7:36 AM Wed 17 Dec 2008 GMT
Heading south in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race for the 28th time, Bruce Taylor, owner-skipper of the Reichel Pugh 40 Chutzpah, told us how new technology has changed the Sydney to Hobart.
Taylor has won his division eight times, possibly the best record of any skipper.
'Every Hobart race is vastly different. It's turning more and more into a game of chess, and the modern boats are also different and so the combination means you have a different set of pieces left on the board late in the race,' he said.
In the days of the IOR and IMS, boat performance was similar in each sort of size. Today's boats are more extreme. For example, Taylor's Chutzpah is extremely quick running and reaching, but isn't as competitive on the wind. However, ten years ago the handicap system ensured boats had a similar performance throughout the wind range.
According to Taylor, this means the weather favours a particular type of boat.
'The exception to that may be the TP52s. They seem to be good all round boats. Boats like Wot Yacht and Ragamuffin, which go well in windward leewards. They are good all round boats.
'But there are a lot of boats out there now such as ours and Wedgetail and the new Limit, I suspect will be the same. They have particular bands of wind direction in which they are almost unbeatable, but they're not all round boats. So the nature of the race is changing in that regard as well,' Taylor said.
The Chutzpah team is looking to do well this year. Preparations are going nicely, with Chutzpah winning the Stanley Race, a qualifying race for the Sydney to Hobart.
We asked Taylor what his team would be doing differently this year. He said that they'd redesigned Chutzpah's spinnakers and were using new weather predicting software, but they'd also be taking a leaf out of Nicholas Lykiardopulo's book.
'Until three or four years ago we used to be very methodical in our tactical decisions; everything we did we tried to be absolutely sure it was the right decision. I think if you look at the Hobart results, usually the boat that wins winds up doing something quite radical.
'In 2005 the Britisher Nicholas Lykiardopulo's boat Aera did something that was just absolutely left of field, yet it worked and won the race,' he said.
Satellite tracking influences actions on the race course, with boats using the position of others to inform their tactics; although it rarely turns into a match race.
'If you wind up trying to cover one boat, you invariably wind up losing out to someone else, because it's such a broad fleet, and because it's spread across such a huge area,' Taylor said.
The exception is sailing One Design boats like the Sydney 38s.
'In the Sydney 38 stuff, that was very much match racing. We'd be slamming on Lou Abrahams and they'd be slamming on us. We'd be watching them like hawks, and they'd be doing the same to us, because we felt a Sydney 38 was never going to win the race, but the objective was to win the 38 division,' Taylor said.
Tracking other boats gives their rivals an idea of what conditions to expect, which is vital in such changeable conditions.
'I think one thing people really fail to understand is how the conditions can vary so dramatically across even just 40 miles of Bass Strait. You can be abeam another boat, you're the same number of degrees south - they may be 30 miles inside of you, and suddenly they've got a spinnaker up going gangbusters and we're beating into a breeze,' Taylor observed.
Currents have a huge impact on small boats because of their slower speeds.
'When you've getting around in a three quarter tonner that does six and a half knots uphill, and does when it's flying maybe 12 knots downhill, the current makes up more than a third of your speed.
'With that sort of background we're extraordinarily conscious of current,' Taylor said.
Taylor admires the technology that is now available, but maintains that intelligent tactics and skilled sailors are just as important as good gear.
'Some of the stuff that's now available from the CSIRO is pretty amazing. The gear you can get on board where you can constantly plot speed over the ground and work your current out that 20 years ago we just dreamed of.
'You've got to keep the boats going at the optimum speed, which means you need good sailors and good gear. Tactically it's becoming a huge sort of mental game. The boats still have to be sailed to their absolute maximum performance, but the guys who win and the guys who do well are the guys who really nut out the intellectual part or it as well,' he said.
As a veteran of 28 Sydney to Hobart's, Taylor can fondly recall the days before GPS when sailors would get out of the heads and have 'no bloody idea' of their location. He remembers an incident in the '89 race where the Davidson 34 Illusion lost radio contact with the fleet.
'In '89 her radio failed, so we had no idea where she was. We wound up within 100 metres of each other at Tasman Island, and they literally had sailed down the coast, and we had sailed almost via New Zealand and had wound up in the same spot. We ended up beating them by less than 20 seconds in the end,' Taylor recalled.
These days sailors have a lot of information, so the emphasis has shifted to making the right decision on where you move your chess piece.
by Gemma Noon
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