All Piss and Wind (17 page)

O
NE OF THE FEW
privileges of reaching what is euphemistically described as ‘mature age' is the right to pontificate. There's an assumption that long experience and the unceasing accretion of time invests those of us in the ‘three score years' brigade with the obligation to bestow our wisdom. This is, of course, bunkum. Most of the world's great follies and disasters were precipitated by stubborn old men who thought they knew better.

In yachting, the old men – at least the rich old ones – make the rules. Yet interestingly, they don't represent the entrenched forces of conservatism as we'd normally expect from the custodians of such an ancient sport. Quite the opposite. They're the anti-traditionalists. The reason for this is that most of these men have very large piles of money to spend on their hobby, and remain ferociously competitive until they're too feeble to stand behind the helm. Result? They build bigger and bigger yachts, crew them with professionals, and bend or overthrow anything in the rule book that might stand between them and the trophies they covet so desperately.

Case in point: for the first time in the 61-year history of the race, Sydney to Hobart handicap and line honours in 2005 went to a motor-sailer. Not some wholesome ketch-rigged cruising clunker with a massive doghouse and sturdy Perkins diesel, but a motor-sailer nevertheless. The brand new 100-footer
Wild Oats XI
could never have become dual champion in the 2005 race without her engine. In fact, she'd have never even made it to Hobart. But it took a wholesale jettisoning of some of the sport's most fundamental principles to allow that result.

The governing rules and procedures of ocean racing in this country are effectively set by the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia. In what they coyly called ‘IRC Division A' (read: front-of-the-fleet hotshots) for the 2005 Sydney–Hobart there were just seven boats. Each of those yachts relied on engine power in some form under sail, be it to shift water ballast, cant their keels, turn underwater foils or handle the rig. To maintain the reserves of electric and hydraulic energy to make all this possible some of the boats needed to keep their motors running for the entire race distance. That's a long way from what most sailors – and the general public – understand to be the principles of the sport.

This emerging dependence on motor-driven mechanical advantage is an outcome of the astonishingly rapid evolution of high-tech naval architecture. Those advances are spectacular, but to my mind they also threaten to rob the sport of its essential qualities and appeal. The issue involves two broad themes: the legitimacy of exploiting ‘stored power' within the established philosophical constraints of the sport, and the safety implications that flow from a yacht's reliance on high levels of non-human effort. Less than a generation ago, listening to the weather on a transistor radio during an offshore event risked disqualification under the ‘outside assistance' rule. Now the unashamed internal assistance of engine horsepower is allowed, and even encouraged. Why?

The answer, as ever, has to do with the single most dominant
factor in yacht development: owner ego. Size wins races. If you simply can't endure another season without that line-honours trophy on your mantelpiece, just build a bigger boat. But there is surely such a thing as reasonable proportion, even in the high-octane world of maxi racing. For those of us who still hold some affection for the traditional qualities of offshore competition, a genuine racing yacht should be capable of being handled safely by the combined physical efforts and skills of the crew on board. Today's maxis are so huge, complex and powerful that controlling their rigs and appendages by muscle power alone is no longer practical. In my view, that puts them beyond the ‘fair limits' of the sport (a concept that's already been made marginal by the inability of current handicapping systems to cope in any fair way with these new extremes of performance).

There is a persistent argument, peddled mainly by designers, boatbuilders, sailmakers and multi-millionaire skippers, that technological development in yachting eventually enhances performance across the entire fleet – the old ‘everyone benefits from the space race spin-offs' justification peddled by NASA back in the 1960s. But that could only be true if every yacht owner had the same bottomless bucket of money to spend, regardless of their boat's size. This is patently a myth. In any case, not everyone wants to tackle major passage events in some carbon cockleshell with lifelines. It's also sobering to view this size issue from a historical standpoint. A generation ago a ‘big' offshore yacht had an overall length of 50 feet. Today the line-honours hopefuls are twice that size with the supercharging bonus of carbon construction, canting keels and/or water ballast, multiple appendages and all the other expensive flap-doodle of a state-of-the-art maxi. That same generation ago the smallest boats in the fleet were around 30 feet. They still are. An average length difference of 20 feet has now blown out to more than 70 feet, a staggering increase of 350 per cent.

Out on the race course, the realities of this chasm aren't difficult
to understand. Sheer horsepower now propels the multi-million-dollar monsters so far out in front of the main fleet that they are literally in a race of their own. The gap between the 100-foot rockets and the bulk of the fleet is so great that they sail in entirely different weather and currents. The leading yachts are now capable of logging more than 20 knots for hours on end while the tailenders struggle to make eight or nine. During the 2005 Sydney–Hobart the ‘Division A' front-runners opened up boat-to-boat gaps of more than 100 sea miles after just 12 hours of racing. But they could only deliver this blistering performance with the aid of mechanical, electrical and hydraulic energy.

The defenders of onboard power in yacht racing usually claim that abolishing the old prohibition rules was inevitable
force majeure
necessity – that it simply isn't possible to sail modern boats of this size competitively without employing motors. This is self-serving tosh. One hundred and fifty years ago the great square-rigged clippers used muscle power to lift their huge yards and sails high into the rigging, trim acres of heavy canvas and weigh their massive anchors. They raced each other across oceans relying on their strength, skill and daring. Only twenty years back the famous maxis –
Windward Passage
,
Kialoa
,
Nirvana
,
Apollo
,
Condor
,
Siska
and others – thought nothing of using four strong crewmen just to grind in the headsail. That's what it needed to get the job done, and nobody complained.

The more disturbing truth of modern yacht design is that saving weight above the waterline is now so crucial to performance that motors are displacing crew. Do the maths. Pound for pound, motors deliver far more energy, don't have to be rested every four hours, don't get sick and don't consume all that heavy food and water. Efficient small diesel generators, battery power and hydraulics now make possible swift changes in trim and heel angle that would otherwise require the energy of eight crew labouring on bulky mechanical equipment. The resultant power-to-weight ratio
advantages are huge. In other words, this new generation of elite maxi yachts have been conceived within the rather distressing assumption that human effort alone could not cope with the loads involved in sailing them properly.

The safety ramifications are obvious. What happens if there's a power or mechanical failure?
Skandia
was abandoned and capsized in Bass Strait after its canting keel structure broke free. Most of the yachts in the last Volvo around-the-world race suffered serious engineering and structural mishaps. Electrical problems are the bane of all ocean-going yachts, especially in the longer events when there's plenty of time for saltwater to seep into the hundreds of hidden connections and miles of wire that snake their way through the bowels of the boat. Circuits go inexplicably dead; batteries fail to hold a charge. A less obvious aspect of these same safety concerns comes from the careless or inexpert operation of power equipment. The load build-up in a conventional winch handle will soon tell you when a halyard has reached its limit of extension or a jib-sheet is trimmed to the maximum. Motors don't think. They will cheerfully tear out your mainsail headboard, grind a turning block off the deck or strip the casing from a brand-new reefing line. All that's needed is someone to keep their finger on that button a second too long.

Equally disappointing to me is that by embracing this ‘motorsailer' concept, the authorities who govern ocean racing have diminished the basic human character and values of our sport. Fitness, skill, talent, courage, stamina and experience are subordinated to technology. For more than a century the sport of yacht racing has had an ideological commitment to containing itself within the limits of human effort. Employing mechanically generated hydraulic or electrical energy to deliver gains that would be unattainable by muscle power is contrary to the most basic assumptions of the sport. There can't be many of us who want to see offshore yachting go the way of motor racing, where all the attention is on the engines, tyres, aerodynamics and steering geometry –
and it takes a team of 30 mechanics and laptop jockeys to put one driver out on the track.

Can we halt the march of all this clever technology, driven by the frenzy of competition and inexhaustibly deep pockets? Not likely. In truth, much of the real heat behind the issue of ‘internal assistance' turns on matters of sentiment rather than principle. For me, one of the most beautiful moments in offshore racing comes just before the start when the engine is switched off and the precious purity of motion under sail takes over. I would find it unbearable to race 630 miles with the donk running for the whole trip. And, as the latest super-maxi monsters sweep past with their generators humming, it's difficult to escape an obvious question: if they're so damn keen to get to Hobart first, why not ditch all that high-tech stored-power nonsense and just strap a couple of 200-horsepower outboards onto the transom and be done with it?

 

And here's another troubling question about the future of the sport: why is there no substantial debate about the rise of professionalism in ocean racing? We've all heard the odd dockside grumble about well-paid ‘rock stars', but beyond that you'll search in vain for any considered discussion of the deeper issues. No single factor in yachting has more bearing on relative performance than the power of rich skippers to sign up the best talent, yet the subject of paid crews has remained virtually taboo for twenty years.

Let's open that rather smelly little can of worms for a moment. It is, of course, impossible in a sport where the basic equipment is so witheringly expensive to keep people with vast fortunes from enlisting their bank accounts in the intense search for advantage. This isn't casual off-the-beach sailboard racing: staying competitive offshore involves serious cash outlays. But should that win-at-any-cost freedom also extend to the crew? Should a wealthy owner be able to use his chequebook to recruit a team
of ‘hired gun' sailors whose collective training, experience and ability will overwhelm the gifted amateurs who crew the remainder of the fleet?

I suspect we've never seriously debated the ethics of professionalism in yachting because it's crept upon us so gradually. There's been no great climactic moment or event to force us into confronting the underlying questions. In the early 1980s the occasional mercenary (who usually claimed to have had some form of America's Cup involvement) began to mysteriously join offshore crews just before the more important races. Nothing was ever said, but it was assumed the ring-in and owner had come to some mutually satisfactory financial arrangement. Then, as ocean-racing yachts grew larger and it became more difficult to assemble the big crews they required, sought-after sailors were emboldened to ask for a return air ticket as the price of their loyalty. It wasn't long before the best crew wanted their accommodation paid as well, plus a modest amount of spending money for ‘expenses'. You can guess the rest. Unabashed fee-for-service professionalism is now a ubiquitous and tolerated feature of our sport at the elite level. Crew travel, salaries, accommodation and expenses are all now budgeted line-items in any major offshore campaign.

Meanwhile, more subtle variations of the practice have evolved. It's not uncommon for an owner to order a complete suit of new sails on the condition that the chosen loft then provides someone from its staff to crew on the boat and look after trim for the season. It's still professionalism, but avoids any vulgar exchange of cash. Crack yachts that wouldn't, strictly speaking, require the full-time attention of a paid hand are nevertheless afforded that luxury by their owners because the employee also just happens to be a champion sailor who'll be on deck every Saturday and for all the offshore events.

Some of the more intensely competitive one-design classes have introduced ‘owner/driver' rules but this pays no more than lip
service to the Corinthian ideal. The rest of the crew are often all professionals, and they tell the owner what to do.

What's wrong with any of this? Wouldn't these hot-shots be sailing on the best boats anyway? Who's harmed by a system that rewards crewmembers with the highest skills? Isn't all elite sport professional these days? Those are plausible questions, but defenders of this simplistic, market-driven approach miss a key distinction. While there are now plenty of professional sailors in Australia, sailing itself – at least offshore racing – is not a professional sport. We still race for fun and the thrill of competition, not for cash. Despite what are sometimes quite high levels of sponsorship there's no fat winner's cheque to be collected at the end of the Lord Howe Island race or even the Sydney–Hobart.

Nor is this a ‘bums on seats' sport whose health depends on gate takings, signage, television revenues or franchised merchandising. Apart from the satisfaction of seeing your yacht's name engraved on a famous trophy, the only tangible prizes at stake in ocean racing are the jugs of rum wagered between crews. That's what helps make offshore sailing unique. It's one of the few remaining areas of human endeavour in which the term ‘amateur' is not derogatory. I'd like to think that it can stay that way.