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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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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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.


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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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Rogue Waves

So that last story, not to mention all this Volvo Ocean Race writing, got me thinking about, and researching, this whole rogue wave thing.

When Miles Smeeton published his book, it joined a building folklore about rogue waves. No less a ship than the Queen Elizabeth had her bridge windows taken out by a wave in a North Atlantic storm in 1943 – they were 28 metres above the waterline. In 1995, her successor, the QE2 took what was estimated to be a 29 meter wave over the bow. Then there was the Esso Languedoc, caught in a storm off South Africa in 1980.

Philippe Lijour, the first mate aboard the oil tanker, was fortunate enough to have a camera handy (fifth picture down) when the breaking crest of a wave roared past, just short of the top of the ship’s cranes some 25 metres above the waterline. At the time, Lijour reckoned the average wave height to be somewhere between five to ten metres from trough to crest.

But despite the stories and even despite Lijour’s photo, oceanographers and meteorologists refused to believe these freak waves existed in any number – their theories simply didn’t predict them. Conventional, linear mathematics states that waves should vary in a pattern around the average, called the significant wave height, defined as the mean of the largest third of the waves recorded. According to this analysis, in a storm sea of 12 metres, a 15 metre wave will pop up about once every 25 years.

A rogue wave - one defined as twice that of the significant wave height - is theoretically possible, but you’ll have to wait about ten thousand years to see one. It seemed to the seafaring community that they were appearing a lot more often than that, but the scientists were about as interested in the anecdotal evidence as they were in reports of the Loch Ness Monster. And that’s how things stood, when on New Year’s Day 1995, the equivalent of the dead bloated body of Nessie floated up on the shore of the Loch.

The winds howling down the North Sea had peaked at hurricane force that afternoon, and the captain of the ferry Colour Viking later described going eyeball to eyeball with wave crests from his bridge, 30 metres above sea level. It would have gone down as just another account, if what’s become known as the New Year Wave hadn’t roared under the Draupner oil platform just after three o’clock that afternoon.

It was measured by a laser wave sensor at a maximum height of 25.6 metres – twice the size of the average wave at the time. If that wasn’t enough, five years later, a British oceanographic research vessel in the Rockall shipping area, to the west of Scotland, used an onboard recorder to measure a wave 29.1 metres from the crest to trough. Suddenly, the accounts of walls of water approaching at twice the height of the waves around them were no longer quite so unbelievable – even to the scientists.

The implication for the safety of ships and oil platforms was not good – their design had always been based on the assumptions of linear mathematics. But the maths was flawed and the theory shot to hell, so the science community went back to its other mainstay – observation. The European Union started up a project called MaxWave, which used images from satellite radar to ‘measure’ wave height across broad swathes of ocean.

I’ve used quotes, because there’s a fair bit of theory between the radar images and the computed wave heights. Nevertheless, from three weeks of images taken from a period and place when two cruise ships had almost been sunk by rogues, the project measured ten waves bigger than 25 metres – and that kicked the linear maths model into touch once and for all. A subsequent project called WaveAtlas used radar images to measure rogue waves across the globe, and provided maps of size and frequency. The latest plan is to provide the radar images in real-time, allowing dangerous swells to be tracked and forecast.

But we still don’t have an explanation of why these waves occur. Counter currents and the sea bed provide known mechanisms for throwing up bigger waves, but that explanation only works in areas like Cape Horn, where an easterly gale can meet the westerly Antarctic circumpolar current across an area of shoaling water. It doesn’t tell us why some waves roar under North Sea shipping platforms at twice the height of all those around them.

The most likely explanations use the same equations as the ghostly world of quantum mechanics – so-called non-linear mathematics. It seems that somehow, the energy from several separate waves is being focused into just one or two of these monsters. But until these theories are better refined and established, our best chance of predicting these waves is the up-coming radar tracking. In the meantime, if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’ll need all the luck and all the determination of the Smeeton’s, Guzzwell and the Tzu Hang to come back and tell the world about it.


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The Smeeton's and the Horn

The trip to Alicante for the start of the Volvo Ocean Race turned out to a little busier than I hoped, what with my triple role as official author, website race commentator and some-time Data Centre worker. As a consequence, I didn't manage to extract much in the way of sailing stories from the book interviewees, but hopefully I tee-ed up a couple of people to get some good ones down the track.

So I'm going to have to fall back on one I prepared earlier, while I was doing a bit of background reading for the upcoming race this past summer. I didn’t want to just read all the other official accounts, so I did a bit of digging on abebooks.com and came up with (amongst others) Miles Smeeton’s book about an early attempt to round Cape Horn in a small cruising boat. And this is one of those tales that's almost been lost - but shouldn't be...

Conor O’Brien’s Saoirse had already been first - the 42 foot ketch departed from Melbourne and successfully rounded the Cape as part of a solo circumnavigation, and O'Brien's book, Across Three Oceans, records his 1923 achievement. It was 35 years before another yacht would clear customs in Melbourne with Montevideo in mind. The Tzu Hang was owned by Beryl and Miles Smeeton. They were the kind of redoubtable British adventurers that belong in Boy’s Own annuals.

Nevil Shute wrote the foreword to Miles Smeeton’s account of their voyage to Cape Horn, Once is Enough. Shute picks out a telling story - when asked if they had had any trouble crossing the Atlantic, Miles allowed for a three day period in bad weather when the damnedest thing had been keeping their eleven year old daughter, Clio, at her lessons. Tsk, tsk, children, really - no discipline these days…

Even before she met Miles, Beryl had done her share of adventuring, travelling on four continents, as likely on foot or horseback as in the comfort of a railway carriage – think rainforests with a pith helmet and an umbrella and you’ll get the spirit if not the letter of Miss Beryl Boxer’s endeavours. Once they had teamed up, they attempted Tirich Mir - a 25,263’ peak in the Hindu Kush - with a young Sherpa called Tenzing Norgay, who went on to greater things.

They didn’t get to the top, but it was the highest altitude achieved by a woman at the time. Miles was a career Army officer, and it was after his service in the Second World War that they took up sailing, beginning with that voyage back across the Atlantic in which Clio had tried to play hooky. They had just bought the Tzu Hang in England - a 46’ ketch, originally built in Hong Kong from teak and copper fastenings - and were sailing her home to Canada. Four years later, in 1955, they sold the farm in British Columbia that had been their home since the war, and took off in the boat. Like so many people before and since, they set off across the Pacific. Unlike many others, on reaching Australia they turned back east, sailed down into the high latitudes and attempted to round Cape Horn.

It all started well enough, Miles Smeeton’s descriptions of life on board are idyllic to anyone familiar with the privations of a modern racing boat. They had the fire stoked up like a country pub on a winter weekend, with the cat curled up in front of it. Beryl Smeeton had taken to knitting jumpers, and her breakfasts of porridge, bacon and eggs, toast and home-made marmalade all washed down with tea, would have shamed most British bed and breakfast hotels. The bunks were real beds, oatmeal cakes were baked, pudding was cooked at any excuse and the England versus Ireland rugby match was on the radio - blissful really, until the 12th February, 1959.

The Tzu Hang was a very slow boat to Cape Horn by today’s standards, where even the mono-hull racers of the Volvo can reel off one 500+ mile day after another – fast enough to almost pick and choose the weather. The Smeeton’s were hoping for an average of little more than a hundred miles a day. At that speed, they were the proverbial fish in a pork barrel - whatever weather came along rolled right over the top of them. And two days before Valentine’s Day, things had been deteriorating for a while.

They had got down to a reefed mainsail and mizzen only, with 60 fathoms of three inch hawser trailing out the back to slow her down and help keep her stern to the breaking waves. The swell was bigger than they had ever seen before – Miles Smeeton described a seascape that was as different from a normal rough ocean as a winter landscape is to a summer one. There was white foam and spume everywhere, showered like confetti by the breaking crests of the huge waves, it lay over the ocean like Christmas snow. And for the first time since the Tasman Sea, the albatrosses had disappeared – this, it turned out, was ominous.

Miles was in his bunk reading when it happened, his wife on deck at the helm. He described what she saw in Once is Enough; ‘Close behind her a great wall of water was towering above her, so wide that she couldn’t see its flanks, so high and so steep that she knew Tzu Hang could not ride over it. It didn’t seem to be breaking as the other waves had broken, but water was cascading down its front, like a waterfall.’

After that, Beryl Smeeton remembered thinking that she could do nothing else with the helm, then the sensation of falling and no more, until she found herself floating alone, in the Southern Ocean, with just the broken tether of her lifeline for company. It was only when she was lifted by the following wave that she saw the boat just thirty yards away, both masts gone and very low in the water - which was unsurprising, when you consider that the deckhouse had been ripped off.

It’s arguable whether Miles Smeeton and their crew mate, John Guzzwell, were any better off down below. They were hurled around the cabin along with everything that wasn’t tied down and quite a bit of what had been. Until the vanishing deck house had allowed the cold black sea to pour in, as the Tzu Hang was rolled over and under that huge wave. They both surfaced into waist deep water, awash with cushions, mattresses and books - and one seriously unhappy cat. Miles made it on deck in time to see his wife swim to the remains of the mizzen mast, from where she pulled herself to the boat on the still attached rigging, and was hauled back on board by the men.

It seemed that they had only saved Beryl for a few minutes – both men felt the Tzu Hang would sink at any moment. Their home was full of water, and there was a two square metre hole where the deckhouse had been. Both masts were gone, as were the rudder, dinghies and the cabin skylights. The rigging, guardrails and stanchions were a mass of twisted metal. There was no liferaft, and no hope of rescue. The men just stood and stared in despair, but Beryl went for the buckets.

She galvanized them all, and their energy was rewarded with luck. John Guzzwell quickly found nails, a hammer and wood in the chaos below. He worked like a demon to make the Tzu Hang watertight again, before another wave took her down for good. Meanwhile, Miles and Beryl bailed, and bailed, and bailed. It took twelve hours to get the water down to the level of the floor boards – had there been any floorboards left. Then, exhausted, they managed to heat some soup, and slept.

The storm abated the following day, and they were fortunate that the sturdy teak hull had not sprung a leak. Slowly, the chaos was cleared - amongst the casualties was the stuffed blue bear they carried as a lucky mascot. Headless, he was thrown overboard, judged to have been no help at all. The boat had been pitch-poled, somersaulted end-over-end. The evidence was a tin of make-up that had slid down a bulkhead as the boat sat on its nose, then slipped into a gap between the deckhead and the bulkhead that had opened with the force of the masts hitting the water. As the masts had sheered off at the deck, the load had disappeared and the make-up tin had become trapped. And there it stayed, proof of their experience.

They built a jury rig and a steering oar, although mostly the Tzu Hang sailed herself, with just changes to the trim of the sails to keep her going in a straight line. Enough navigational equipment had survived for them to take position fixes, along with a pilot book for South America and twenty three unbroken eggs. It took almost a week for the cat to dry off and recover her good humour.

They made a landfall near the Chilean naval yard in Talcahuano, and with a great deal of effort and patience the Tzu Hang was rebuilt. Then the Smeeton’s – alone this time – went back to the south, intending to run into the Chilean Channels and round the tip of South America through the Magellan Strait. There was also a sense that they had some unfinished business down south, and Miles allowed for the possibility of another crack at the Horn if the opportunity appeared. So they sailed west, offshore, to clear the southerly wind and northerly current that tore up the coast of Chile. And they found another storm. This time, they let Tzu Hang lie a-hull – that is, all the sails down and the tiller lashed to keep her bow up into the wind. It was a technique that they had used many times previously, but not in the Southern Ocean.

After ten hours of riding out the worst of the storm, the boat was hit by another monster wave and rolled – this time on its beam ends, tumbling through a full circle with both the Smeeton’s down below. Despite the stove breaking free and being thrown around the cabin, neither of them was badly hurt in the carnage. And so, a year after their first crushing defeat by the Southern Ocean, they found themselves in remarkably similar circumstances – a little further north, but a lot closer to the coast.

The radio, chronometer and barometer were all gone, and so they had much less in the way of navigation aids. Otherwise, the damage was not as bad, the new deckhouse – built by John Guzzwell in Chile - was cracked and crushed, but still in place, and a stump remained of the mizzen, along with the rudder. Their new dinghy, which they had never even used, was gone, but at least the cat seemed a little less disgusted than the first time. They built another jury rig, and once again turned back to the north. This time they were insured, and used the favourable wind and current to reach Valparaiso, from where the Tzu Hang was shipped back to England to be repaired.

When it was all done, Miles Smeeton described the encounters with the rogue waves in his book, and then put himself at odds with received wisdom when he concluded that there are some waves that a yacht is simply not going to survive – ‘whatever she does’. These days, such an opinion is mainstream, but prior to the Tzu Hang’s experiences, yachtsmen had believed that a well-sailed, well-founded yacht was safe in any deep water sea. They were wrong. There are rogue waves out there that don’t seem to belong to any ocean or storm, monstrous waves created by some unknown collusion of the elements. By that story will have to wait for another day…


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A New Theme and Michel Desjoyeaux

It’s been a busy summer getting ready for the Volvo Ocean Race (and have we got some cool stuff coming for you in the Race Data Centre), but here I am, finally, back on the blog…

Sadly, nothing that’s happened since I wrote the last Cup report has convinced me that the AC’s immediate future is any brighter than the interior lighting of a New York Court room. So, I’ve been casting around for a new theme, and I think I’ve found one – it’s time to pull up a stool, crack open a beer and tell a few stories…

There are so many good tales that will never make a book of their own, often about people that will never make headlines, but who, when their moment came, were more than up to the challenge. Together, these stories form the mythical backdrop to the world of sailing – for Gordon Banks’ save from a Pele header in the 1970 World Cup, read Cam Lewis and Bruno Peyron’s 1993 rounding of the Horn.


These stories are the new theme for this blog - I’ll be trying to dig out a few contributions (stand up, Jerry Kirby) over the next ten months, going around the world with the Volvo Ocean Race. I’m after stories as told and as remembered - be it badly, inaccurately (and preferably not libelously) but, I hope, entertainingly. Remember – never spoil a good tale with the truth…

In the meantime, I’m going to kick if off with a few personal favourites. And the first one demonstrates very sweetly that this round the world racing thing isn’t just about who’s got the biggest cojones on a black night in the Southern Ocean. I originally heard it when I was writing daily reports on the 2000-01 Vendee Globe for a website called madforsailing.com – now The Daily Sail. And this is how I remember it…

That Vendee was the race that made Ellen MacArthur famous. It would have been hard to believe if you’d read the British headlines at the time, but she didn’t actually win. She came second behind a yacht called PRB, sailed by Frenchman Michel Desjoyeaux, also known as Le Professeur for his analytical, intelligent approach to the sport. But it was a close run thing, and it was never closer than on the approach to Cape Horn, when PRB reported that the starter motor on the Professor’s generator had given out.

As you may (or may not) know, the generator is absolutely essential aboard these boats, as they don’t carry enough water to complete the voyage. Instead, they carry a desalinator to make the water as they go along. These machines are run off the electrical power in the batteries, and the batteries are charged by the generator or engine. No generator or engine means no water, and since pretty much all the food on board is freeze dried and needs to be rehydrated, nothing to eat either. And that’s before we’ve got started on all the other systems that go down when there’s no power on the boat – navigation, communication, lights... although the toilet should still work.

And the Vendee is non-stop, no assistance – for Desjoyeaux, a stop at Cape Horn for spares meant that he was out of the race, handing our Ellen (or l'anglais, depending on your viewpoint) the lead. As the hours ticked by, Desjoyeaux and his support team ashore racked their brains for a way to repair the motor with what was onboard. The boat held north, heading for Chile and retirement, while everyone watching (via the internet) held their breath.

Then, PRB dived south towards the Horn - alone in the Southern Ocean, Le Professeur had worked a fix. How did he do it? It was breathtaking in its ingenuity. Desjoyeaux had a hand crank for his generator, at first glance useless, because he wasn’t strong enough to turn the engine over… but there are other sources of power aboard a sail boat.

Desjoyeaux had set PRB up on a beam reach, then pulled the mainsail in as hard as possible, making it fast with the sail ridiculously over-sheeted on the centreline of the boat. He then guided the rest of the mainsheet down below, through a series of blocks, until he could wrap it around a drum fastened to the hand crank on the starter motor. The set up was just like the starting cord on a manual outboard engine, or petrol lawn mower.

With everything in place, Desjoyeaux climbed back on deck and, warily I suspect, let the mainsheet go. The load on the over-sheeted sail pushed it out at huge speed, hauling the mainsheet through the blocks all the way back to where it was wrapped around the hand crank on the starter motor, spinning the drum and… Bingo. One engine, running – this was creative genius on the level of the guitar riff out of the instrumental in Led Zep’s Whole Lotta Love. And it saved the race for Michel Desjoyeaux.


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Over It…

A fair bit of water has flowed past the becalmed America’s Cup since my last post, a few weeks back. Alinghi's skipper Brad Butterworth had a go at Team New Zealand's Grant Dalton, but Dalts refused to bite.

Alinghi’s head honcho, Ernesto Bertarelli, went to Valencia looking to cut a deal for the venue of the 2009 America’s Cup match, even though Justice Cahn of the New York State Supreme Court (in whose hands the matter rests) has still to decide the date.

BMW Oracle announced officially what we’ve all known for a long time - that they are building a boat for the Deed of Gift match. And Alinghi followed up with an announcement that it’s going to take fifteen months to build their boat for a race that Justice Cahn may well schedule for this October. Perhaps they started ten months ago, and perhaps they didn't...

There was another predictable legal volte-face from Alinghi, when they returned to the courts in their efforts to stave off the Deed of Gift race until they have a boat ready for it – Noah should be so lucky as to have had recourse to the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division.

Fortunately, the inestimable Cory Friedman was there to make sense of it all in Part 21 and Part 22 of his Scuttlebutt oeuvre. Or not, depending on how you good you are at following tediously complex legal cases. I think his conclusion was that it's about to start raining on Alinghi's parade, and they need a little more Old Testament sense of urgency when it comes to boat building.

To all of which, my response was… yeah, well, yada, yada, whatever…

So it’s been hard to summon the enthusiasm to write something that might be worth reading. But eventually, guilt and/or a misguided protestant work ethic kicked in and I sat down to have a quick scout around the usual suspects on the interweb, to see if there was anything I'd missed. But when I turned up at the ever reliable Mariantic, I found this…

Mariantic is taking a break. Thanks for your support. More later.

I thought… maybe I’m not the only one with Cup fatigue.

And then I thought… what a great idea.

Enough already.

I have no fear for the future of the Cup. George Schuyler’s Deed of Gift and the desires that it inspires have always proven to be bigger than the shabby behaviour (and there’s a long, long history of it) that those very same desires can provoke. It’s the nature of the thing - the peaks of Fremantle’s liquid Himalayas were followed by the troughs in the swells of San Diego's 1988 mismatch - boom and bust, recession and bubble…

The Cup will get back on the water and put this shambles behind it, and that’ll be a good time to start taking an interest again. But I don’t need to follow every memo, motion, argument, appeal, order, stay, toll and cross-motion in the meantime, not least because Cory Friedman is doing a vastly superior job of it.

But also because I can see a whole lot more golf in that particular hole - given the attitude of the protagonists - and frankly, I’d rather write about sail boat racing, or travel, or just about anything other than two or three (four, five?) more years of arcane legal procedures in a New York court, accompanied by Alice in Wonderland press releases and briefly interrupted by three days of (albeit spectacular) but very one sided yacht racing.

So this blog will be back with a new brief, just as soon as I’ve figured it out. And if nothing inspires before then, the Volvo Ocean Race is coming up at the end of the northern summer, and that is going to be worth watching.

In the meantime, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

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Another Busy Week Going Nowhere…

Everyone who had no idea what a Tolling Agreement was until this week raise their hands. I guess that’s most of us. Since we left our sailing soap opera with a post last Friday, Tolling Agreements have gone from a dinky little new phrase to chuck around in the pub, to being central to any likely settlement of the future of the America’s Cup.

A Tolling Agreement, it turns out (I’ve been reading Cory Friedman Part 19…), is the legal way of stopping the clock on an event (building a nuclear plant, flooding a valley to build a hydro-electric dam, running the America’s Cup… all the normal stuff) while the legal action proceeds to a conclusion. Such an agreement was suggested by Justice Cahn way back in September last year, at the first hearing in the New York State Supreme Court. Both the Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC) and the Societe Nautique de Geneve (SNG) were in general agreement on the idea at the time – GGYC apparently even did the subsequent paperwork and signed an offer that... SNG rejected. So nothing exists in print, and as we all know, a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

Or maybe not…

The parties met before Justice Cahn on Wednesday, April 2nd, to try and settle the matter of the date of the 33rd America’s Cup match. And the account of that hearing forms Part 20 of Cory Friedman’s opus (odds on Cory laying down Part 60 around this time next year?). It does seem from reading this that GGYC have turned the straight-forward absence of a tolling agreement into a dog’s dinner of an argument about why the match should be in October 2008. The only motive for this that I can think of - rather than going for the jugular and insisting on a match according to the original challenge dates of July 2008 - is that they won’t be ready by then either. As to the rest of what went on at the hearing… Read Friedman’s account.

At the end of it all, Justice Cahn decided that he couldn’t decide at the hearing, and I’m not surprised, given the plethora of arguments and rationales for the various dates/hemispheres. There’s a rumour going round that he will issue a judgement in a week or two, but whether that gets us any closer to the 33rd America’s Cup (never mind the 34th) remains to be seen. There is still plenty of legal golf left in this hole. SNG can still drag the whole damn thing down to the Appellate Division although, as in 1988, that may not stop the Defender having to sail a match in the meantime. But the venue of that match, the rules that apply to it, the legality of the Challenger’s boat could all still be the subject of further court action… This is getting old isn't it?

If you want to read the reactions of either Alinghi or GGYC/BMW Oracle to all this, click on the links. But frankly, you’ve got better things to do, like... oh, you know... going sailing?

Meanwhile, the sailing team training that we reported on last week proceeded less than smoothly for Alinghi, who managed to flip Alain Gautier’s trimaran, Foncia, over in the Atlantic. The sound of hollow, Schadenfreudean chortling echoed around the world (discreetly - as two of the guys were airlifted ashore to hospital – no serious damage). But Alinghi fronted up with a decent press release (this one is worth reading), in which Ed Baird talked through the capsize, which happened while they were bearing away. Thierry Martinez was there to record the event in glowing colour.

If I were a crueller man, I would have found a picture of Ed standing on the upturned hull of Foncia and captioned it… ISAF Sailor of the Year. Then I’d have found a picture of Rohan Veal going Mach Ten in his foiler Moth and… And you can guess the rest, but it’s a way cheap shot. None of this is Ed's fault. As far as I know.

BMW Oracle Racing were having a more successful time of it, training on Groupama 2 with Franck Cammas. The Groupama website told us that Russell Coutts, John Kostecki and Jimmy Spithill had all been sailing with Cammas' and some of his crew. They kept it upright, and will move onto match racing in 60 foot multihulls next week…

Times are less entertaining for all those other teams that announced their planned participation in America’s Cup XXXIII way back in the halcyon days of last summer. The sound of slamming doors and keys turning can be heard all over Valencia. There are rumours of another round of retrenchment at one of the teams, while United Internet Team Germany shutdown on schedule on the 31st March with the somewhat mixed message that they plan to… ‘continue its previous, trustful and successful work in the 34th America's Cup on a basis of a new protocol / rule’. While simultaneously… ‘The contracts of all team members are discontinued and the base in Valencia will be closed for the time being after March 31 2008.’

This is presumably the death of the circuit of regattas proposed for this summer (in the old version five boats) that the German management had been working hard on. You can draw a couple of conclusions from this: if it doesn’t have official America’s Cup racing stamped on it, sponsors aren’t interested. In which case you can forget all those ideas about telling Alinghi they can keep the trophy and starting up the Louis Vuitton Cup instead. Or maybe this credit crunch thing is making life a little tough for the sponsorship hunters right now. In which case, perhaps it’s good that we’ve got an excuse to keep everyone off the water for a couple of years (decades?) till the good times roll again…

Meanwhile, the sailing teams are sticking together as much as they can, we’ve previously mentioned that the core Team Germany squad will be racing the TP52 Platoon (renamed Platoon powered by Team Germany). And on Wednesday, Valencia Sailing reported a press conference at Desafio Espanol, where they announced that they too would be sailing TP52s, along with a GP42 campaign this year. If there isn't some light at the end of the Cup tunnel soon, where might these teams turn next for some action?

And it seems that on the same day that CNEV’s (remember them, they used to be Desafio's yacht club and the Challenger of Record) lawyer was apparently up before Justice Cahn, Desafio were also announcing that they will now be representing Bilbao’s Real Club Maritimo del Abra. There is a lot more on this if you follow the Valencia Sailing link.

But that’s plenty enough for me…

www.markchisnell.com

Mark Chisnell ©

Groundhog Day

Out of court, and straight back into court, sounds familiar, right? Ernesto Bertarelli’s promise to get the America’s Cup show back on the water turned out to be about as reliable as England’s so-called ‘golden generation’ were on Wednesday night… No, sorry, that’s not a good metaphor; the over-paid, over-rated bling merchants are reliably awful.

The week started with another exchange of volleys in the press release/letter war. You may recall that when we left things just over a week ago the warring factions were primarily engaged in a skirmish over the date of the Cup match – July 2008 (as specified in the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s (GGYC) original Deed of Gift Challenge), October 2008 (the date GGYC say they subsequently agreed to with Societe Nautique de Geneve (SNG) last November) and July 2009 (the date that SNG are claiming for the match).

After that story was posted, things really livened up, with a flurry of letters, claims and counter-claims. There might have been a time when I’d have sifted through these, and summarized each missive with a link… though I prefer to think not. Anyway, now I have a life. If you don’t, you can find them all in the usual places – the GGYC and Alinghi websites.

When you stick it on high heat for a while, all these words boil down to the usual: both sides blame each other for the current impasse, and neither will shift from their position.

They eventually got the opportunity to tell each other this in person, with a meeting on Wednesday 26th March in Geneva. The outcome was soooo predictable… Alinghi’s press release was entitled - SNG frustrated with meeting outcome. Oh really? I never would have guessed. GGYC were more guarded, but it made no difference. Alinghi followed up in short order with an announcement that they were returning to Justice Cahn and the New York State Supreme court for a decision on the date of the Deed of Gift Match. Alinghi posted their letter to Justice Cahn for us all to read, and GGYC followed up with their own legal response.

Again, cutting to the chase, Alinghi’s case is all about the idea that the 10-month notice period stipulated in the Deed of Gift is suspended (or 'tolled' as Alinghi call it) by the legal action – as they claim GGYC have already agreed to, and GGYC vehemently deny (this is a good BYM News interview with Tom Ehman). I could harp on about this legal stuff, but frankly, Cory Friedman will do a better job on Scuttlebutt when he posts his latest missive on the opposing arguments on Monday 31st March…

Meanwhile, the good Justice (who would be well on the way to winning ISAF’s World Sailor of the Year if it wasn’t for the fact that our august governing body have given every appearance of siding with Alinghi) hasn’t wasted any time, and he’s set a date for the court hearing of Wednesday April 2nd - after which, we can all tune our sets to stand-by again (or switch them off, if you’re carbon neutrally inclined) until Justice Cahn pronounces.

Then what happens…?

My money has it that the court is more likely to set a date of July 2008 than July 2009 and if that happens SNG/Alinghi are in a whole world of hurt. Expect the toys to come hurtling out of the pram and Alinghi to either return the whole thing to the court with an appeal, or less likely but more entertainingly, try something like the forfeit/rechallenge strategy I outlined in the last post.

The October 2008 date is the more interesting, as Alinghi could make this one – whatever they may claim. They have time to build a boat even if they start now, never mind if, as Tom Ehman points out in the above interview and one of the GGYC’s many press releases of the last week, they started back in December ’07 (they have signed up Alain Gautier for multi-hull training).

So this one could go either way, SNG can still play the venue card – they get to decide whether the race is in 5 knots off the Island of Capri, or 25 knots of the island of Oahu (the word on the Valencian street is that the Oracle camp is fully packed and containerised and ready to go anywhere in the world). Not to mention that SNG/Alinghi can choose the rules (How about... no boat shall be penalized for a collision... take that one and ram it into your lightweight multi-hull, Larry). Alinghi might just decide that they really aren’t getting any joy from the court, and return to what they’ve demonstrated they are good at – winning tough yacht races. Or they might not.

And if it’s July 2009, I don’t think we’ll be hearing much from Alinghi except for the crowing. And although GGYC might make a fuss about being hard done by, if the rules and venue are something they can live with, I suspect they will also accept the date. They still have a headstart, and there’s nothing to stop them maintaining it by building a second multi-hull, based on the lessons they learn from the first. In fact, given that Alinghi’s Protocol limitations on two-boat testing won’t be applying to this regatta, they could conceivably crank up a full two boat programme between now and then, and wouldn’t that be fun to be a part of…

The other possibility is that Alinghi swaps horses mid-race and offers a multi-challenge event for 2011 (or even 2009) under the compromise Protocol (proposed by GGYC and backed by the other challengers) that they, SNG/Alinghi, had previously turned down last autumn. This one would really put the cat amongst the pigeons back at Oracle Towers.

Whatever their motives when they issued their Deed of Gift challenge back in July last year, I doubt that Oracle believed that Alinghi would so comprehensively sail themselves downwind into a narrow creek with a square rigger. But they have, and right now, Oracle have a hand on the prize. They are one court judgement away from going into a Cup match with a serious jump on their opponents. Would you give that up if you had the opportunity – even if, when you started out, you just wanted a fairer deal for the Challengers in a multi-team event? I didn’t think so… but that call ain't gonna make you look good.

And finally, there’s a peach of an article by Vincenzo Onorato on the Mascalzone Latino website, where Vincenzo gives it to Alinghi with both barrels, loaded with number ten shot (you don’t want to break the glass - I’ve been reading No Country for Old Men).

The story finishes by looking forward to a day where the 33rd Match is all over, and Oracle have won – clearly a glass-half-full kind of guy - but the ideas are rock solid:

If possible, get Louis Vuitton back on board – they define the event, as much as the name America’s Cup, and their presence will reassure other sponsors.

Use the old boats and limit new hull builds to one – there’s a need to cut costs at a time when all the teams are struggling for sponsors and cash. (And personally, I doubt the credit crunch/US recession is going to improve matters for anyone anytime soon.)

Race as soon as possible – like, you know, 2009.

You can’t argue with any of that – roll on the day…

And don’t worry, Vincenzo, we haven’t forgotten why this all kicked off in the first place.

www.markchisnell.com

Mark Chisnell ©

Laying Down the Law…

Justice Cahn has spoken… on the 17th March 2008, the New York State Supreme Court ruled in favour of BMW Oracle and the Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC), pushing aside the efforts of Alinghi and the Societe Nautique de Geneve (SNG) to overturn the 27th November 2007 judgement. If you haven’t been paying attention that was the one about the Club Náutico Español de Vela (CNEV) not being a proper Challenger of Record, substituting the GGYC in their place. So the judge read the wedge of ‘Keel Yacht’ papers provided by SNG, and dumped them in the trash where they belonged…

So much for the headlines, the detail is murkier, our gold standard in these legal matters has been Cory Friedman, writing in Scuttlebutt, and his latest take on the affair (Part 18, god help us...) makes it clear that he isn’t clear if this latest judgement is an actual court order, or not. If it is, then the you-have-30-days-to-appeal clock starts ticking. If it isn’t, then we’re still waiting for the order that has been pending since the end of November.

Still, that might not matter - Alinghi have declared that they won’t appeal in a statement posted on their website. But then, they said that before and then changed their minds, only to apparently change them back again.

Just as critical a part of the equation going forward is the date in Alinghi’s announcement – they are saying that they look forward to a Deed of Gift match with the GGYC in July 2009. But we know Oracle have in mind a date rather earlier – October 2008. In a phone call to Cory Friedman, quoted in the Scuttlebutt article, Ernesto Bertarelli tells our hero that…

‘SNG would not be ready to race in October 2008 if that turns out to be the date. He (Bertarelli) further confirmed that, if pressed to race in October 2008, SNG will forfeit.’

Friedman’s next action was to call GGYC and talk to Tom Ehman – who reckoned that as Challenger, they have the right to choose the match date and if SNG doesn’t like October 2008, then it’s up to them to do something about it. A later story in The Times online had a further explanation from Ehman on how the October date has been arrived at:

‘The Deed of Gift says that the Challenger chooses the date and must give ten months’ Notice of Challenge. So we challenged last July. We gave them not ten months, we gave them 12 months’ notice and chose dates in July 2008.

‘In December, after Justice Cahn’s ruling, we agreed with their attorneys then - they have since been excused by Alinghi - that we would race in October [2008]. So we gave them another 11 months’ notice from Justice Cahn’s decision and a total of 16 months’ notice [from the original challenge], and now they want two years’ notice. As far as we are concerned it is in October, we won’t go back now. Even though Justice Cahn makes it quite clear that the match could be in July [2008], we stand by our agreement.’

Are we headed back to court on this one? Justice Cahn has told them both that if they can’t agree a date for the match, then they can come back to him for a ruling, or use an independent neutral arbitrator.

So this looks like the next front in the battle, but I’d been reading the whole Keel Yacht affair as part of that same rearguard action on the part of Alinghi: namely, using the courts to stall because they had started the multi-hull design and build process after Oracle and were playing for time to catch up.

On the face of it, it’s hard to see how SNG are going to bring about a Cup match in 2009 without using the court to further this same strategy. But when you read the order, you can see how Alinghi might have decided that the legal route was not getting them anywhere – despite two sets of extremely expensive lawyers.

So their next move has been to send a letter to the GGYC, which is posted on their website, to explain why they think that the earliest date a match could happen would be 1st May 2009. This argument is largely based on the idea that the ten month notice period is interrupted by the litigation. This notion is discussed in Justice Cahn’s decision where he states, ‘Contrary to SNG’s assertion, that the parties wound up entangled on legal proceedings, which “interrupted” the 10-month period, does not invalidate the Notice of Challenge’.

Although Justice Cahn is not expressly dismissing the idea of an interruption to the 10-month notice period, given those quotations marks I’m not sure I’d want to be stepping up in front of him and trying to argue its validity in order to postpone the event to 2009…

So… perhaps… Bertarelli’s declaration that Alinghi would forfeit the Cup rather than be forced to race in October 2008 is the first shot in a new gambit – calling the court and Oracle’s bluff. Would Larry Ellison accept the Cup as a forfeit, and collect the opprobrium of the world along with it?

And there’s another angle here (since we seem to have started a game of what if...), which is that the time and place of the forfeit would presumably be at Ernesto Bertarelli’s choosing, by delivering a letter to that end to the GGYC - no prizes for guessing what might well be delivered a couple of seconds later… no, not a pizza… another Deed of Gift challenge for the next America’s Cup.

Once SNG’s challenge was placed with the newly minted Cup holders (by forfeit) at the GGYC (for the summer of 2009, presumably), they would have to accept it. The circle would be complete and the rest of the challengers would be just as locked out as they are now… And the Deed of Gift match goes back to July 2009 anyway.

This idea has some traction (hey, I’m speculating, but who isn’t?), given how hard it is to tune in a picture of Bertarelli just handing the Cup back… It might be the best leverage he has for getting the Deed of Gift match when he wants it – and short of having a representative of the GGYC’s preferred Challenger of Record accommodated in the entrance hall at the San Francisco yacht club 24/7 to shadow all arrivals of mail and couriers, I don’t see quite what Oracle can do to counter this play…

There are various responses to all this posted around the net, if you haven’t caught up with them yet, then Dalts response for Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) is on their website, and the K Challenge reaction is on BYM News…

Meanwhile, sailing preparations continue unabated at BMW Oracle. It looks like the latest to sign up to the Coutts juggernaut are former ETNZ sail designer, Robert Hook, and Craig Phillips. Phillips has long been Hooky’s right-hand man, joining him at OneWorld in 2003, and then moving to ETNZ for the 2007 Cup - I can’t remember any further back than that…

The rest of the BMW Oracle sailing team were also announced this week, along with a training programme that spans Extreme 40s to TP52s. Joining Coutts at the back of the boat are John Kostecki (tactician), Jimmy Spithill (helmsman), Hamish Pepper (strategist) and Michele Ivaldi (navigator). There are plenty of names from the 2007 Oracle sailing roster, but there are more from the old Luna Rossa sailing team that Spithill led to a Louis Vuitton semi-final in 2007. What there aren't are any multi-hull specialists - these guys all have America's Cup stamped through them like rock... check out the recently resuscitated BMW Oracle website (bring back the BOB!) for the full list.

Also away from the courts, Team Shosholoza has been forced to deny reports that it’s folded (just like most of the world’s investment banks then). The head honcho, Captain Salvatore Sarno commented that they still had staff at the base in Valencia and, ‘In South Africa, our naval architect Alex Simonis and his team is working on our new AC 90 campaign yacht. We are going ahead even though the rules and dimensions might change.’

And there was a Paris presentation by Marc Pajot, head of the new French America’s Cup challenge, French Spirit. I think (it’s all in French) that Pajot announced that he will be joined by Philippe Presti as skipper and Bertrand Pacé as helmsman – a pretty tidy starting line-up. Presti was the back-up helmsman with Luna Rossa in 2007, and Pace is a former ISAF number one ranked match racer. This is of course for the 34th Cup, as the 33rd will be invites only to Oracle and Alinghi…

www.markchisnell.com

Mark Chisnell ©

Cup, what Cup?

I’ve just checked the date on my last blog post, and it was six weeks ago. But I guess that’s about the level of attention that the America’s Cup deserves right now - just the occasional glance over the shoulder towards the court room… yup, still there, bickering away…

BBC correspondent Robert Peston has just written a book (Who Runs Britain?) on the rise and rise of the super rich, the market failings that have allowed this to happen and the distorting impact that it has had on British society and the economy - hey, Robert, over here, you missed a bit…

It’s a shame we don’t have the collective will to start Rule 69 proceedings, chuck a couple of people out of the sport for five years and see how the dust settles on that. In fact, if Team New Zealand wanted to go down the legal route, it might have been just as profitable to turn up at the next Farr 40 regatta and slap a Rule 69 report on the desk of the protest committee. The rule is ambiguous - as far as I can see - on whether bringing the sport into disrepute has to be done at the actual regatta in question…

But hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself - back at the ranch house the court room affairs have (as always) been best reported by Cory Friedman for Scuttlebutt, and there have been four additions to the oeuvre since we last posted – someone is sticking with it, at least...

Part 14 was on the January 23rd hearing in the New York State Supreme Court before the venerable Justice Cahn. Nothing much happened, except the Société Nautique de Genève's (SNG) new lawyer, Barry Ostrager, managed to obfuscate and stall sufficiently that the GGYC team couldn’t get the killer blow in. Come back later.

And so they did, on January 28th, when the hearing was covered in Friedman’s Part 15. This was mostly about the whole ‘Keel Yacht’ issue that SNG are using to try and establish that the Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC) challenge is invalid. Friedman covers where the issue came from (the words were copied from the 1987 Kiwi challenge that led the Cup into court last time), and why it threatens GGYC when they are so close to getting a ten count on SNG…

Personally, like Friedman, I think the use of ‘keel yacht’ in the challenge paperwork is irrelevant and have said so before – GGYC provided the dimensions in their challenge, and SNG can sail what the hell they like anyway, as evidenced by the court’s decision in 1988. In that case, the court allowed San Diego’s multihull to race against New Zealand’s monohull behemoth. But whether or not this judge, Justice Cahn, will see it that way once he’s waded through the blizzard of paperwork that SNG have presented to murk up the case remains to be seen.

GGYC finally got around to making this fundamental point in a letter to the Judge, sent after the January 28th hearing. It was the subject of Freidman’s Part 16 which finished with a nice summary of the state of affairs that still pertains (in this court case), at this point in time:

‘GGYC argues that Justice Cahn should sign its proposed order, dated December 11, 2007 (an October 2008 match), and send the case to the Appellate Division, First Department, if SNG, as promised, appeals. SNG argues that Justice Cahn should DSQ GGYC or refer the matter to ISAF, without, however, citing any provision of the New York Civil Practice and Rules that would authorize Justice Cahn to make such a referral, or provide a mechanism to do so.’

And so, the teams continue their preparations for the DoG fight in Cats...

Not a lot else has happened in the intervening six weeks, or even in the two months since the last full update. There was talk in an Italian newspaper, Fare Vela (and reported in English here) that a race circuit might be set up for the Version 5 Cup boats, with the possible venues including Cowes, Kiel, Trieste, and Valencia, with Alinghi, United Internet Team Germany, TeamOrigin, Shosholoza, Victory Challenge, Desafìo, one of the two French Teams, Emirates Team New Zealand and one team from China all supposedly involved.

And the Brits, in the shape of the Royal Thames Yacht Club (RTYC) and Team Origin, filed a Deed of Gift Challenge with SNG. This seemed to be something of an ass-covering exercise, just in case a vacuum should open up with the judge throwing out the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s challenge (on the basis of the keel-yacht), along with the earlier first challenge from Club Nautico Espanol de Vela (CNEV) that’s been the bone of contention all along. But until both of these things happens, I don’t think we have to worry too much about this one…

Each of the putative challenging teams is responding in a different way to the circumstances. Team Germany will begin laying off its sailors at the end of the month (but they may get new contracts if they race in the proposed Version 5 series, which they seem to be prime motivators behind). That includes Sport Director, Joechen Schuemann, who must be dead pleased he left Alinghi for the German challenge. Michael Scheeren, the team’s owner, was quoted by German magazine Focus as saying, ‘A certain number of contracts, including Jochen Schuemann's, expires on March 31 and we will not be extended. We cannot continue to finance a large team without knowing more about where the America's Cup will take place in 2011.’

So Schuemann and his mates have headed off to race TP52s with Harm Muller-Spreer's Platoon. Muller-Spreer has gone from steering his own boat and racing with a few mates, to a fully cocked pseudo-Cup programme in the space of two seasons. And this quote from the Adonnante article gives you an idea of how those changes might play out in the wider TP52 class:

‘The only thing about the MedCup circuit that, honestly, bothers me is that- it is going to be very professional of course - we have to take care that is not taking off like the Formula 1 motor racing where one guy, Bernie Ecclestone, is dominating everything. The MedCup is a business for some, it is about earning money, but my feeling is that they have to ask the owners of the boats a little more, because without the owners and the teams there is no MedCup… At the end it is private owners who are pushing it forwards and these professional teams are coming forward. At the beginning it was the King of Spain, and guys like this, and you have to keep asking them as well.’

I talked about the possible impact the Cup hiatus might have on the TP52s back on January 2nd, and here’s evidence of the pressure it is putting the owners under. Watch this space.

But it’s the response of Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) to their predicament that has caused the most excitement of late. They have also been laying off staff – nearly a third of the team so far. Then, at the beginning of March, the Kiwis lodged their own set of papers with the New York Courts, in two separate cases. In the first, SNG, Team Alinghi, Ernesto Bertarelli and America's Cup Management (ACM) are all charged in the New York State Supreme Court with breach of contract in not organising an America’s Cup in 2009 – for which ETNZ claim they had a binding agreement (Justice Cahn has been assigned to this case).

And just for good measure, there’s an anti-trust case in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, against the same group, over the way they have handled organizing the Cup so far, and the pretty pass to which it has brought us all. Dalton and co want damages in excess of US$12 million - Alinghi were quick to respond and Dalton explained the background in an interview in which the - previously very pro-Alinghi and partisan - BYM website agreed that CNEV was not a valid yacht club....

Once again, Cory Friedman waded into the breach, with Part 17, and Friedman’s conclusion was… don’t hold your breath. None of this is going to get settled any time soon, and almost certainly not before the main GGYC v SNG case. If you want to know why, I’ll refer you to Part 17, 'cos I’m going to leave it right there. Hell will freeze over before we see another Cup match at this rate of progress...

But come October, there will be guys racing around the planet at Mach 3 with their ass on fire, and it’s going to be a whole lot more interesting than this - did I mention I’m going to be writing for the Volvo Ocean Race? Now that is something we can all get excited about....

www.markchisnell.com

Mark Chisnell ©

Same Old, Same Old...

The action continues unabated in the Americas Cup court case, but frankly, from the beaches of Northern Peru and the cloud forested flanks of Machu Pichu, its pretty hard to get excited about the to and fro of the legal arguments, which are no closer to being resolved. I keep thinking I should do a proper blog update, but, well, the surf is looking pretty good...

For those who want to follow the latest court wrangling, then I can point you to the ever reliable Cory Friedman, writing for Scuttlebutt...

Normal service will be resumed as soon as I return to the frozen north, but at this rate of legal progress I very much doubt there would be anything significant to report if I stayed here till the end of the southern summer...

www.markchisnell.com

Mark Chisnell ©

A DoG fight between CaTs…

It’s been sliding this way for a while, but events in the last couple of weeks confirm that the America’s Cup has slipped off the edge into a looking glass world where nothing is as it seems, or as anyone says it is…

Exhibit 1

Posted on the Alinghi website, where Tom Schnackenberg gave his views on the 90’ long barge that he (apparently) believes Oracle will be using in the Deed of Gift challenge. We talked in the last post about Alinghi’s latest legal contention to the New York State Supreme Court that the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s (GGYC) challenge is invalid. The Société Nautique de Genève (SNG)/Alinghi argument is that an error on the GGYC boat certificate forces the club to turn up with a 90 foot wide mono-hull, and that the boat would be so unseaworthy as to be unfit for the race course, thus invalidating Oracle’s challenge. Or something like that. Next thing we know, Schnackenburg appears on the Alinghi website discussing how little Rolf Vrolijk (Alinghi’s head designer) knows about the sailing barges of his Dutch homeland, and how this puts Alinghi at a disadvantage.

It’s a joke, Jim, but not as we know it.

Exhibit 2

Posted on the BYM website, a story all about how the word ‘keel yacht’ can’t be applied to a multi-hull, despite the arguments of the GGYC, posted on their website. At least, I think that’s what it’s about as my eyes started to glaze over half way down…

Then came the day in court - January 14th you will recall was the day that Justice Cahn was going to make the order from the November decision in Oracle’s favour, which would give us a date for the next America’s Cup - a race between Oracle and Alinghi under the basic definitions of the Deed of Gift. A proper DoG fight. Or is it a cat fight? I know, it’s a dog fight between cats – as I said, it’s a looking glass world.

Not much happened in court, or rather a lot happened, but it got us no closer to a decision or a date for the match.

Exhibit 3

Posted on the GGYC website - their take on the court proceedings - they were happy that the Judge would soon sign an order to enforce the November decision and were pleased with the day.

Exhibit 4

Posted on the Alinghi website - their take on the court proceedings - they were happy that Justice Cahn had decided not to issue an order and were pleased with the day.

If there is any chance of sense on this matter, it resides in the writing of Cory Friedman, who continues to follow the case affidavit by memo of law for Scuttlebutt, with Part 12 posted before the January 14th court date. So far, Friedman’s writings on the matter have been a model of clarity and precision, even for us legal laymen. But such are the arcane details of this case that even he is now struggling to make it seem straightforward. But, on your behalf, I persisted with stuff like…

‘On or after the settlement date, now effectively January 14, 2008, Justice Cahn will enter an Order. Until he does so, there is no order to affect. Indeed CPLR 2221(d)(3) mandates that a motion to reargue “shall” [mandatory] be made within 30 days after the order in question is entered and served with notice of entry.’

Now, you would think that the issuing of an order is a kind of digital, one or zero, issued or not-issued sort of event. But no, it looks like we're in a grey, statistical world of order issuing a la Schrödinger's cat, with the state of the order depending on some quantum mechanical uncertainty - which is doubtless only right and proper in this looking glass Cup.

Anyway, essentially Friedman dismisses the SNG/Alinghi case in Part 12, not least because Hamish Ross (Alinghi’s general counsel) previously swore to the court, (supported by Fred Meyer, SNG Vice commodore) that the 90 by 90 foot boat in GGYC’s challenge could only be a multi-hull. So it’s tough for them to turn around now and say it sounds like an unseaworthy mono-hull. Friedman states, if this was a trial, counsel’s next question would be, ‘Were you lying then, or are you lying now?’

It makes the whole ‘keel yacht’ (or bargegate, if you like) issue moot, and Friedman reaches the conclusion – as this blog has previously - that the whole thing is just about delaying the sailing part of the game until Alinghi can catch up with Oracle’s headstart on multi-hull design.

Remember how one of the primary reasons this whole thing kicked off in the first place was because Alinghi had introduced a new boat for the next Cup, without any prior discussion with the Challengers, and was perceived to have got an advantage in the design race by doing so?

What goes around, comes around, even in the looking glass world.

Friedman then went to court to watch events on January 14th, and came back and posted Part 13 for us afterwards. And yes, the number does seem significant, as things have moved onto another plane of complexity, with different issues now before the court. But as I understand it, it works like this…

The issue of whether GGYC is a proper challenger (based on SNG’s arguments about the invalid boat certificate – bargegate – and others) will be heard on the 23rd January.

Then, if GGYC is still the challenger after that hearing (i.e. SNG lose on the 23rd), the court hearing to sort out the order pending from the November decision in GGYC’s favour (which should tell us when the Cup match will be) will be held on the 28th January.

After that, whatever the order says, SNG will appeal it anyway, and the whole thing gets carted off to the Appellate Division, where we all 'return to go' and the only people who 'collect £200' (or the equivalent) are the lawyers, anyone still on a salary at Oracle and Alinghi, and those who scored a retainer from any of the challenging teams that still have the money to pay them.

In the meantime, Alinghi get to work on sailing cats, while officialdom in Valencia is losing patience with the whole affair (much like the rest of us) and want their port back. Given that no teams, except Oracle and Alinghi, are likely to be sailing out of their bases in the short to medium term this seems entirely reasonable.

And finally (which seems appropriate in the week that News at Ten returned to British tv screens), it appears that Barry Ostrager, SNG’s new lead counsel, was… ‘lead trial counsel for Swiss Re in the highly publicized insurance coverage dispute involving the World Trade Center tragedy, which resulted in a unanimous jury verdict in favor of Swiss Re.’

So the man that litigated and won the insurance claims from 9/11 is now spending his (doubtless incredibly expensive) time, sorting out a sailboat race…

It’s a looking glass world.

But I’ll leave you with the positive note that Friedman strikes in his final ‘graf, after pointing out that Ostrager doesn’t believe the case should be in court, and knows the kind of top class mediator’s that might just bring Bertarelli and Ellison to a resolution…

‘A change of counsel can often have a positive effect on a case. Picking up the phone is a major change. Coming in after a loss on summary judgment, new counsel has to be candid with the client about how deep the hole they are in really is, if for no reason other than self-preservation. New counsel is also free from blame for the existing situation. New counsel is thus in a much better position to advocate for a reasonable approach to settlement. Of course, first he or she has to fight like hell to claw back into the race and bank some credibility with the client. Having bested Herb Wachtell in the mammoth World Trade Center Insurance Litigation, Barry Ostrager had the clout to get this gig and has the skills and resources to litigate for a long time, if he can convince the Appellate Division to grant him a stay of the order Justice Cahn will enter. That is not by any means a gimme. He also has the clout to get it resolved. The jury is out and we shall see how it unfolds.’

We can only live in hope. And if not hope, then that bit about Ostrager being able to litigate for a long time means it might be time to start looking for something else to write about...

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Mark Chisnell ©

Retrenchment...

Hope you all enjoyed a relaxing Christmas and New Year break – because the Alinghi lawyers certainly didn’t…

The Swiss team has followed up their pre-Christmas barrage of new legal issues with an appeal posted in the New York State Supreme court on the 27th December. The latest contention is that the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s (GGYC) challenge (on behalf of Larry Ellison’s Oracle team) is invalid, because it didn’t accurately describe the challenging yacht. The court documents have been posted on the America’s Cup website, along with a press release.

The GGYC’s challenge can still be found on their website and you’ll see that it describes a keel yacht of ninety feet length and beam. As soon as everyone saw this, they thought… multi-hull. But Alinghi are arguing that this assumption is at odds with the words ‘keel yacht’ which implies a mono-hull. They reckon the GGYC challenge should go the same way as that of the Club Nautico Espanol de Vela (CNEV), because a ‘keel yacht’ or mono-hull to those dimensions would be so misshapen that it wouldn’t be fit for the race course.

This is what Lucien Masmejan, lead counsel for Alinghi’s challenging club, Société Nautique de Genève (SNG), had to say – ‘The purpose of the boat certificate is to give the Defender a precise idea of what the challenging boat will be in order to prepare its Defense. The history of the Cup has shown how important was the adequacy of the certificate with regard to the validity of the challenge… We want to make sure this is the boat they would show up with and not a multi-hull, or their challenge would deem to be invalid.’

But my reading of the recent history of the Cup would indicate the opposite – the New York State Supreme court had no problem with Dennis Connor defending in a catamaran when Michael Fay turned up in his 135 foot mono-hull in 1988. So if the defender can use whatever type of boat comes to hand, then why do the semantics of the challenger’s boat certificate matter? I suspect they don't, and I also suspect that many at Alinghi know this - as we've suggested before, they're just stalling. They need to put the date of the Cup back as far as possible to catch up with Oracle's multi-hull programme, and this is just a legal tool to that end.

Understandably, the GGYC’s response was swift, posting comments on their website the same day, ‘If these arguments were valid they would have been presented months ago,’ according to Tom Ehman, Oracle’s spokesman. ‘But unfortunately they now look like a rather desperate measure by Alinghi's new lawyers. We are confident they will be rejected by the Court.’ Most observers are giving these arguments equally short shrift – for instance, Richard Gladwell does a nice job of taking them apart in a Sail-World article, and it will be interesting to see what Justice Cahn makes of them when the parties return to court on the 14th January.

In the meantime, GGYC and Oracle then followed up their initial response with a statement from CEO Russell Coutts, two days later. It told us what most people have expected for some time – that Oracle will compete for the next America’s Cup under the basic provisions of the Deed of Gift. Coutts reckoned, ‘We had hoped to negotiate a conventional regatta under the Deed’s mutual consent provisions. But the Defender has made it clear to us and the America’s Cup community that they will not negotiate. We are now fully committed to a multi-hull event in 2008.’ Someone, somewhere started laying up carbon fibre on a bloody great multi-hull at about the same time as that announcement was posted - if they hadn't already.

If nothing else, this clears the air – it’s now a straight fight between Ellison and Bertarelli and their chosen intermediaries, both legal and sailing. But it’s obviously not good news for any of the other teams, who can no longer pretend that they are doing anything other than standing on the sidelines, watching. Sir Keith Mills at Team Origin had already announced a retrenchment back in mid-December, ‘My principal goal now is to keep TEAMORIGIN together so as to be able to compete for the America’s Cup at some time in the future. Without any certainty today as to when, where and how that will be I am reluctantly forced to slow things down and stand the team down from full operational mode.’ There are similar noises coming out of Team New Zealand, United Internet Team Germany and Desafio Espanol.

So it’s a wintry New Year for the America’s Cup community, although in reality, things aren’t that much worse than last time. There’s still every chance that there will be a multi-challenge Cup in 2011 – a four year gap, as there was between 2003 and 2007, and shorter than the endless wait between 1995 and 2000, when the Kiwis defended for the first time. But it could have been so different, and so many plans have been laid and lives altered, only for this to completely derail it all…

From the sailor’s point of view, the great thing about the Cup has always been the vast sums of money that some people are prepared to spend to win the thing. It doesn’t just mean good salaries; it means money for research and learning stuff about boats that doesn’t happen anywhere else. But the billionaire bloated budgets come at a price – the whole game is played at the whim of the owners, and every so often, something like this is going to happen.

But there is a danger that the influx of out-of-work Cup sailors into other areas of the sport – like the TP52’s for instance – might have the same impact as during the last Cup hiatus in 1988-90. There was a marked increase in professionalism in the old International Offshore Rule (IOR) boats, as the AC class of ’87 looked around for somewhere else to cut their competitive teeth. And the 1989 Admiral’s Cup turned out to be the beginning of the end for both that regatta and the IOR (guilty as charged, m’lud).

But I think things are different now – the Fremantle America’s Cup was a step change in the numbers and outlook of professional sailors. And while both the numbers and the professional standards have been growing steadily ever since then, I don’t think the 2007 Cup had a comparable, paradigm-shifting effect like the event twenty years earlier. So while you can expect to see the TP52 fleet gear up another level this summer, with Cup sailors and some teams focusing on it as an alternative outlet for their activities, hopefully the class and the sport have developed sufficiently for that to be a good thing, not a bad one.

And things are still bright-ish from the perspective of the America’s Cup spectator. I suspect a catamaran challenge is going to be well worth watching. Not for very long, mind you, but for those first few minutes of the first race, it’s going to be must-see, water-cooler entertainment of the highest order…

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Mark Chisnell ©