Going offshore with Stu Bannatyne

New Zealand’s Stu Bannatyne has competed in eight Volvo Ocean Races, winning four. Stu knows offshore sailing and shares gold nuggets with Andy Rice for Yachting World:

Maximizing the benefits of your training time is one of Stu Bannatyne’s mantras. Drawing on his wealth of offshore racing experience, he likes to bring the highest level of preparation to any campaign that he’s involved with.

“One of my recent programs has been with the Volvo 70 Tschüss 2,” he says. “We ended up doing a couple of Transatlantics, a RORC Caribbean 600, a Gotland Runt, a Rolex Fastnet Race, and a few others in between.

“All of these were raced under the IRC rule. So we were looking for ways to optimize the boat’s performance under IRC, which is just a single number rating.

“One thing was to identify for each race what configuration made the most sense, and really leaning on the fact that the Volvo 70 has a very strong performance profile, both in real terms and in rating terms. As soon as the wind is over 15 knots it’s pretty competitive in all directions.” – Full report