“Starboard!” The young Optimist sailor shouted as he converged on a collision course with the tightly bunched fleets of Flying 15s at Rutland Water. No one was giving way, but not to be intimidated, the young sailor continued to assert his rights to the older sailors approaching on the opposite gybe. “Why aren’t they giving way to me?” the teenager asked himself, indignation in his inner voice.

Sometime later, all became clear as the Optimist sailor realised that he had inserted his daggerboard back to front in the case. What, you may well ask, does that have to do with the port/starboard rule? Well, quite a lot if you have the word ‘PORT’ highlighted in red on one side of the board and ‘STARBOARD’ highlighted in green on the other. Perhaps he would have been advised to have written ‘FRONT’ and ‘BACK’ on the top of the board as well.

Now, if you asked Adam May for a solution to this problem, then he would design a set of hydrofoils for your Optimist, and then you would soon know if you had put in your daggerboard back to front. Indeed Adam was responsible for creating the first foil-born Optimist last summer, a harebrained idea subsequently vindicated by his girlfriend Katherine who got the pram dinghy successfully up and foiling in Portland Harbour. A world first!

How Adam finds the time to such important design work is beyond me. In addition to being a great Moth sailor in his own right, Adam is in much demand as a coach, currently counting America’s Cup hopefuls Team Origin and reigning Olympic and World Champions in the Star, Iain Percy and Bart Simpson, among his blue-chip clients.

After the success of the foiling Optimist, this summer has seen Adam become the first to mount a wing rig on top of a foiling Moth. Ever since BMW Oracle trounced Alinghi in the America’s Cup last February, the Moth community has been speculating about when someone will apply the concept to a foiling boat. There was no one more qualified than Adam to turn such a fanciful idea into concrete reality. Here’s an excerpt from one of his posts on his excellent blog, Foilborne.

“The wing had long been discussed with regard to the Moth, and I’d always thought you couldn’t do it; we capsize the boat just to launch – a wing wouldn’t like that. It would probably be heavier, and sailing a heavy rigged Moth would not be that nice in terms of handling. But what if it did work? I been considering it for ages, and my weight spreadsheet kept me honest for a while, until I simplified it enough, and had gone into some depth with thinking about the structure. It is an interesting problem, because the design and structure are so linked.

“Post launch, I’d say I worried about the weight too much. Launching and capsize recovery was easy enough, and the effect on tacks and gybes wasn’t noticeable. The added weight up high is probably a performance gain upwind for those of us with less righting moment anyway! [this is because Moth’s sail with the rig canted over to windward]

“Design-wise it is a very simple two-element wing, with camber and rear element twist control (although I probably went too far in making it capsize safe, and the rear element is quite stiff!). Being quite weight conscious I played safe on the sizing, going a bit under area. Slightly less span because I was concerned over the centre-of-gravity height, and slightly smaller on chord because I wanted to fit it onto a standard Mach 2 Moth, and the mainsheet location imposed a few size restrictions on me. I could have done a transom mainsheet system like some use, but having used that system and capsized on the first tack, I thought it was a little punchy given how little sailing time I had available to me. It was never intended to be a fully finished product straight away. Most people thought it couldn’t be done on a Moth, (or at least was a stupid idea!), so this was a little step into the unknown.”

When Adam took the wing rig for its maiden sail, the International Moth European Championships were just days from taking place. As you read this you may well know the results already, or else you can go and find out yourself on YachtsandYachting.com. To read more about Adam’s exploits and all the crazy - and more conventional - projects that he is involved in take a look at his blog here, http://foilborne.blogspot.com


505 Worlds

The 505 used to be considered to be at the cutting edge of dinghy technology, and while new developments such as hydrofoiling and wing rigs are not the domain of this class, the Five-Oh still offers some of the most exciting and high-quality racing outside of the Olympic classes.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to write the daily race reports for the SAP 505 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark, recently. Ian Pinnell, aka Nelly, won the 2008 Worlds, and had teamed up with Ian Mitchell – the winning crew with Mark Upton-Brown in 1997 and 2006. The Brits had high hopes of being able to win this, their first 505 world championship sailing together. When I spoke to Nelly the week before the championship, he identified Germany’s Wolfgang Hunger as the biggest threat. Such was Hunger’s tactical ability that Nelly reckoned he’d have to be sailing faster to have a chance of beating him.

Disappointingly for the two Ians, Nelly’s analysis proved correct. Hunger, a two-time 470 world champion and holder of three 505 world titles, proved unstoppable in Aarhus. Crewed by a tall, fit and light Julian Kleiner, Hunger was very fast downwind and had an uncanny ability to make sense of seemingly unfathomable conditions that bore little rhyme or reason to anyone else in the 126-boat fleet.

Even Hunger found it difficult to describe what exactly it is that he does when he’s picking his way through such shifty conditions. There was one day when the breeze was blowing anything from a flat calm to force six, and swinging through 90 degrees.  In one race the Germans came from about 25th place at the leeward mark to take the lead by the next windward mark. Even Kleiner couldn’t believe it. “Wolfgang said he thought the left-hand shift was coming because of the way the boats at the back of the fleet were carrying their spinnakers,” he explained. Hunger relied on these hunches too often for anyone to be able to say that he was just lucky.  When I asked Hunger himself what it is that he does, this was the best answer it could give: “It was from watching things, the clouds, the other boats, but also from a feeling that I had, maybe an intuition.”

Pinnell and Mitchell finished in third overall, behind the Germans and behind the Bojsen-Møller brothers from Denmark. Like Hunger, Jorgen and Jacob Bojsen-Møller are now both in their 50s, but seemingly just as quick as they were in their youth. Just behind Nelly were the Americans, Howie Hamlin and Andy Zinn. Both Hamlin and the Bojsen-Møller first competed at the 505 Worlds in 1978, so the leading lights in the 505 are not exactly spring chickens. In fact of the top four, only Nelly is under 50, and even he passes that milestone next year.

However in fifth place was a 24-year-old, a female 24-year-old from Germany called Meike Schomaeker. Crewed by Holger Jess, who won three world titles with Hunger in the early Noughties,  Schomaeker’s performance is the best ever by a lady in the highly competitive 505 fleet.

My daily written stories from the event were part of a much bigger media effort that delivered blow-by-blow coverage of the racing each day. The Danish organisers had pulled together a number of different parties who all fed into the media machine, centrally controlled at the event website.  What I found most interesting about the project was that nearly all the technology  was either free or very cheap. The Danes set up some on-board live streaming camera footage from six of the competing 505s, using a bracket and mounting consisting of  items that you would probably be able to buy from a DIY store of £50 or less. The cameras themselves were just standard camera phones in Aquapacs, and the footage was live streamed using a free service on the Internet.

I could go into a lot more detail, and I should point out that there were times when this technology was frustratingly slow or inefficient. But the main point here is that new technology is making it very possible to bring live images and audio back from the water onto the Internet. It may not be to the quality of what we see with America’s Cup coverage or the TP52 circuit, but the price of this technology is tumbling while the quality is improving.

At the moment, sailing is one of hundreds of so-called minority sports that barely register with the football-obsessed TV broadcast companies. But once broadband speeds have increased tenfold from where they are now, it’s hard to see why broadcast television should continue to exist. At the point where a big flat screen in the corner of our living rooms has superfast Internet access, then the opportunities for sailing and other minority sports to reach a global fan base will be enormous. The experiment at the 505 World Championship was a small example of what might be possible in the future.