Mariquita Book - mk2.5

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