never got around to asking him if the 'flare gun' story was true.



Rousmaniere's account is, after all, rather more prosaic. On the Tuesday morning, on the way from the Fastnet Rock to the Scilly Isles, the steering cables jumped off Golden Apple's rudder quadrant. It took a couple of hours to repair, but the Irish got the boat fixed and carried on. They lasted only a couple more hours, until, with Ron Holland at the helm (ironically), the rudder itself broke. They tried using the spinnaker pole with a pre-prepared metal plate screwed to the end of it. The pole broke and the boat was left rolling helplessly to the waves - the race, the Admiral's Cup, all gone.



And that's how rescue helicopter Wessex-527 found them. Golden Apple's owner, Hugh Coveney, was given little time to make a choice about whether or not to abandon the yacht. With the Scilly Isles now 40 miles to leeward, Coveney decided the smart thing to do was to go ashore and try and find a powerboat to tow the yacht to safety. All ten men were picked up by the chopper, and that was the end of Harold Cudmore's Fastnet.



No mention of spinnakers, flare guns or anyone strapped to the mast. Of course, I could just contact Harold and ask him the truth, but a few years ago, I came across a very similar story about the old clipper ships – running before a storm, the skipper was said to have chained a man to the main mast with an axe, and instructions that should the helmsman lose control at the wheel, the ropes holding the sails aloft were to be cut. Ah, I thought, the light bulb of recognition coming on - sailing's answer to the urban myth.



If anything, the story about the square rigger is the more plausible. If there was one thing that boats like Golden Apple (built to the International Offshore Rule of the late-70s) didn't need with the spinnaker up, it was extra weight at the front, near the mast. It was guaranteed to make the boat more difficult to drive. And what if the flare did hit the sodden spinnaker? Would it do much more than punch a hole through it, leaving you with what you had anyway – a mess of flogging nylon?



I've never tried it, so I can't be sure. But, in contrast, square rigged ships running before a storm could absolutely not afford to lose control. The spars were not supported strongly enough for the ship to point into the wind, with sail up in a gale. All the rigging was set to hold the masts up with the wind coming from the side or the stern – not directly from the bow. If you lost control downwind in a big sea and the ship rounded up into the wind (broaching), the entire rig would come crashing down around your ears. It would likely be the end for all on board – the wreckage dragging the ship under before it could be cut away.



In his book, Rousmaniere tells of the need for the survivors to talk down the storm, to somehow, 'inoculate ourselves against the awareness that, at its worst, the storm was much more dangerous than, say, the 1972 Bermuda Race gale, and that there had been excellent reason to be frightened.' Was the entire sailing community involved in the same process – reaching for a time-honoured myth and re-casting it to make us feel more comfortable with the ferocious challenge of that storm? Is that what filtered that particular story through to a teenage dinghy sailor, and got it stuck fast in my consciousness for three decades? Perhaps, and if so, the new tale continued to serve the time-honoured purpose of myth and legend. And who then, are we to ruin a good story with the truth?





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Cape Horn Tales

I didn't want to tempt fate previously, but now the Volvo Ocean Race fleet are as good as round Cape Horn, I thought I might tell my favourite Cape Horn story. It dates back to the first Jules Verne season in 1993. Both ENZA (Peter Blake and Robin Knox-Johnston) and Charal (Olivier de Kersauson) had hit Unidentified Floating Objects south of Cape Town, and returned to South Africa manning the pumps.



And that left Commodore Explorer – the old Jet Services V, a 23 metre catamaran - the last man standing in the Southern Ocean. Skippered by Bruno Peyron and assisted by, amongst others, Cam Lewis. I first came across Lewis' account of their circumnavigation in a Seahorse article written shortly after they got back. He later published a book about it, Around the World in 79 Days, which I read way back in the day, and dug out again recently to get myself in the mood for the Volvo Ocean Race.





Back in 1993, Cameron Carruthers Lewis was the kind of character I wouldn't have dared to make up for a novel. He was a blue-blooded WASP with a Ford agency model for a girlfriend. The ancestral line included Revolutionary War generals; the explorer, Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd; and good ol' great-uncle Leverett Saltonstall, the Governor of Massachusetts during the Second World War.



Lewis had an undeniable talent for racing sailboats. He won back-to-back World Championships in 1979 and 1980 in the single-handed Finn – an Olympic boat then as now – and he was more than just a favourite for the gold medal in Moscow. It wasn't to be; the Russian invasion of Afghanistan intervened, the US team stayed at home and a disillusioned Lewis started to look elsewhere for a buzz.



It wasn't a half-hearted search either, when Cam Lewis wanted excitement, he wanted it spelt in capitals with lights and bells on. He had always had a whiff of the six-shooter about him – back in my Mirror sailing days, I remember hearing that after crossing the finish line to win one of those Finn titles, he'd returned to the sailing club as naked as the day he was born - another story that's too good to spoil by establishing its truth, or otherwise.



So for followers of Lewis' career, it really wasn't that surprising to find him as watch captain and cook to four Frenchmen on an old catamaran, mortgaged to the hounds and trying to beat an imaginary English gentleman in a race around the planet. But with Blake, Knox-Johnston and de Kersauson out of the game, by March 24th all that stood between Lewis, his mates and glory was the 28 and a half days of sailing they had left to complete the 80 day lap - and Cape Horn.



Commodore Explorer was closing on the great cape from the west, with Chile to leeward and a perfect weather forecast – eight to twelve knots from the south-west. But when Cam Lewis came on deck for his watch at 2.00 am, it had already built way past twelve knots. They changed down through the sail plan like a driver going through the gearbox at the end of the straight. No sooner had they reduced sail than the wind increased and they had to peel off some more. Peyron was on the radio trying to figure out where the hell all the wind was coming from. The most likely explanation was that a powerful new low pressure system had unexpectedly spun off the Antarctic continent. And with the wind building to 55 knots and the barometer in free-fall, the weather system was heading their way.



Their options shut down quickly. Even with all the sails on the deck, the boat was still being driven forward at 25 knots by the 31 metre tall wing-mast, with its 22 square metres of wind resistance – that's about the same as the sail area on a nice little cruising boat. The waves and wind would let them steer just one course with any safety, and that heading was taking them closer to the coast – evident from the way the continental shelf was reaching up to the 40 foot waves and starting to lump them into 60 footers. Lewis was below making pancakes (seriously – when in trouble, cook) when Peyron realised that 'parking this beast' was the only remaining option.



If they'd been aboard a nice little cruising boat it would have been a piece of cake. Sails down, lash the tiller to keep her head up into the wind, then retire below and keep your fingers crossed. But they weren't, and no one had 'parked' or heaved-to in a 26 metre catamaran in a Southern Ocean storm before, or in any storm of this magnitude, anywhere, ever.



With the wind now shrieking across the deck at 65 knots, they started work. With one man on the helm, it took all of the rest of them to drag the headsails aft, one at a time, moving the weight to the back of the boat to keep the bows up and out of the waves. Then Lewis went forward and retrieved a halyard, took it to leeward and fastened it to the daggerboard. It sounds simple, but even if you ignore the waves, the motion and the spray, then just the windage on the rope was enough to drag Lewis off his feet, off the boat and into the torrent flushing by to leeward at 25 knots.



But he got it done - albeit with the halyard twisted around another part of the rigging. Once it was fastened, they hoisted the daggerboard out of the water, and then repeated the process with the board in the windward hull - the idea was to reduce the catamaran's resistance to wind and waves, allowing it to slide sideways, going with the flow, rather than fighting the storm's energy.



There was one final preparation before they tried to turn the boat into the wind. Everyone got their knives out, so they would have a chance to cut their lifelines and swim out from under the wreckage. Then, after studying the waves, Bruno Peyron called the moment and Marc Vallin swung the wheel.



There were many possible outcomes - a straight-forward capsize was most likely, which in a catamaran almost 14 metres wide is an event of considerable violence for anyone standing on the top hull. But they could have ended up going backwards down a wave, snapping the rudders off, and then maybe pitch-poling with a reverse summersault for the full ten-point manoeuvre. None of that happened, Commodore Explorer turned towards the wind and slid gracefully to a halt, waves washing harmlessly past.



Leaving a man on deck on watch, everyone else retired below and got ready for a capsize. It would take just one rogue wave. Now they were the fish in the pork barrel; the mighty catamaran helpless before the non-linear maths of wave generation. The crew dressed in survival suits, stowed away anything made of glass or with a sharp edge, and dug out the emergency gear. Then they sat and waited it out – except for Jacques Vincent, who, in what might easily have become a Captain Oates moment, went back outside and proceeded to untangle the halyard that Lewis had left wrapped around the rig.



When the halyard was released, the daggerboard was able to slip back down into the water. Immediately the resistance allowed the waves to start breaking aboard, rather than washing past. If Jacques Vincent allowed too many of those carbon-jarring impacts, the boat would just break up. It took him three hours to do a job that would have taken a couple of minutes under normal circumstances. And Lewis had to watch the whole thing from the inside of his cabin.



But that was only one danger in circumstances of multiple jeopardy. If you look up desperate in a sailing dictionary, I think you'll find: Commodore Explorer, Cape Horn, 24th March 1993. The five men were as isolated and exposed as a climbing team camped in the death zone on Everest, pinned down and waiting out a storm. The ticking clock was no less lethal than a lack of oxygen - the remorseless drift towards the rocks and crashing surf of Tierra del Fuego would kill them just as effectively. They had reached a point where the choices were all made, and there was nothing more to be done, except wait.



Bruno Peyron and his team were some of the best big-cat sailors on the planet. But they had no more control over their fate than a gladiator in the coliseum, waiting for the imperial edict - the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The storm would abate in time and allow them to sail clear, or it wouldn't. A rogue wave would capsize and crush them, or it wouldn't.



The wind stayed over 60 knots for the rest of the 24th March, with one gust topping the anemometer at 85 knots. That's well in excess of the 64 knots required to officially register as hurricane strength - Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. In his book, Lewis described it as the longest day of his life. But finally, 24 hours after he had first come on watch to find they needed to reduce sail, it started to ease, and by 3.00 am on March 25th it was down to an average 45 knots.



They hoisted the storm jib, started sailing and reached the Horn a little under 12 hours later. And on April 20th 1993, Commodore Explorer crossed the finish line off Ushant in 79 days, six hours and 15 minutes to set a new circumnavigation record – and win the Jules Verne Trophy.





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