Category: sailing

MIDDLE SEA RACE AND THE WHITBREAD RACE

Something we all tend to forget is just how well J boats rate. They also tend to sail well, but perhaps more importantly they seem to outsail their ratings. I cannot count the number of races, where we considered we had sailed well and were biting our nails about a j boat close on our heels, wondering if we would have saved time against the competition.

The Swans, a Sparkman & Stephens staple in the seventies. We have forgotten how dominate these designs were. “Noremya” a Swan 48 was the first foreign yacht to win the Bermuda Race in 1972. I sailed this boat in her next life as “Weald” and was so impressed that we could power away from “Carina” often.

Skip Novak’s remarks demonstrate how captivating the anecdotes of life can be. Todays boats are so fast, there is little time for those little stories. Sitting on the rail is now so critical to a yacht’s performance; so life on a boat is now pretty much eating, sleeping or sitting on the rail. Not much time for shenanigans.

 
Rolex Middle Sea Race 2011, currently underway, is organized by the Royal Malta Yacht Club. Approximately 30 boats are still racing and 39 boats have finished as of 18.30 CEST. 

After racing over 600 miles, the J/122 Artie crossed the finish line at 15.22 CEST, eight minutes in front of Jaru Team EC, a J/133, and, in doing so, was the first Maltese boat home. That finish also put the local entry, co-skippered by Lee Satariano and Christian Ripard, ahead of Rán (GBR) as overall handicap leader.

However, the crew of Artie will have to cool their heels on the Royal Malta Yacht Club terrace as they wait to see if any boat still racing might be able to beat them on handicap. A formal announcement of the overall winner will be made tomorrow at 1200 CEST at the Royal Malta Yacht Club.

Owner Lee Satariano was clearly relieved to beat his local rivals home and said, ‘It was very achievable because we worked very hard. The crew has been preparing the boat for the past several months, we even have a new sail wardrobe. Being the first Maltese boat gives us a big satisfaction because the local competition is very, very big.’ As for the possibility of an overall victory, he was more cautious and said, ‘The competition is growing every year. In the past we’ve had two second place finishes; we hope this third time is even better.’

Christian Ripard, co-skipper said, ‘It’s a great feeling. We ended up doing most of the race alongside or crossing tacks with Jaru; it’s nearly a rerun of last year, though this time we managed to beat them.

King’s Legend Joins Legends Fleet
Kings Legend in 1977. Click on image to enlarge.

VOR LegendsAlicante, Spain: King’s Legend, the boat that finished second in the Whitbread Round the World Race in 1977-78 with Skip Novak as her navigator, has become the latest entry to the Volvo Ocean Race Legends Regatta and Reunion in Alicante, Spain in November after securing sponsorship from The Jalousie Enclave, an exclusive property development in a UNESCO World Heritage site, Val des Pitons on the Caribbean island of St Lucia.

In 1977-78, owned by English gentleman Nick Ratcliff, flying the British ensign and drawing on the talent of a multinational professional crew, King’s Legend — a sloop rigged Swan 65 built by Nautor in Finland — came second behind Flyer.

“On King’s Legend we had a real boat race on our hands as the pre-race favourite, Flyer, had exactly the same handicap rating,” Novak, one of the Legends Ambassadors, recalled. “The wealthy Dutchman, Cornelius van Rietschoten beat us into Cape Town by only two hours after a hard-fought upwind battle in the South Atlantic. But the most poignant moment for me was seeing Table Mountain on the horizon from 50 miles out, having navigated there with ‘a sextant and a time piece’.

“The next crew drama was when a leak was discovered at the rudderpost, which was opening and closing in the huge waves. We made contact with the crew of Adventure, Great Britain II (both yachts will attend the reunion), and Heath’s Condor, all of whom agreed to listen out for King’s Legend via the radio every six hours.”

After two days of worry, the crew was able to bring the leak under control. However the event was a stark reminder that these are desolate oceans populated only by albatross, whales and ice, with no shipping within thousands of miles.

After a massive broach while stampeding towards Cape Horn, water from the heads found its way into the SSB radio, which immediately ceased to function. “It may seem strange today,” says Novak, “but no-one was in the least alarmed that we were completely cut off from the outside world.”

By being one degree of latitude too far south, King’s Legend lost Flyer on the scorecard forever, and trailed her across the finish line to take second overall.

SEAWORTHINESS

This is another one of those subjects on which I spend way to much time pondering. As far as a racing boat seaworthiness and seamanship are tied. There is more than one boat I have refused to sail on either because of the boat or it’s crew. A well found boat can compensate for a less competent crew and vise  versa.

Should the Fastnet race have in recent years the number of withdrawals we have seen? The Middle Sea race? The Stamford-Vineyard race?

Here the question being asked is specifically about seaworthiness. Regardless of my opinion the horse has escaped the barn, as the saying goes. I will add that I have sailed some very sea kindly boats in recent years; far better than many years ago.

PRACTICALITIES OF SEAWORTHINESSWhen mistral conditions cancelled the first day of racing this week at theMaxi Yacht Rolex Cup in Porto Cervo, Italy, a cry of ‘What The F#@K’ camefrom the sidelines. Was this another instance of offshore race boats beingunsuitable to go offshore? Hugh Welbourn, Principal at Hugh Welbourn Designin Southampton, United Kingdom, joins the conversation:———————————————————————-Pitiful indeed to be cancelling because of 25 knots, when I can wellremember frequently starting and racing in Sardinia in full Mistralconditions and having some of the best racing and fun days ever. One ofthose days was the first of many occasions racing with Bruce (NavalArchitect Bruce Nelson) in fact, and rolling the good old IOR boatsdownhill in seriously interesting conditions around the many rocks offPorto Cervo!
But how have we got to this stage?
You have to lay some of the blame on currently having rules and raceorganisers that on the whole take no interest in the actual practicalitiesof seaworthiness. That’s something that is totally separate from basicissues of stability and structures which have mostly been dealt with, butis more along the lines of ensuring that it is possible to work the boatboth above and below decks in severe conditions if necessary.
Ever increasing pressure on short course racing results has created superefficient sail handling and deck layouts for sure, but ‘conveniently’brushed under the table are such basic seaworthiness points of no deckpenetrations that allow water below, or indeed as with current TP52’s thenthe sheer mass of string running all through the internals of the boat. Andwatertight integrity? Got to be joking!
Of course the TP52’s and some others in current guise would run a mile fromdoing any real offshore event and even deliveries between events are causefor looking for benign weather windows.
But yachts of this ilk shouldn’t be sailing in events such as Sardiniawhere challenging conditions are so often encountered and also should be somuch of the fun.
Yes, the modern boats are harder on the crew, the motions are more violent,but sanitising the racing because some of the boats can’t deal with theconditions is plain crazy.
So surely its time that the rules and race organisers recognise that thisstate of affairs must not be allowed to continue – racing boat numbers areshrinking everywhere and part of the issue is for sure that they arebecoming less and less suitable for the general mix of offshore/inshoreracing.
Killing off the races in such great waters as Sardinia just because some ofthe fleet can’t deal with it?
Pitiful.

NEW RECORD AROUND BELLE ISLE

Over the weekend Gitana set a new record(2 hrs 42 min over a 41 mile course) around Belle Isle.  500 boats on the starting line at once.  On the site for the race it says the the purpose is: conviviality, simplicity, and pleasure of the sea. When was the last time anyone heard these words in the context of a race?  Belle Isle offers strong tides and often wind.

I have experienced a start like this and as one might imagine it is a bit chaotic.

LOVE OF THE SEA

When I  saw this posting, my first thought was to be sure that it was not April first. While I still harbor a measure of skepticism, as I believe genetics still have a long way to go before the science matures; I am intrigued and amused. Of course it is a perfect explanation/excuse for my behavior over the past 45 years.

Scientists find gene for love of the sea

Posted on March 8, 2011 by genotopia

What did Thor Heyerdahl, Captain Ahab, and Odysseus have in common? They all may have shared a common variant of a gene for love of the sea.

Researchers at Mystic University in Connecticut have identified a gene associated with seafaringness, according to an article to be published tomorrow in the journal Genetic Determinism Today. Patterns of inheritance of the long-sought gene offers hope for “sailing widows,” and could help explain why the sailing life has tended to run in families and why certain towns and geographical regions tend historically to have disproportionate numbers of sea-going citizens.

The gene is a form of the MAOA-L gene, previously associated with high-risk behavior and thrill-seeking; another form of the gene, found last year, made news as the “warrior gene.” The current variant, dubbed 4C, was found by a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 290 individuals from Mystic, CT, New Bedford, MA, and Cold Spring Harbor, NY—all traditional nineteenth-century whaling villages. Residents showed the presence of the 4C variant at a frequency more than 20 times above background in neighboring landlocked towns.

C. M. Ishmael, the lead researcher on the study, said the findings could be a boon to medicine. Although the International Whaling Commission outlawed commercial whaling in 1986, the research could benefit literally hundreds of “sailing widows” left alone for Wednesday-evening sailboat races up and down the East Coast. Each year, an average of 11 salt-stained Polo shirts washes up on the New England and Mid-Atlantic coasts, the only remains of a lantern-jawed investment banker and his half-million-dollar boat. Ishmael said he is trying to have the irrational urge to sail entered into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, standard reference for psychiatric diseases, in the next, fifth, edition.

“This receptor is an exciting potential target for new drug therapies,” Ishmael said in a phone interview. “We hope lots of companies will be interested in it. And venture capital, too.” Ishmael is himself CEO of a company, MysticGene, formed to develop such therapies. When asked about potential conflict of interest, he replied cryptically, “Well, duh.” Shares of MysticGene closed higher on Monday following the announcement.

The gene for seafaringness has long been an object of study for human geneticists. The trait was first described in 1919 by Charles Davenport, director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who named it “thalassophilia.” Using pedigree analysis and anecdotal correlation, Davenport identified thalassophilia as a sex-linked recessive gene and distinguished it clinically from wanderlust, or love of adventure. Although one might think naively that people living in towns with good harbors would tend to go to sea, Davenport suggested the reverse: those with the thalassophilia trait have tended to migrate toward regions with good harbors and found settlements there. The current study does nothing to refute Davenport’s analysis.

Further, a tentative expansion of the GWAS analysis to various racial groups largely confirms Davenport’s observations that thalassophilia is more prevalent in Scandinavians and the English, and less common in people of German ancestry.

Thalassophilia joins a rapidly growing list of complex behavioral traits that have been shown to have a genetic basis, thanks to GWAS. Besides the warrior gene, recent studies have found genetic links to promiscuity, aggressive behavior, especially while drinking, religiosity, and bipolar disorder, or manic depression—all traits that Davenport and other early human geneticists were deeply interested in. The difference is that modern science better understands the mechanisms involved.

“Seamen know very well that their cravings for the sea are racial,” Davenport wrote in 1919. “’It is in the blood,’ they say.” Today we know it’s not in the blood—it’s in the genes.

The true bits:

Garland E. Allen, “Is a New Eugenics Afoot?,” Science 294, no. 5540 (October 5, 2001): 59 -61. (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/294/5540/59.short)

Charles Benedict Davenport and Mary Theresa Scudder, Naval officers: their heredity and development (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1919),http://books.google.com/books?id=EWESAAAAYAAJ&dq=naval%20officers%3A%20their%20heredity%20and%20development&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Richard Alleyne, “A gene that could explain why the red mist descends,” Telegraph.co.uk,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8219521/A-gene-that-could-explain-why-the-red-mist-descends.html.

Jeremy Taylor, “Violent-drunk gene discovered,”http://www.asylum.com/2010/12/23/bad-drunk-gene-discovered/.

Justin R. Garcia et al., “Associations between Dopamine D4 Receptor Gene Variation with Both Infidelity and Sexual Promiscuity,” ed. Jan Lauwereyns, PLoS ONE 5, no. 11 (11, 2010): e14162.

C. Frydman et al., “MAOA-L carriers are better at making optimal financial decisions under risk,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (12, 2010),http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19830-people-with-warrior-gene-better-

SPEEDREAM

35ft scale model of Speedream to be built

Vlad Murnikov’s radical foil-assisted monohull takes a step forward

Friday January 14th 2011, Author: Brian Hancock, Location: United States

As the design and engineering for SpeedDream continues to advance, a decision has been made to build a 35ft scale version of the radical new monohull. Hundreds of hours of computer engineering and analysis has already been completed for the SpeedDream design, but there is nothing like a scaled prototype version out sailing in actual conditions to test the unique ideas and technical solutions that are at the heart of this project.

“For a typical evolutionary design you start with a set of known performance parameters and work to gradually improve them,” said Vlad Murnikov, the lead designer and creative force behind SpeedDream. “But the SpeedDream concept is so radical and innovative there are no analogs to compare to and improve upon. While CFD analysis and tank testing are extremely important, they can only get us so far. It will be very useful to check both the general concept and the hull shape, appendages and rig configurations on a real scaled version of SpeedDream. Appendages like the extreme canting/telescoping keel and the lifting/stabilizing foil have to be tested and optimized in a real sailing environment and this is why we believe that building the prototype is necessary. I feel that a 35-foot version is the right size to provide a superb realistic platform to test all the critical SpeedDream components.”

To achieve previously unattained speeds and bridge the performance gap between multihulls and monohulls, SpeedDream relies upon two innovative appendages to greatly enhance the boat’s performance; a canting keel that lifts clear of the water when the boat is fully powered up, and a foil to leeward that provides not only lift, but also resists leeward force.

“The geometry of most modern canting systems allow for a maximum cant angle of up to 50 degrees,” said Murnikov. “For SpeedDream we have developed a proprietary system that allows much higher cant angles while at the same time being able to significantly reduce loads. The goal ultimately is to sail the boat with the keel completely out of water thereby removing a significant amount of drag while maximizing righting moment. In addition, the keel will be telescoping. This will allow us to fine tune the angle of heel as well as make it more practical to get the boat in and out of marinas where depth may be an issue.”

Lifting foils have been used in hydrofoil ferries and military craft for decades. Recent applications in sailing yachts include the DSS stabilising system developed by Hugh Welbourn. Curved lifting daggerboards find widespread use in offshore racing multihulls, in record setting projects like the extreme foiler L’Hydroptere, the boat that holds the outright speed record and in the latest generation IMOCA 60s.

Cam Lewis, the skipper of SpeedDream said: “I have followed developments in both monohull and multihulls for decades. This latest America’s Cup was a great example of how some new developments in foils radically changed the performance of both boats. It’s these innovative technologies like the telescoping keel and lifting foils that will set SpeedDream apart from all other monohulls and allow the boat to not only break, but smash all existing records. We will test these features, along with others in the SpeedDream-35 prototype and prove to us and the sailing community that this boat is a step ahead of anything else out there.”

OVER THE TOP HYPERBOLE?

You be the judge. I find it hard to compare Dr. Laura to Bernard Montessier, perhaps the author is just trying to create controversy.

NEARLY A MODERN DAY BERNARD MOITESSIER

Dr. Laura Schlessinger – who is based in Santa Barbra, CA – might be best

known as a nationally syndicated American talk radio host. However, she has

the sailing bug big time, and is finishing construction on a custom Tim

Kernan designed 46 footer that she plans to race in the March 2011 Newport

Beach, CA to Cabo San Lucas Race.

While having been largely committed to buoy racing, she first ventured

offshore nearly a year ago in a similar race to Cabo on her J-125 (Warrior),

winning overall in both ORR and PHRF. Here she comments on the experience:

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I did the Cabo race purely for the adventure. I had never been out on the

open ocean and simply wanted the experience. By the end of the first day and

one-half, I was cold, damp, exhausted and generally miserable. I clicked my

heels but couldn’t get back to Santa Barbara. Then, on the second and

one-half day I got with the rhythm of it and can’t tell you enough how much

I absolutely loved it: huge turtles, whales, dolphin, the horizon with no

land and no other boats – it was just amazing!

We followed the progress of all the boats on the computer and we were well

behind our competition for most of the race. Ultimately – I didn’t care that

much because we all were having such a fun time with each other and with the

elements. I would guess that if the amount of laughter aboard a boat won a

trophy – we’d get it. On the last day I woke up from my four hour down-time

to find zero wind. I did see a shark fin and wouldn’t let anyone swim! We’d

gone way out to sea and were totally becalmed. I decided I was the “wind

witch” and would bring wind any moment now. They all scoffed at me – until I

pointed to some tiny cat paws on the surface of the water growing larger in

diameter. Suddenly, we started to take off.

The best part of the entire experience was that night when we were coming

into Cabo. I was driving (that’s my job) through the moonshine on the water.

It was so beautiful I was crying. Believe it or not, I turned to my crew and

suggested we forget the finish line and just keep sailing. I meant it – as

strange as that may sound. I got voted down, so over the finish line we

came. From the day I suggested we do that Cabo race, I never considered the

possibility of winning. I just wanted the adventure. And this year, we are

doing the Cabo race to qualify for Transpac – talk about an adventure. —

http://www.nhyccaborace.com/nhyccaborace/Profiles.html

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