The Oman Sail project is doing such a good job of promoting its young sailors that RUSSELL COUTTS dropped by recently to add his support

In 2008 Sultan Qaboos bin Said gave the green light to set up a groundbreaking initiative to reinvigorate Oman’s maritime heritage and introduce sailing to a new generation of youngsters. Eight years on, things couldn’t be going better for Oman Sail.

From its humble beginnings Oman Sail has grown into one of the Sultanate’s – and the sailing world’s – great success stories, helping more than 20,000 Omani men, women and children to discover the sport. The programme’s goal? To develop homegrown talent good enough to compete at the top of sailing, be that an Olympic Games, an America’s Cup or in a Volvo Ocean Race. It’s a mission well on the way to fulfilment, with its sailors regularly representing Oman in international regattas and top campaigns.

But Oman Sail’s beating heart is its flagship Youth Programme, getting youngsters out on the water for the first time and nurturing talented junior sailors. Four sailing schools (with three more to come) dotted round the country are abuzz with children taking their first steps in the sport or developing their racing skills. Through its Performance Pathway, Oman Sail identifies the most talented young sailors, then provides top training from expert coaches to advance high performers to a level where they are ready to be selected for the Oman National Sailing Squad.

The Youth Programme supported by Omantel has been such a success it has drawn praise from the international sailing community, including from Sir Russell Coutts himself. The five-time winner of the Auld Mug, and now CEO of the America’s Cup Event Authority, spent time watching Omani youngsters race their Optimists in Muscat during the recent Louis Vuitton AC World Series Oman.

‘Oman Sail’s Youth Programme is a wonderful initiative for these young sailors and to bring back the rich nautical heritage that Oman has,’ Sir Russell told crowds at the race village.

‘More than 20,000 young sailors have been put through the programme and that’s a fantastic achievement. I had the chance to see these junior sailors racing and I’ve got to say I was very impressed. It’s my hope that we will see one of these young sailors go forward and win an Olympic gold medal and even one day be at the helm of an America’s Cup boat. I think that would be fantastic for sailing and fantastic for the area.’

As well as encouraging development in sailing Oman Sail has helped foster industry through the building of schools and marinas and set countless Omanis on new career paths. Oman Sail’s wide programme encourages training across a range of vocations from sport instructing to building boats and cutting sails, from skippering charter boats to event management and public relations.

Oman Sail also helps showcase the country as a tourist hotspot by hosting major sporting events – its tranquil waters, stunning scenery and rich culture making it an alluring travel destination. The world’s media turned their attention on Oman last month

Main picture: our admiration for the all-round excellence of the Farr née Mumm 30 is undimmed even 18 years on. An outstanding choice for the EFG Sailing Arabia – The Tour. Sir Russell Coutts in Oman (below) doing one of the things he really does do best

for the opening round of the 2016 Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series. With the world’s best sailors flying their AC45 foilers, it was Sir Ben Ainslie’s Land Rover BAR team that emerged triumphant after two days of intense racing.

Oman Sail also recently staged a sixth edition of EFG Sailing Arabia – The Tour, the flagship sailing event of the Gulf region, while March saw the return to Muscat of the Extreme Sailing Series with its new generation of foiling GC32 catamarans.

‘I love Oman – I’ve been here twice now and it’s a great country,’ Ainslie said following his World Series victory. ‘Conditions were great for racing. There is such fantastic support for sailing too and in particular youth sailing and getting youngsters out on the water.’ One of Oman Sail’s biggest proponents is French yachting star Sidney Gavignet, who has worked closely with the national initiative for the past five years to develop offshore talent. As the skipper of MOD 70 trimaran Musandam-Oman Sail, Gavignet has helped raise Oman Sail’s profile in key markets while providing vital offshore experience to his Omani crewmembers, along the way breaking a number of major speed records.

Gavignet recently returned to Oman to defend his title in EFG Sailing Arabia – The Tour, a 730nm race in Farr 30s around the Arabian Gulf. Such is the level of development of Oman Sail’s offshore talent that Gavignet found himself going toe to toe with Omani sailors Fahad Al Hasni and Sami Al Shukaili, his protégés and members of his MOD 70 crew.

‘The Tour really is becoming a classic event in itself, there’s nothing else like it in the world right now,’ says Gavignet.

This year EFG Sailing Arabia – The Tour also saw the return of an all-women crew featuring sailors from Oman Sail’s successful Women’s Programme, launched in 2011. Led by round-the-world yachtswoman Dee Caffari as skipper, Oman Airports featured three talented young Omani women including Ibtisam Al Salmi, the Middle East’s first professional female sailor. The future for sailing in Oman, as the saying goes, is bright.

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MAARTEN VOOGD is creating not just boats but fleets with his Chinese business partners

In 2009 we were introduced to Chinese manufacturer Fareast Boats, at that time one of the main suppliers of smaller dinghies such as the Optimist and 420. As Fareast Boats already enjoyed a 30 per cent worldwide market share in this sector – 1,500 boats were built and sold in 2015 alone – they decided the time was right to branch out into other areas.

The first project we did with them was the cruiser-racer Fareast 26. That boat introduced us to some interesting building techniques that the Chinese had long regarded as standard but which elsewhere might be considered as state of the art for the sector in which we are operating. After the 26 came the Fareast 18 and within three years more than 100 of each of these boats had been sold – mainly to China but with about 10 per cent going to Europe. However, these boats are both relatively conventional, so it was difficult for Fareast to make much of an impact in the wider international market.

Fareast 31R
By the end of 2012 Fareast were asking us to think about designing a more radical raceboat, approximately 30ft long but now built to a genuine no-expense-spared specification.

Over the past 20 years we have done a fair number of boats in the 25-40ft range, all performance but not necessarily rating oriented. However, here was the chance to design something completely unencumbered by any rating considerations at all. Even subconsciously it can be challenging as a designer to avoid slowing up a boat so as not to escalate the final rating; but with the Fareast 31R we consciously worked to buck the trend and optimise everything 100 per cent towards maximum speed.

Main picture: no two ways about it, the Fareast 31R is a beast of a boat, with carbon fin bulb keel, lots of sail, a very clean shape and these innovative aero-deflectors mounted on the foredeck sheer to help to optimise fore-and-aft airflow in the foot area.
Below: the 28R is a nice clean design with an asymmetric pit plus a simple cost-efficient J/Boat-style three-winch layout. Keel fin and rudder are in carbon like the 31R but the hull and deck lay-up is now E-glass/polyester. A lift keel and detachable rudder make for easy towing. But the real killer… a fast, modern 28ft dayracer that is yours for circa US$38,000 ex-factory. No wonder that Fareast Boats have sold nearly 180 boats in just 18 months

Stability and sail area were maximised, allied with a clean modern hull shape with low wetted surface and minimum drag; our philosophy is that for general inshore racing an all-round boat is still the best solution in terms of balancing upwind and downwind capability. One-track wonders always have their day, but sometimes that day can be a long time coming.

With the Fareast 31R we created a boat that hangs in with typical 40-45 footers upwind while leaving them for dust after the weather mark. This is achieved using a moderate beam/length ratio but with very high SA/DSPL and a 66 per cent ballast ratio. So lots of power balanced mainly with mechanical stability. To preserve sailing balance when pressed there is also little change in waterplane with heel, which means hydro drag stays relatively constant. Even in light air the run off the transom is clean, leaving very little wake.

The first Fareast 31R was shipped to the Netherlands and in late 2013 we began testing the boat in earnest. We soon discovered that it had an impressive turn of speed but that initially this did not always translate into the all-round performance we were seeking. However, after some hard work we unravelled the problem, an intense process of sail design optimisation producing a dramatic step-up in performance. A learning process.

So did the Fareast 31R have potential as a new international class? Sadly the answer is no, it did not. We had to be realistic; with Fareast we had come to the market with a flat-out carbon racer, no expense spared… and we were tapping into the wrong market. But what we had achieved was a new level of worldwide awareness, helped by the Ferrari red of our first boat plus the shiny clearcoat carbon aerofoils on the forward part of the hull designed to deflect airflow positively onto the jib.

On the water the Fareast 31R was hard to miss, but a price tag of €130,000 ex-sails and ex-factory proved similarly hard to digest.

Fareast 28R
Things move fast in China nowadays and in April 2014 the yard came to us with a request for a slightly smaller version of the Fareast 31R but built in conventional materials. This became the Fareast 28R, which really can be regarded as marking the company’s breakthrough into the mainstream keelboat market.

The Fareast 28R was introduced with a bang during the China Cup in October 2014 with its own class of 16 boats, on the back of a design-to-production cycle of just six months. As of March 2016, more than 175 units had been produced and sold, of which 30 per cent have gone outside China.

So how do we explain this success? Personally, I think the boating market is going through a big transition. As people spend less time practising one specific hobby, ease of maintenance, handling and low operating costs have become of paramount importance.

What we are now creating with Fareast is by no means new, but the package is attractive. Modern performance designs, without grand prix complexity and cost but still capable of grand prix speeds. And at a very much more accessible price point than many ‘more sophisticated’ rivals. So, you’re thinking… well, the answer is US$38,000 ex-factory.

Aimed primarily at inshore racing, the big open cockpit on the Fareast 28R features a TP52-style asymmetric companionway and pit for windward-leeward courses; much better for spinnaker retrieval than using the (leaky) front hatch we had on the Fareast 31R. There is also a lifting keel and transom-hung rudder to make handling ashore and towing much easier than with a similar sized fixed-keel design.

For the Fareast 28R the carbon hull and deck of the Fareast 31R are replaced by polyester resin/E-glass construction. Keel fin and rudder are, however, still built using a carbon/epoxy lay-up. All of Fareast’s keelboat hulls are built using vacuum infusion.

Lastly, the carbon rig of the Fareast 31R is traded for a simple double-spreader aluminium mast and boom from Selden.

For the appendages and other smaller composite items Fareast make good use of the resin transfer (RTM) technique they perfected with their Optimist production, using CNC-milled aluminium tooling. The foam core for the keel and rudder is similarly milled to exact size and then inserted into the dry laminate stack. After closing the mould the resin is injected and the completed structure post-cured in an oven. Using this process high-quality identical components are produced – essential to a modern one-design product.

The Fareast 28R was awarded ISAF one-design status on 1 January 2016.

Fareast 23R
Not a company to rest on its laurels, in 2015 Fareast Boats commissioned us for the design of a new Fareast 23R, aimed to further widen the appeal of the Fareast range of fast, light and affordable offerings.

The Fareast 31R is a very technical boat that needs to be sailed with six people, while the 28R is a simpler concept, designed to be raced by a crew of five with a more friendly deck layout and a pinhead mainsail in place of the 31’s big fathead main.

The Fareast 23R sits somewhere in between these two concepts, with the overriding requirement to fit within a 2.55m beam limit for road transport – something that has posed some problems with the Fareast 28R in Europe in particular.

On the water the most obvious difference between the Fareast 28R and 23R is the loss of the permanent backstay to allow the reintroduction of a square-top mainsail. While a backstay is important for sail trim, we were keener to create an affordable club racer that sailors would still identify with larger grand prix raceboats.

Where next?
The ambitions of Fareast do not stop at the R-range of yachts. The company’s next line of boats that we are already working on is a range of high-performance cruiser-racers. The focus for these boats will be on comfortable but fast cruising plus taking in the occasional weekend regatta.

Over the past 20 years there has been an unfortunate trend for cruiser-racers to put on weight to such an extent that sailing characteristics have really suffered (a trend partly mirrored in the automotive industry). Our objective is to buck the trend with a new line of comfortable boats that also sail really well. Surely that is something worth pursuing?

Maarten Voogd, Enkhuizen

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Work in progress and the clock’s ticking. SARAH GOSLING tours the beaches of Rio

The Olympic Games is the biggest sporting event on the planet. It’s an event unlike any other in that it’s unique, compelling and evokes raw emotions. Sydney 2000 was the last time an Olympic sailing regatta was held in the heart of a city, benefiting from stunning backdrops and sailing conditions that challenged each and every sailor. The Sydney Games were spectacular.

Sixteen years on and Rio de Janeiro, with Sugarloaf Mountain, Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana Beach, will provide a picture postcard background that is unrivalled. Some tricky wind and tide conditions will also be added into the picture come competition time, which should help make for compulsive viewing… with the perfect end result being that the world’s best all-round sailors take home Olympic gold.

Rio’s water quality has obviously been hotly discussed at World Sailing and on many occasions both the organisation and in turn myself have come in for criticism on the subject… we have also been regularly misquoted. I can take criticism, but not being attributed with comments that are entirely fabricated.

During the Aquece Rio International Sailing Regatta 2015, the Olympic Test Event, sailors had no interest in talking about water quality. They were there to compete, focused on the task at hand, and were only really happy to discuss sailing and the competition.

While they are not talking about it, it is part of my responsibility as chair of the World Sailing Athletes’ Commission to ensure that all that can be done to improve the water quality is being done. I would greatly like to see an improved situation for the Rio locals themselves, but my first responsibility is towards the sailors. The Rio city government made a clear promise in their host bid document that they would indeed take comprehensive steps to resolve water quality issues, but the truth is that any improvements that have been seen have been painfully slow in being delivered.

At World Sailing’s executive committee meeting last month I visited Marina da Gloria and Flamengo Beach, two venues that the Rio 2016 Regatta will utilise. The situation is far from perfect, but the progress made since my previous visit in 2013 is staggering.

The Rio Test Event, with the 49erFX (main picture) and Nacra 17, plus the 49er the average speed of the Olympic fleet is gently rising. Meanwhile, photographers at Rio 2016 are going to be looking for one backdrop only (below)… while local boy Robert Scheidt (who actually lives on Lake Garda) will have plenty of fans urging him on to an unprecedented sixth Olympic medal

The anti-sewage ‘belt’ that is being built off the marina is due to be completed shortly, the dredging of Marina da Gloria has begun and when combined these two programmes are expected to deliver dramatic improvements in water quality within 10 days of completion.

There is little to be done around Flamengo Beach, which is a better situation – aside from installing good showers and more comprehensive hygiene facilities for the athletes. But if the locals are anything to go by, then there really seem to be few concerns at this venue – there were at least 100 people swimming there during my latest visit.

Floating objects and rubbish on the field of play, the racing areas, is a big concern to me as this could influence finishing positions. This issue will be strictly managed during the Olympic Regatta by international technical official Pedro Rodrigues; he will act as the link between the Rio 2016 sustainability manager, the State Environment Agency and the World Sailing race management team to ensure that the racing areas remain as free of debris as is possible.

I will continue to work hard to ensure that World Sailing and the IOC are together doing all that they can with the Rio 2016 organisers between now and the end of the Games so that 2016’s big event is remembered for all of the right reasons.

Athletes at the core
At the heart of the Olympic movement are the athletes, and their opinions on the big subjects are the only opinions that really count. This fact was reiterated by International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach when he introduced Agenda 2020 in 2014.

Rio 2016 gives us the opportunity to vote new members onto the IOC Athletes’ Commission and there are some great sailors who have put their names in the ring. It will then be up to the sailors competing in Rio to use their votes to confirm the next sailing representative on the IOC commission. It’s then down to that person, with the appropriate support, to work hard to protect sailing’s position within the Olympic movement.

The period of Rio 2016 is also the time that sailors will vote their peers onto World Sailing’s own Athletes’ Commission. I have been on the commission since 2012 and we are a mixture of current and recently retired Olympians. We will have five places up for election this year and it is hugely important that the sailors continue to play their part in the decision making.

Sarah Gosling, chair, Athletes’ Commission

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Paul Larsen, aka the world’s fastest sailor, finally consummates his affair with the foiling A-Class

I bought my first A-cat as a training boat for the upcoming International C-Class championships in Newport RI in 2008. I wanted to try a few ideas such as the new canting rig mechanisms as well as keep my own skills sharp ahead of the main event.

Truth is I always wanted one. I grew up sailing on Hobie cats in Victoria, Australia in the 1980s and on occasion our fleets would cross. I can still remember watching an A glide effortlessly through us upwind while we lay inboard on the tramps. A slight gust hit us both. We lifted a little while the A lifted gently onto one hull as the helm rolled out on the trapeze and then pointed the slender bows at an angle we could only dream of upwind, leaving only a very thin wake but a lasting impression.

I believe that all of us who sail, especially those who seek higher performance, have a natural affection for simple, elegant and efficient design. Long slender hulls and tall, high-aspect rigs have always been appealing to the eye. If your passion involves carving through air and water in an efficient manner then these are nice attributes to arm yourself with. The rules that define the A-Class have always led to pretty designs that tick all these boxes:

• One-person catamaran
• Length 18ft (5.49m)
• Beam 7ft 6in (2.3m)
• Sail area 150ft2 (13.94m2) inc mast
• Minimum weight 165lb (75kg)

One sail, simple and effective controls and no crew hassles. You are just left alone to enjoy the grace of the efficient shapes working their magic through fluids. That was how it was… until foiling came along.