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Scuttlebutt Updates
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Archived NewslettersSCUTTLEBUTT 2085 - May 2, 2006Scuttlebutt is a digest of major yacht racing news, commentary, opinions, features and dock talk . . . with a North American focus.IT’S GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION . . . His role in the race diminished, his enthusiasm dampened, (Gary) Jobson was on the outside looking in, telling anyone who will listen how disgusted he is with the evolution of a (Volvo Ocean) race that was founded 32 years ago. Pervasive commercialism, and a lack of national identify for the boats, has, in his view, converted an event that should be a contest of seamanship among nations into a global hospitality tent for multinational corporations which threatens to alienate fans. "When I did the America's Cup, the name of the boat was Courageous. It wasn't Bank of America," he said. Jobson spent most of the 1990s lobbying to bring the race -- then called the Whitbread Round the World Race -- to Maryland. The first two times the Volvo race came here, Jobson was involved with its management. New leadership took over in 2002, and Jobson wasn't asked to be part of it. Now, his participation is limited to Ocean Race Chesapeake, the local organization in charge of the three-week stopover in Baltimore and Annapolis. In the Volvo Ocean Race, the nationalist element is missing. The top "Dutch" boat, ABN Amro One, has no Dutch sailors. The "American" boat, Pirates of the Caribbean, has two Americans on board -- a U.S.-born skipper and one of the crew members. Brasil 1, the only yacht carrying a national name, includes five Brazilians in the crew of 10. "I think sailing will take off if we can get back to our nationalistic roots," Jobson said. Part of the problem, he said, is that the Volvo race has become too expensive for even millionaires to bankroll. "The whole thing needs to cost less so there can be more participation," he said Race organizers say sponsoring a Volvo yacht costs $12 million to $18 million. Privately, representatives from syndicates say the racing costs much more than that, and the figure does not include elaborate client hospitality events that sponsors host at ports. Volvo Ocean Race Chief Executive Officer Glenn Bourke said his corporate bosses at Volvo are pleased with the way the race is going. He pointed out that the last race produced 15,000 press clippings. This time, there were 10,000 in the first three months of the eight-month competition. Bourke said that nationalist branding wouldn't work for the sponsors. Their priority, he said, is to get a roughly equal amount of news coverage in all media markets. An American boat, he argued, would make a big splash here but would be overshadowed in other ports. The pitch to the sponsors is that they receive global, not national, coverage. -- Excerpts from a story by Annie Linskey, The Baltimore Sun, full story: http://tinyurl.com/nvuvn A NEW KIND OF RACE Marcello Burricks is not your typical America's cup yachtsman. Raised in a rough, mixed-race township on South Africa's Cape of Good Hope peninsula, he had to prove himself as a street fighter long before he ever climbed aboard a sailboat. In his early teens, he fraternized with local gangs and got in knife fights. These days, however, he puts his strength into grinding winches and helping to trim the mainsail of a sleek, 25-m America's Cup–class racing yacht. Burricks' journey from local tough guy to élite sailor is just one of the remarkable stories to come from Africa's first-ever entry in the 154-year-old America's Cup, yachting's most prestigious — and the international sport's oldest — prize. Burricks is part of Team Shosholoza, a young, racially diverse South African crew defying the odds by taking on sailing's biggest names and deepest pockets — and scoring impressive victories. Africa's yachting tradition is limited, to put it kindly. Shosholoza lacks just about everything conventional wisdom holds that a team needs to be successful. They can't compete with the experience, technological prowess and $100 million-plus budgets of teams like U.S. entry BMW-Oracle (put together by software billionaire Larry Ellison) or some of the European entries. The team has broken a mast and collided with a whale during a training run on Cape Town's Table Bay. Lacking sponsorship, they spent their first year racing in an obsolete, secondhand Cup vessel bought on the cheap. For Burricks, sailing provided an escape from the violence of township life. "You grow up thinking that's your way of living," he says. "But if you give kids something else to do, like sailing, most will stop being naughty." Ask any kid here what he wants to do when he grows up, and he'll say he wants to sail on Shosholoza. "They've proved that they have the passion and the inspiration to take on such a tough challenge," says Alinghi's helmsman and sports director Jochen Schümann, who was in Cape Town recently to attend a Shosholoza charity auction. "It's an open question how far they will get." For many of South Africa's young sailors, blazing a trail for the next multiracial generation of sailors is victory in itself. -- Excerpts from a story by Magan Lindow, Time Europe, full story: http://tinyurl.com/g2ms6 LISTENING TO THE OWNERS Following the Boat Owner’s Forum held at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia earlier this year, the Club’s Sailing Committee and Board have been considering the issues arising with participation in the Club’s key handicap events of boats with canting keels and boats using stored power to power winches. The CYCA Sailing Committee has reviewed recent results and trends in IRC time correction factors for boats, and undertaken a comprehensive test during the recent Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race. The Committee and the Board believes that a workable new approach can now be implemented. CYCA has for some time embraced the concept of divisions in each handicap category, so that boats of similar speed may be grouped together. Divisional wins are regarded as the key achievement in the Club’s long races, more so than an overall handicap win. In the IRC handicap category, boats with movable and variable ballast have in recent years been incorporated in divisions with conventionally ballasted boats. The TCC bands for each division have not been fixed, and changed from one race to the next. For the 2006–2007 sailing season, starting with the Sydney Mooloolaba Yacht Race in July, the CYCA has announced it will introduce a new fixed division-based system that will apply to all CYCA rated events. All boats will compete in these divisions and be eligible for a divisional win. (See website for splits) At this time CYCA is not making a change with respect to boats using stored power for winches and other accessories. It is noted that the issue of stored power is being addressed by RORC and that from 1 July 2007 (in Australia) all boats using such power will receive a rating tax that will increase their handicap against a yacht not so using stored power. -- http://www.cyca.com.au DO YOU REMEMBER “THE PROVING GROUND?” Bruce Knecht, author of the best-selling book about the Sydney to Hobart Race, has a new book: “HOOKED: Pirates, Poaching and the Perfect Fish.” Part high seas adventure, part thought-provoking expose, it describes how an Australian patrol boat chased a pirate fishing vessel halfway around Antarctica, through building-size waves and an obstacle course of icebergs. It also describes how “Chilean Sea Bass” (the pirates’ target) became the fish everyone in America had to have. Tom Brokaw says: “HOOKED is a fish story, a global whodunit, a courtroom drama, and a critically important ecological message all rolled into one.” http://tinyurl.com/oaq6g MEASURING IN The measurement period has begun for the Valencia Louis Vuitton Acts, as all boats, old and new, have to pass muster with the America’s Cup Class Technical Committee before being cleared to race. Ken McAlpine, Chief Measurer for the 32nd America’s Cup says it’s just a matter of ensuring each of the boats are ready for racing, and in class before racing begins in May. “Almost all of the boats have been modified or changed since racing in Trapani last year. So to make sure we have what we think we have, we make some checks. The boats with minor modifications don’t have to go through a full measurement, but we check off some key places. For extensive modifications, the boats will be fully measured again,” he says. The measurement programme started on the 26th of April and concludes the day before the first race of the Valencia Louis Vuitton Acts 10 & 11, the 10th of May. “We have a programme where we open our doors for business and work with the teams to assign measurement slots” McAlpine says. “We spend these days going from compound to compound and working with the teams on everything from sail measurement to flotation measurements with the boat in the water.” -- America’s Cup website, full story: http://tinyurl.com/mfool GOING PUBLIC In a "going public with the Confidentials", Ken McAlpine published Monday morning 13 "Confidential Interpretations". To be in full compliance with Version 5 of the America’s Cup Class Rule, teams may ask the Measurement Committee for interpretations of the Class Rule to validate their design innovations. Generally, all questions result in "public interpretations" (which become public as soon the Measurement Committee issue them), unless the nature of question is such that by making it public a secret would be revealed. In this particular case, the ACC Rule allows teams to seek and receive "Confidential Interpretations" from the Measurement Committee, but only through March 31 of this year. Thereafter teams can only seek "Public Interpretations". The Class Rule also provides that any "Confidential Interpretations" that were issued individually to teams must be made public by the Technical Director not later that 1 May 2006. It was the same in the previous versions of the ACC Rule. In the past, however, CI's only became public just before the start of the LVC. -- Cup in Europe website, full story: http://www.cupineurope.com/NewsEN/2006/RegleNews.htm SCUTTLEBLOG: CAN’T BLINK Seems like you can’t blink these days, or you just might miss out on some new means of communicating or collecting information. Email and the web still rule, but gaining control of our information seems to be an increasing priority. Scuttlebutt has been offering the RSS feature since last year, which allows the web-version of the Scuttlebutt newsletter to be delivered to special “reader” software that collects new information from websites that have been subscribed to. A twist to the RSS subscription concept is Bloglines.com, which is a web-based reader that searches for items that you have indicated. No software to download - simply register as a new user and you can instantly begin accessing your account any time, from any computer or mobile device. One of the features of Bloglines.com is that you can have your email subscriptions go to your Bloglines.com account rather than your email client, so as to help minimize some of the email that comes to your inbox each day. Instead of the Scuttlebutt e-Newsletter going to your personal or business email account, it can now go to your Bloglines.com account. While we haven’t tried out the Mobile version of Bloglines.com that is optimized for handheld computers and cell phones, we imagine it could provide another resource for sailors to get their daily fix of Scuttlebutt, regardless of where they are. Given that RSS readers and bloglines.com are free, the growth of these ideas are only limited to whether you happened to blink at the time they found you. - Craig Leweck Details on RSS: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/rss Details on Bloglines.com: http://www.bloglines.com/about Reprinted from Scuttleblog: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/blog PRIZE WINNERS Two thousand people came together at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore Sunday night to congratulate the prize winners from leg five of the Volvo Ocean Race 2005-06. As well as presenting the top three finishers from the leg, three additional awards were also presented. Making a change from tradition, for the first time one of the prize giving awards was presented to two people who have spent very little time actually onboard a boat. The media prize, normally awarded to a crewmember for capturing a fantastic account of the sea via email or pictures, went to two people who spent very little time on boats this year. Movistar’s media team of Maria Bertrand and Javier Sobrino work tirelessly to encourage and coerce news organizations to cast the limelight on their campaign. They contentedly remain in the shadow. But their work has so far earned live television coverage of the Sanxenxo and Rio de Janeiro In-port races on TVE, a national station in Spain, led to the printing of 5,800 articles and seen their team featured 670 times on various television shows. It has amounted to a level of exposure worth €21.88million so far. “Fantastic work and invaluable to our sport,” said Gary Jobson, the emcee, as he called them to the stage to collect a cheque for $1,000. -- http://www.volvooceanrace.org MUST HAVE GEAR With the ability to keep you cool in hot situations, our Code Zero Shirts have proven to be a success. Designed to wick moisture away from the body and help keep your core body temperature regulated while you are working under the gun. Developed with maximum flexibility, style, and UV protection, it is the must-have gear of this season. Check it out at http://www.camet.com MISSION ACCOMPLISHED Very happy to report that Donna Lange landed safely in Opua, New Zealand after a 168 day non-stop solo voyage from Rhode Island. She and her 28 foot Southern Cross boat handled the journey quite well. The significance of this sailing venture might better be appreciated by comparing it to Sir Francis Chichester’s 107-day solo sail from Plymouth, England to Sidney, Australia (as the first half of his 1966-7 circumnavigation.) Donna sailed in an aged, much-repaired stock boat she called “Inspired Insanity.” Sir Francis custom-designed and custom-built a new 53-foot boat he called “Gypsy Moth IV” – to beat the100 day record set by the famous clipper ship Cutty Sark. Although the two journeys were separated by 39 years, the basic new technologies Donna used were GPS and satellite telephone. She did not have long-range radio or other electronic tools Chichester used. Donna Lange was on the water two months longer in a boat half the size of that Sir Francis used. Donna's friends are scouring sailing books, seeking information on longer, non-stop solo sailing ventures. Did she set a record of any kind? -- Will Barbeau, http://www.donnnalange.com SAILING SHORTS * After winning gold medals at last week’s French Olympic Sailing Week in Hyères, four members of the US Sailing Team continue their European campaigns. Laser Radial winner Paige Railey now travels to Austria for the ISAF World Sailing Games which start next week. Meanwhile, the Gold Medal Yngling team of Sally Barkow, Carrie Howe and Debbie Capozzi are switching from fleet racing to match racing to defend their World Match Racing Championship title in Denmark later this month. * Free online video reports of ‘Volvo Ocean Race: Life at a Jaunty Angle,’ plus the ‘Baltimore Stopover & Finish of Leg 5’ are now playing on http://www.t2p.tv * The Stanford collegiate sailing team made program history during the recent Pacific Coast Conference Championships, which are the regional qualifying regattas for the ICSA National Championship, to be held May 31-June 2 at College of Charleston, SC. The Cardinals won the Women's event April 22-23, hosted by UC Santa Barbara, then this past weekend won the Team Race event and finished second to USC in the Dinghy event, with racing hosted by the Cal Sailing Team at their home waters in Treasure Island. Photographer Glennon Stratton has two great galleries of images from the racing: Team Racing: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/photos/06/teamracepcc Dinghy: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/photos/06/dinghypcc * Klaartje Zuiderbaan (NED) upset the odds in the Calpe, Spain over the weekend, starting with a come from behind victory against World number one Claire Leroy (FRA) in the semi-final. The Dutch star then scored a 3-1 final victory over Nina Braestrup (DEN) to retain her ISAF Grade 1 International Women Match Race Criterium title. After the disappointment of the semis, Leroy came back strongly to take third place, controlling both matches in the petit final, thanks to excellent pre-starts. -- http://www.sailing.org/default.asp?ID=j6qFh`p7? * While most local Antiguans enjoyed the national holiday of May Day today, crews aboard the 194 boats competing at the Rolex Antigua Sailing Week worked hard for results. Battling tropical downpours and shifty wind - when it eventually showed up, some three hours after the scheduled 0900 daily start - the two divisions went separate ways. Division A was sent six miles offshore for windward/ leeward racing that was eventually cancelled for lack of sufficient wind and Division B for a 21-mile point-to-point tour along the coast. For results, photos and daily highlights video, visit the event's official website www.sailingweek.com * Dee Caffari has ‘extracted’ her 72-foot Aviva from the doldrums and we had found the Northeast trade winds on her attempt to become the first woman to sail solo and non-stop westwards round the world. “I had to learn what sail plan she wanted for the conditions again,” Caffari explained. “It felt good to be on the breeze and putting reefs in the mainsail again.” With 2665 still to go on this voyage that began on November 20, Caffari advanced 170 miles in the last 24 hours. ~ http://www.avivachallenge.com *With just 10 left before the Louis Vuitton races begin again, Valencia Sailing cruised inside Port America's Cup for the last time in order to check each team. You’ll enjoy the images: http://valenciasailing.blogspot.com/ WEATHER SUPPORT Experienced yachting meteorologists at Sailing Weather Services are ready to help your team succeed. Proven race weather support packages for all major North American and European events. Med TP52, Newport-Bermuda, Mac Race, etc. Exclusive high-resolution GRIB data. Complete meteorological support for competitive sailors worldwide. mailto:info@sailwx.com or http://www.sailwx.com Curmudgeon’s Comment: Sailing Weather Services is the Official Meteorologist for the 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race, and will be providing Scuttlebutt with an exclusive weather breakdown later this week for the VOR Leg 6 from Baltimore to New York City, which starts this Sunday, May 7th. LETTERS TO THE CURMUDGEON (Letters selected for publication must include the writer's name and may be edited for clarity or space - 250 words max. You only get one letter per subject, so give it your best shot and don't whine if others disagree. And please save your bashing, and personal attacks for elsewhere. For those that prefer a Forum, you can post your thoughts at the Scuttlebutt website: http://sailingscuttlebutt.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi) * From Adrian Morgan (edited to our 250-word limit): Here we go again; bleating on about the health (or ill-health, is what they actually mean) of the sport. No-one came to see the end of the Volvo Race in Baltimore; US Olympic medals are becoming scarcer, and so on. Sailing is losing ground, maybe because no one has found a way of building a dinghy that would plane under the average hamburger-raised child? Certainly, on a recent visit to Florida, the size of the average American at Newark airport was about 33 per cent bigger than those at Schipol. I was en route to the new Florida Maritime Museum where I found sailing alive and thriving, but in the hands predominantly of the over 50s (and bearded). It was a far cry from the dizzy level of round the world racing, but as a measure of health, it rated A1 for enthusiasm,. When people bemoan the ill-health of a sport it's usually because they envy other sport's 'media coverage', as if that defines the health of anything these days. It does strike as ironic that in the days when yachts were out of sight for weeks on end, and reports were scarce, the reception when they returned battered and bruised to port was proportionately huge. Maybe the answer is to ban onboard reporting altogether; let the guys race without the constant need to communicate with an increasingly apathetic audience. As for health; in a competitive world, sailing is as healthy as it deserves to be, no more no less. CURMUDGEON'S OBSERVATION “Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier'n puttin' it back.” -- Will Rogers Special thanks to Bruce Knecht, Camet Intl., and Sailing Weather Systems. |
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