Posts from — May 2009

It’s always nice when the effort you put into an article is matched like-for-like by the subs and designers who put it on the page.  The above pic is from a feature of mine that appears in the latest episode of Outsider magazine, available at newsagents or free with purchases at good outdoor stores nationwide.

Nick Ward, the 70s icon in the pic above, is a survivor of Fastnet ’79, the world’s most infamous yachting disaster. His crew left him for dead – Ward came to in the water amid a near-hurricane, tethered to his boat by a lifeline with a dying crewmate for company. He survived.  The friendships with his crew, understandably, did not.

Outsider has gone from strength to strength in the last year or two and the quality of material is at its apogee lately – it’s a pleasure to work for them, too. Grab it while it’s hot.

Previously: Left For Dead

Until this year, the biggest fleet I’d sailed in was a 92-boat World Championships – the Laser II worlds in 2001. It was my first big-fleet experience and it felt huge – necessitating gate starts rather than line starts (to begin with) and feeling particularly massive on the day when we had 91 of them behind us. Nice.

Looks like I’ll be going bigger in 2009. So far there are 1,082 entries for the JP Morgan Round the Island Race, with two weeks yet to go until the entry deadline expires. It may be down from a record 1,875 last year, but any race with over 1,000 boats is a big deal. The race runs anti-clockwise around the Isle of Wight, and last year’s start was carnage, with rockstar helmsman Alex Thompson (crewed by Olympian Ben Ainslie and formula one racer Lewis Hamilton) taking out one of the locals with his Open 60 at the start. (Pic of the resultant damage here).

Having never been a fan of handicap/big boat racing, I’ve never actually raced in the Solent, and I’m told I’ll be navigator for the 50-miler, with some of the trickiest tidal waters in the North Atlantic to figure out. The video of last year’s race is below – enjoy.

The keepers of sailing’s worst-kept secret have finally put their hands up and come clean. As the Volvo Ocean Race prepares to set out from Boston today, en route to Galway and the first every Irish stopover, the Irish team have admitted that they have little hope of keeping up with the pack.

The dogs in the street knew, at this stage, that the Green Dragon’s keel was light. After all, it was pretty hard to hide during the straight-line drag race from Rio de Janeiro to Boston. The Dragons admitted that after the first night, they didn’t even see another competitor, and their blog posts during the leg took on the tone of an apologetic obituary. Of course, that was before the blog posts disappeared completely on April 27, with a final post entitled ‘We’ll be back‘, presumably quoting the captain of the Marie Celeste. Interestingly, the blog posts ceased when, reportedly, the Green Dragon team let go the majority of their non-essential team staff, i.e. those not involved directly in keeping the boat afloat.

The Dragon then came into Boston last. They came last in the two in-port races in Boston, and facing a powerful blast reach across the North Atlantic and another last place finish, they have pulled a stunt that no-one saw coming to deflect attention – allowing online gamers choose their route through the next leg via an online interactive poll. This does a couple of things for the Dragons.

Firstly, it allows the 200,000 gamers in the virtual VOR (maybe 50,000 of whom are active) have an active input to a team’s racing tactics – something that has never been done before.

Secondly, it goes some way to save face for the homecoming, and to turn negative attention, generated by their lack of speed, into positive attention, centred around this new innovation.

Thirdly, it gives them someone to blame if this leg goes tits up. ‘It was the gamers advice. They told us to zig when we should have zagged’.

All of which motivations, of course, will be refuted if anyone asks.

What is irrefutable, however, is that the Green Dragon team are frustrated. The podcast below is but a snippet of that frustration, taken from last night’s RTE interview with Tom MacSweeney on Seascapes. In the mp3 below Justin and Damian admit that they knew from the start that their keel was almost a tonne light. The lead bulb on the end of the keel, visible in the pic above, is where the majority of the weight is located for maximum leverage, and the Green Dragon’s is 500 kilos light. The keel keeps the boat upright, and helps transfer maximum power from the sails into forward motion. If your keel is 900 kilos lighter than those on the other boats, your boat is less upright, and goes much slower.  They’ve been doing that for more than 30,000 miles now, and the strain is showing, particularly as on the last leg, the second-hand Delta Lloyd snatched third at the mid-point scoring gate and beat the Dragons home.

The whole thing is available online here, and it’s worth a listen, because the lads expound on the full frustration and how hard they have being pushing, with little to show for it of late. Still, the online interaction is a novel tack to take, if you’ll excuse the pun, and worth watching to see what the results are. If the gamers take the lead and the Dragon romps home, there’ll be a whole new set of questions to be asked in Galway…

dragononandon

Nota Bene: This is a cross-post with the Afloat.ie blog which is here.

It’s been quiet for me on the writing front lately – having a completely separate business to run and all that. But I still get to do bits and pieces of work from time to time for magazines and radio.

Roisin from Outsider magazine  (They’re on Twitter too – @OutsiderMag) asked me to interview Nick Ward a few weeks back for their upcoming ‘Survival’ issue. Nick is a survivor of the 1979 Fastnet race – yacht racing’s most famous disaster. When he came to in the water, tethered in by his lifeline and with a broken leg, he realised the rest of his crew (those that were still alive) had abandoned ship, and spent 14 hours with his dead crewmate hoping for  a rescue before being spotted.

And when he was found – did his crewmates come visit him in hospital?  Nope. They didn’t even send flowers.

It’s an amazing story, and the Outsider guys have given it a great treatment in the pages of the mag, which you can pick up for FREE in many outlets, listed here. The entire article is below the fold.

Having written a book about the whole affair, Nick seems fairly zen about having been abandoned in one of the worst storms in living memory. Apart from entitling his book ‘Left for Dead‘, that is.

Below is a snippet from the interview we did, wherein he gives his views on the call his crew took to abandon their 30-foot Grimalkin, along with him and the dying Gerry Winks.

nickwardsnippet

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