Sydney-Hobart: CBTF wins!(prediction)

For me, there are two ways of looking to sail racing: Either we accept any power help, as long as it has nothing to do directly with the propulsion, or we do not allow any power that is not coming from wind and human muscle.

You can even accept both and have two different classifications.

Personally I am all in favor of technology and all against the use of any exterior power help. Canting keels are alright, providing you can cant them with hand operated hydraulics...Should be hard, not impossible...after all, this is sailing, not a motor racing sport. I have nothing against motor sports, but racesailing should not have anything to do with engines.

 

Chris, the Sydney-Hobart organisers are totally in their rights to ban multis. The race is not and has never been an "all-comers" race. It has always been specifically for a certain type of boat - conventional monos.

The conventional monos, their owners and crews thought up the race, built up the race, run the race and populate the race. They are the ones who built it, they are the ones who determine who should come.

If the multis want to do a race, they can make their own.

The S-H isn't discriminating against multis, it's just not their race. It's almost exactly the same as the fact that the rules for the most prestigious small multi race (the C Class Little America's Cup challenges) banned tris. It's just like the fact that the Ronde Texel cat race bans windsurfers and skiffs. It's just like the fact that (IIRC) the A Class cat rules ban tris.

It's not their race! Simple as that.

Our cat club bans monos and boards; so many cat regattas. There was a query about letting skiffs into our cat club's major event - the reply was "no, it's a cat race". The cats created the race, built its history, run the thing - it's their race. Monos can do their own thing.

The monos and boards don't complain about cats having cat-only events, so why should the multis complain about not being allowed into a race that was created by another group of sailors?

If you have a great race in Hobies, I can't just demand to wander in with a Tornado and kick you all, so why should multis have rights to the S-H?

Yes the multis would be spectacular in the S-H - but the race already gets live TV etc and the numbers are not as strong as they were. Major surveys show that here, there is NOT a strong link between publicity and sponsorship, and the number of participants. The 18' skiffs prove that, because they had live TV and almost died. So you can't just say "more spectacle= more racers". Yes you can (and I would) make exactly the same argument about the supermaxis (which have been part of a time when the fleet numbers are well down on earlier eras, because the number of slower boats has dropped dramatically).

PS on canting keels - how do you control (in a swell) subtle but effective pumping of the hull and rig when it is carried out by a canting keel?

If you drop restrictions on the use of power (normally only for big boats *&^%% it) why not allow unrestricted pumping of rigs? Sure, it's against the rules - but some boardsailers, 470 sailors and Laser sailors say there's only a very gradual grey area between pumping, illegal pumping and trimming. So we could abandon those rules, and just let the keels rock, the powered winches hum.....oh what fun.

 

RULE #52 MANUAL POWER

"A boat's standing rigging, running rigging, spars and movable hull appendages shall be adjusted and operated only by manual power."

CBTF boats that use other than manual power are not legal under Rule 52. If I owned a real sailboat I would protest.

 

They changed the rule.

 

Is my prop a movable appendage?

CBTF wins motorsailng class!

Bah Humbug

I've got no problems with CBTF, just motor boats "winning" sail races.

 

Hogwash..

Like I said earlier:
"Just barely won the SH" ! what a load of hogwash! The boat cleaned the clocks of the whole fleet for line honors and overall in record time. Alfa also broke the record(I think). CBTF broke the record!!
I would never suggest you couldn't race your leadbelly and you shouldn't have the incredible presumption to say that these magnificent SAILBOATS shouldn't be allowed to race.
If Wild Oats DIDN"T have some trouble I would be surprised! It was her FIRST major ocean race for gods sake! Canting keels and particularly CBTF have a long and mostly safe record-in fact no CBTF boat has ever had a design problen with the keel to my knowledge. There were huge ,serious problems with fin keels when they were first introduced but the designers learned as they will with canting keels.
You talk in absurd doubletalk when you say "power assisted" or motor sailers" as if the engine was providing motive power which it most
certainly isn't. It's pitiful that in your dislike for the new technology you have to use such silly tags for some of the most magnificent sailing machines ever to touch water. It's pitiful that you feel the need to denigrate the accomplishment of a huge team of dedicated people from Bill Burns,Alberto Calderon, Charles Robinson,Matt Brown and the other guys at CBTFco, to Jim Pugh and John Reichel at Reichel-Pugh, the builders at McConnaghy's and the crew on the boat.Some of these people have worked for over 25 years to achieve this goal and to try to put down the accomplishments of such a team using those ridiculous tags is disgracefull!

 

No they didn't:

51 MOVABLE BALLAST
All movable ballast shall be properly stowed, and water, dead weight
or ballast shall not be moved for the purpose of changing trim or
stability. Floorboards, bulkheads, doors, stairs and water tanks shall
be left in place and all cabin fixtures kept on board.

52 MANUAL POWER
A boat’s standing rigging, running rigging, spars and movable hull
appendages shall be adjusted and operated only by manual power.

Under the Basic 2005-2008 RRS

Rule 51 makes movable ballast to change trim or stability illegal. Canting Keels and Water Ballast are not legal systems under rule 51.

Rule 52 makes using the engine to move the ballast or make any adjustments illegal.

If these rules get changed for a race or a class any "records" that are set under the relaxed rules should not be compared to the records that were set by boats that don't need relaxed rules to sail.

Interesting that legal multihulls that don't require rule exceptions are banned in favour of boats that do.

The fact is that the RRS do not ban multihulls, but they do ban movable ballast systems.

Am I the only one that finds allowing rule breakers to hold sailing records a joke?

 

Lighten up, Doug.

 

CBTF Wins!

Barley-CBTF most certainly did win-you could see where the canters w/o CBTF or using an older form of CBTF finished.Funny, CBTFco thinks they won....
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Randy, "rule breakers " is a bad choice of terminology when you don't know what you're talking about; I only have the 2001-2004 rule book but I'm certain the new book is essentially the same:
86.1-b specifically allows the Sailing Instructions to modify the rules you refer to.
86.1 c- allows the class rules of a boat like the Schock 40 or any other class to change those same rules.

As a matter of common sense it is obvious that Wild Oats was sailing under the rules since they have been recorded as having won on the "Rolex Sydney Hobart" website.
Now aren't you remorsefull for using the term "rule breakers"?! Huh?

 

Race committees can make exceptions to canting keel boats, and these exceptions are regulated by the ISAF. If the rules hadnt been changed, then why have the CBTF boats and all the other canters been racing? They would be ineligible to race under the original rules.

 

Not to drag this out, but

When a home run is hit in baseball, was the bat responsible or the player?
The most significant factor in Oat's win was the decision to stay inshore. Yes, they had a great boat, but good sailors making good decisions won, not the foils. The fact that a small company eager to sell their technology latches on a win in one of the premier races in the world hardly makes it gospel truth. The development in the super maxis is also a factor. The new boats are clearly faster than the 2 year old ones. It is a similiar pattern to the TP52 class, where the new generation boats are markedly faster. I am not slamming the CTBF technology, it is clearly fast, but to claim that it is the overridding factor on a boats success is a major stretch.

 

How can a canting keel be legal?

I agree strongly with Rough!

I think these maxi's long ago ceased to be sailing boats...floating cheque books using diesel to gain extra boat speed. What happened to good old rule 42 below?

42 PROPULSION
42.1 Basic Rule
Except when permitted in rule 42.3 or rule 45, a boat shall compete by using only the wind and water to increase, maintain or decrease her speed. Her crew may adjust the trim of sails and hull, and perform other acts of seamanship, but shall not otherwise move their bodies to propel the boat.

 

Cbtf

CBTF technology is unquestionably fast and a central theme of the design of Wild Oats and Alpha. This was a matchup between not just crews and navigators: it was also a matchup of canting keel technologies and CBTF won hands down and with gusto.
You HAVE to consider this technology when considering the performance of movable ballast boats. CBTF has convincingly beaten waterballast and it has trounced other canting keel systems.CBTF is not just a couple of foils -it is a fully integrated system that dictates foil placement, cant angle, hull design and sail area.CBTF requires different skills to sail than even other canting keel boats-the crew has to be specially trained to use the system correctly. I guess the closest analogy would be in car racing when people say "Lotus won" or "Chevy won". It does not slam the contribution of the the crew but it is a critical element in the fact that Alpha and Oats were 1-2.

 

I would also not credit CBTF with the win, basically because they thought of the concept, but Reichel/Pugh actually designed the boat. Since R/P had designed 5(?) CBTF boats before hand, including Alfa Romeo, I seriously doubt that they needed much, if any input from CBTFco.
If you say CBTF wins, you also need to say North Sails wins, Reichel Pugh wins, Southern Spars wins, Central Coast Hydraulics and Engineering wins, Yanmar, Harken, etc.....
Basically CBTF gets $90,000 for merely approving the boat.

Also, Skandia and Konica Minolta are first generation supermaxis-so you had better hope that AR and WO are faster, or somebody messed up. As it turned out, Skandia was doing well until she ran into technical problems. She was forced to sail away from the rhumb line for 2 hours while her engine was repaired, and then it broke again later, forcing her crew to pin the keel in the center and depowered the rig slightly. Then she and Konica were forced to tack all the way up the Derwent. If she had been able to shadow Alfa, she would have finished about 1-2 hours after her, rather than 5 and half.

 

Also, Alfa Romeo did NOT break the record, she missed it by 13 minutes.