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THE PANERAI TROPHY<br />
2014<br />
We set about this season with an absolute determined focus to win. <strong>Mariquita</strong> had come second last year, in fact she had come<br />
second in five regattas. We had to change the mindset from saying, “second is not bad” to saying “second is actually the first loser”.<br />
At the end of the 2013 season, we were ranked joint second on points but with the ‘countback’<br />
system in place, we ended up third; clearly we had some work to do if we were going to achieve<br />
our goal of winning the Panerai Big Boat Series in the Mediterranean in 2014. Moonbeam IV<br />
had pace on us. On handicap, Moonbeam III and Halloween could beat us.<br />
Tactically we felt that we had done okay in 2013, but as always in winning yacht races, it’s about<br />
minimising the number of mistakes one makes going around the course. In the general sense,<br />
there were not too many mistakes, so in short, we needed to get the boat to go faster and as we<br />
all know, “boat speed makes you a great tactician!”<br />
In retrospect, the breakthrough came in Naples, in June 2013, when we snagged the working gaff<br />
top whilst hoisting before the start. We continued with the hoist and set the topsail in the normal<br />
way as part of our pre-start manoeuvres where we check boat speed against apparent wind angle<br />
to make sure we are reaching our target numbers. As we had 40 minutes to the start sequence, we<br />
made the call to drop the topsail and to make a running repair by hand stitching the tear. When<br />
the sail was on deck I noticed that we were actually sailing faster whilst going up wind despite the<br />
reduction in sail area. There is little available research on topsails, but clearly in the circumstances<br />
encountered in Naples and therefore presumably on other occasions too, the sail was producing<br />
drag not drive.<br />
The one set of data that I could refer to from my time on board the super maxi Leopard, was the<br />
roached mainsail, where the sail cloth in the headboard area is cut completely flat. Arguably gaff<br />
rigs like <strong>Mariquita</strong> were the forerunners of today’s roached mainsails so we decided in November<br />
2013 to re-cut all of our topsails including the big jackyard by taking out the curvature and belly<br />
to flatten the sail as much as we could whilst going to windward. Also as part of our boat speed<br />
optimisation programme, we did some work on the underwater section of the hull, which involved<br />
a laborious process call ‘longboarding’, which ostensibly makes the hull more fair. We also sprayed<br />
the anti-fouling as opposed to applying it by brush or roller. I think that the effect of this, as<br />
evidenced in our training sails, was to increase our boat speed upwind by as much as half a knot,<br />
downwind by say a quarter of a knot … we were ready for the 2014 season.<br />
The real test of the Panerai series is to show consistent form across a whole season, from June in<br />
Antibes through to Cannes in September. You can’t afford to have a poor regatta. The challenge<br />
is to deal with the different wind and sea state conditions, from the high winds and big seas in<br />
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