On the 10th anniversary of the first Yacht Race Forum it’s the good burgers of Aarhus in Denmark who will play hosts to this year’s edition

The annual conference for the business of yacht racing will celebrate its 10th anniversary in November in Aarhus, Denmark. Founded in 2008, the event has steadily gained momentum since it was taken over by the Genevabased team at MaxComm Communication, led by event MC Bernard Schopfer.

In the three years since, the number of exhibitors has tripled. For a great many of those involved at the sharper end of yacht racing – opinion-formers, suppliers, sailors, organisers, sponsors, administrators – the Forum has become an important information sharing and networking opportunity in the run-up to Christmas.

The Yacht Racing Forum remains the only business-to-business conference dedicated to bringing together players from across the whole yacht racing industry and the 2017 conference will once again be populated by key personalities from within the industry worldwide.

The event will also provide the chance to discuss some of the much wider issues increasingly facing the sport. Kim Andersen, World Sailing president since November 2016, will give a keynote address with other members of the sport’s governing body contributing on a range of specialist topics.

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Growing the Sport’. The 2017 Forum will therefore focus on mainstream and popular yacht racing. ‘We’ve often received feedback that we were too elitist in the past,’ says Bernard Schopfer, CEO of the Yacht Racing Forum.

‘We have taken those comments onboard and will make a feature this November of debating issues that affect every competitive sailor, not just the pros. Having said this, we will carry on looking with great interest at the major professional events, the Volvo Ocean Race, America’s Cup, Extreme Sailing Series or World Match Racing Tour to name a few. They will all be represented by senior management in Aarhus.’

The imagery hub
Sailing cameramen and photographers are too often overlooked for the support they provide to the sport. We need them and we admire their work, but most people don’t know who they are nor have any idea how hard their job can be.

Hours waiting for the wind under blazing sunshine, exposure to waves and spray, heavy equipment to carry, endless hours in airports, nights spent editing footage and distributing pictures; it’s rarely the glamorous job of many people’s imagination.

Sailing imagery is also at the heart of the commercial development of our sport, and this is one of the reasons why the Yacht Racing Forum gives such prominence to photographers and film producers. The Forum hosts the Mirabaud Yacht Racing Image photo gallery and organises the annual prizegiving in public.

The same will, from now on, apply to the more recently created Mirabaud Sailing Video Award, with the best clips being shown to delegates while the winners are called on stage to receive their prizes.

These are the only events in the world of their kind, aimed at celebrating the best sailing images produced each year and, most importantly, celebrating those who have produced them. They are annual contests open to professionals from all over the world, as well as to sailors who today produce very fine examples of onboard video work while competing in the events themselves.

And our delegates at the Yacht Racing Forum are of course their clients: event organisers, teams, sponsors, classes… It was therefore rather logical to connect the two!

A great location
The Yacht Racing Forum 2017 will take place over 27-28 November in Aarhus. Denmark’s second biggest city is European capital of culture in 2017; a perfect and newsworthy destination located at the heart of Europe.

Aarhus is also positioning itself at the heart of the international sailing calendar. This year’s Yacht Racing Forum will take place eight months prior to the sailing world championships, where 1,600 sailors from 100 nations will be competing midway through the Tokyo Olympic cycle. Aarhus will also host a pitstop on the next Volvo Ocean Race, on the final leg between Gothenburg and The Hague.

Aarhus is served by two international airports: Aarhus and Billund. Aarhus Airport is located 44km northeast of the city with flights by numerous major carriers including British Airways, Ryanair and Scandinavian Airlines. Billund Airport is slightly further away, but bigger with international flights from Scandinavian Airlines, KLM and Air France.

Above: The Spanish 470 team of Onan/Cabrera competing in the Medal Race at the 2014 multi-class sailing world champion ship in Abu Dhabi. The next event is scheduled to be held in Aarhus – site of this year’s Yacht Race Forum – in summer 2018. Aarhus is increasingly popular as a major championship venue and is also the setting for much of the development of new tracker systems – benefiting from a strong technology industry that sees sailing as a useful local testtrack for dynamic new spectating systems for sports fans

Courtesy cars provided by Volvo will transport delegates from both airports to the Blu Radisson hotel where the conference will take place.

Two conferences, one exhibition
(and maybe even some parties)
The sailing world is changing fast and faces new issues that impact its participants as well as those involved in the sport’s organisation or finance, related to, among others things, safety and commercial development. Flying boats, rigid sails, new events, formats and courses, venues, partners and sponsors all help to shape the new face of the sport and raise questions that will be debated this year in Denmark.

The 2017 forum will be divided into four modules: Top of the Sport, Marketing & Media, A Sustainable Sport, Risk Management and Safety.

Held alongside the Forum, the one-day Design & Technology Symposium will also take place once again – on Monday 27 November – in a much bigger room than last year, when over 100 delegates crammed into an unexpectedly confined space (some new friendships were probably made as a result!) The price of fame and (another) lesson learnt.

Chaired by Seahorse contributor Dobbs Davis, the Symposium will as usual – and as its name suggests – focus on technical development and innovation. But there will be an added drive this year to extend beyond the technology to examine how to better encourage technical trickledown, to benefit the more mainstream areas of both racing and cruising.

Day one will conclude with our evening reception, as usual to be hosted in some style by North Sails.

Day two brings both symposium audiences together to focus on topics of wider interest for sailors, event organisers, yacht clubs, designers and sponsors.

Every year the forum brings together the widest range of opinion-formers from across yacht racing and the yacht racing industry. This unique event provides the chance to discuss issues and share best practice in a well-organised, international and surprisingly relaxed environment. Networking opportunities abound – one more reason why many of the sport’s most successful brands and most committed stakeholders will also be there to welcome you to Yacht Racing Forum 2017.

Click here for more information on the Yacht Race Forum »

Among the specialists who helped Armel Le Cléac’h to his Vendée Globe victory were some modest engineers working away quietly in Quimperlé…

Guelt, the mother company with its roots in the technically demanding food service industry, founded Guelt Nautic 20 years ago to apply its mature expertise in precision metalwork for applications in another challenging environment: performance sailing. The company’s skill set, which combines hightechnology engineering and design, mechanics, electrics and automation, allows it to take on a wide variety of demanding projects on all scales and in all settings.

With these skills plus a spirit of innovation, Guelt Nautic has become a regular supplier to teams in the world’s top sailing events, the Route du Rhum, Vendée Globe, Volvo, Transat Jacques Vabre and recently the America’s Cup.

Guelt’s 5,700m2 facility in Quimperlé, between the ocean racing centres of Port la Forêt and Lorient, is well established as a prized asset in the delivery of engineering focus and reactivity to many of the most successful skippers and their teams. This gives Guelt a rare opportunity to collaborate closely and frequently with many of the world’s most demanding ocean racing projects.

The Guelt team is proud to have contributed to the victory of Armel Le Cléac’h with Banque Populaire and in great performances by other French skippers in the last Vendée Globe: keel fins and bearings, bulbs, blocks, rudder bearings and other key elements were made and modified in the Guelt workshops; the company’s products could be found on most of the Imoca 60s participating in the latest event.

And straight after the Vendée finish the Guelt technicians were immediately back to work refurbishing Maître Coq’s keel as part of a big refit before the boat went to new owners Initiative Coeur.

Main picture: milling a solid lead bulb for an Imoca 60; the ‘window’ seen at right is left in place to be used to adjust the final weight in accordance with class rules on righting moment, adding lead or filler as required.
An Ultim mast bearing (below): high-grade titanium is used for the main body incorporating the multiple lashing straps to attach the necessary sheaves and fittings. The bearing ball itself is made out of very high-grade stainless steel which has the most suitable wearing properties for a ‘very’ important component – that will remain unseen for many months and often for tens of thousands of miles of high-speed sailing…

In the 35th America’s Cup Guelt Nautic worked with Groupama and skipper Franck Cammas to deliver the key parts for the critical wing control system – to allow precise and friction-free adjustment of the several different wing elements.

Most recently, a Wally superyacht owner placed his faith in Guelt expertise for the manufacture of an all-new fabricated keel to be manufactured in HLES high-strength steel – a nearly three-month project.

Among current projects are some rather large mast bases and fittings for two of the new Ultim trimarans, Gitana 17 and Banque Populaire IX.

The Ultim mast bases are made from a combination of titanium and F16PH stainless steel. The major steel element starts out as a forged block, which is first externally and then internally turned, then milled to its final shape before undergoing a surface treatment to strengthen resistance to wear and to reduce rotation friction. The associated sheave box is made in a similar manner; four to six weeks are required to manufacture a fitting of this size and sophistication.

With the shop’s capacity of 1,200 man-hours per week, working two shifts per day, the fast pace of machining activity places considerable strain on the tooling equipment, aggravated by the extreme hardness of some of the materials used.

The Guelt team’s latest challenge is to integrate ‘additive manufacturing’ for some of the most technical parts, adding more pressure on staff to adapt to new working methods while still producing the highest-quality work. Technicians specify the appropriate materials for each element (eg titanium, high-carbon steel, stainless steel, carbon, PHED plastic, composite etc) to prepare for fabrication using 3D printing. Compared with conventional machining, the additive process has the advantage of using only the precise quantity of material necessary to manufacture a part, keeping it at minimum weight while optimising mechanical and physical qualities. Guelt has already been implementing this process for the production of parts for the two new Ultims – demonstrating impressive confidence in a new technology at a relatively early stage.

Yet Guelt does not only work on large projects: its geographical location, close to the main marinas of Finistère and Morbihan, allows the company to offer a year-round local service, machining a steady stream of smaller fittings for sailors who drop by the workshops.

Guelt Nautic’s strength is not just being able to manufacture good-quality parts, of equal value is the expert advice Guelt makes available to each of its customers followed by a dependable commitment to on-time delivery.

Recently a member of the design team at Groupama Team France visited the factory in Quimperlé to thank the team for the work accomplished on their America’s Cup campaign: ‘I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your support…

‘It was a real pleasure to work with you for the first time. We didn’t have any trouble with your parts and I think “the copy” was a good one! Thanks a lot again and see you soon.’

Click here for more information on Guelt Nautic »

It’s not just boats that suffer in a whale strike at sea… the consequences for the world’s largest known mammal can be every bit as destructive

For most offshore sailors the grandeur of seeing wildlife within their marine ecosystems is another big reason to be passionate about this sport. Thousands of species of birds, fish and mammals all play their roles in keeping a healthy and sustainable balance to the ocean’s ecosystems. As sailors we can have a unique role ourselves in helping preserve this balance even as man’s own interactions with the planet present increasing and now more easily identifiable effects that threaten this environment.

Observing large marine mammals in their habitat is simultaneously thrilling yet frightening since the prospect of being close to a moving object that may greatly exceed our size can be disturbing. One hundred and fifty years on from the tale of Moby Dick it’s no less hard to break this primal fear of being sunk from a whale impact. And each year brings more living examples.

One was in May 2012, when video captured Camper helmsman Roberto Bermúdez de Castro throw his VO70 violently up into the wind to narrowly avoid colliding with ‘something huge’ while hurtling along at 20kt. ‘It would have been a bad day for the whale and for us,’ said onboard reporter Hamish Hooper. ‘Fortunately “Chuny’s” decent reflexes saved the both of us from the equivalent of a freight train colliding with a truck.’

Main picture: an injured blue whale tools along gently below the surface off Baja with an injury characteristic of a keel strike – many yachts were racing through the area at the time. Ship strikes are much more likely to prove immediately fatal to ‘our’ largest known mammal but even a relatively minor yacht contact can leave a large whale weakened and unable to feed properly – or evade predators attracted by the blood loss. The chart below was used in the whale protection briefing given to all the competitors in last year’s Atlantic Cup for Class40s

This was not an isolated incident: these events are becoming more numerous. In 2012 Fabian Ritter, ship-strike data co-ordinator with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), published a study showing that over the past 60 years, of the 81 reported collisions and 42 near misses of whales and sailing vessels recorded, the greatest proportion were from more recent years.

Even when organisers take precautions to minimise the risk of mammal contact, accidents still happen, such as the 2016 Imoca Transat from New York to Les Sables d’Olonne. After leaving New York in late May, the solo fleet took care to avoid a right whale exclusion zone off Nantucket. The north Atlantic right whale is a critically endangered species, with only 500 examples left; their leading known cause of death is collisions with vessels in their habitat close to the busy Boston shipping lanes.

However, less than 24 hours into the race, reports were coming in of collisions with unidentified floating objects. First was French skipper Yann Elies, who reported damage to his boat’s daggerboard. Then Armel Le Cléac’h hit an unidentified object and turned around. In the end eight boats reported 15 collisions. Six returned to port and one boat dropped out of the race entirely.

Sailors for the Sea recognises this growing problem within the sailing community. Without change, with sailboats becoming more numerous and faster, the potential for harmful strikes can only increase. A start can be made with establishing some best practices in the planning of an oceanic event:

Damian Foxall, Volvo race winner with Groupama – and a former education manager at the Canadian Wildlife Federation – thinks statistics under-report the problem. ‘One of our roles is to ensure that everyone going afloat is aware of best practices while in the vicinity of marine mammals. In the case of a collision, we have an obligation to report any incident to the coastguard as a safety notice to other mariners, as well as to the IWC ship strike recorders.’

Sailors for the Sea makes a number of recommendations:

• Integrate marine wildlife information into your event and supply participants with a Wildlife Disruption Prevention Plan. This can include an overview of local species with a description of their physical characteristics, known distributions relative to the course area, behavioural traits and population status (eg protected, endangered and so on.
• Ask participants to report collisions and injured wildlife and provide them with reporting forms to collect relevant information.

An event that already integrates environmental awareness of marine mammals is the Atlantic Cup, a biennial Class40 series that in 2016 also crossed the busy sea lanes off Boston. With the help of presentations to the competitors, but also to spectators and sponsors, this event has earned one of the highest ratings as a Sailors for the Sea Clean Regatta in part for its efforts in making known the plight of the north Atlantic right whale.

Through use of these best practice guidelines, Sailors for the Sea can help every event contribute to the preservation of local ecosystems and our marine heritage both now and for future generations.

Click here for more information on Sailors for the Sea »

It took a lot of time and effort but 25 years after first – briefly – seeing the light of day on Chris Dickson’s Whitbread 60 Tokio the Code Zero sacrificial leech has finally been consigned to the sailing history books

In describing the luff shape of Doyle Sails’ new cable-less Code Zero, the designers use a lens analogy – which neatly illustrates the smooth curve that projects forward but gives no hint what it actually achieves. That subtle bulge represents a significant performance gain and an elegant solution to an issue that has troubled these asymmetrical sails ever since increasing boat speeds started dragging apparent wind further and further forward to the point where offwind progress was achieved with upwind trim.

As is often the case, class and rating rules often lagged behind the pace of technical development, leaving sailmakers and competitors to adopt clumsy work-arounds to extract the available performance within outdated regulations.

Almost from the time that asymmetrical spinnakers became mainstream, the name of the game has been to design flatter and flatter sails – until they came up hard against limits imposed by the rating rules.

Under IRC, for example, the definition of a spinnaker demands that the mid-girth measurement is at least 75 per cent of the foot length. Other offshore racing classes have similar constraints. The challenge was to achieve a sail with the area of a spinnaker and able to be used for heavy-air running, yet flat enough to operate like a masthead genoa at relatively tight angles in lighter airs.

The advantages of a sail able to achieve both purposes, but still be measured as a spinnaker, are most obvious when you look at relative sail areas: the largest rated jib area for a Maxi72, for example, is about 130m², as opposed to the 500m² area that most teams measure with as a maximum spinnaker area.

For years, and at great expense, sailmakers have looked for ways to achieve the full multi-purpose potential of Code Zero sails within the constraints of the spinnaker definition. The most common solution has been an ugly duckling compromise of a genoa-type shape supported on an integral composite luff cable, but with superfluous material along the leech to achieve the 75 per cent mid-girth target. As the apparent wind moved forward the trimmers would crank up the luff load and sheet on hard, leaving the excess leech material either flapping away, adding drag and fast degrading an expensive sail, or tamed with an over-tensioned leech-line acting like a handbrake.

‘The whole game has been to push the 75 per cent rule as far as you can, trying to find a balance between how much shape you put in the sail against how much leech instability you are prepared to accept,’ says Doyle designer and special projects specialist Justin Ferris, whose offshore racing CV includes multiple Volvo campaigns.

Two years ago Doyle took a very different approach. They dispensed with a luff cable altogether and replaced it with three full-luff vertical carbon-Technora panels supporting a genoa-type sail plan.

In a reversal of convention they met the 75 per cent mid-girth requirement by pushing the extra ‘girth’ to the leading edge and in front of the natural load line instead of the leech. When the sail was flying the airflow would suck this unwanted sail area around to the leeward side where it lay flush and quiet, leaving the rest of the sail to do its work as efficiently as possible.

‘We could eventually absorb about 90 per cent of the extra midgirth we needed to demonstrate by means of that front-end panel,’ adds designer Daniel Fong, who also has an extensive offshore, grand prix and America’s Cup CV. ‘We were able to achieve a flatter sail without an unstable leech. It was a huge advantage. The sails were very fast. If you can average 2kt or 3kt more than your opposition on a certain point of sail, it represents a huge gain over the course of a race.’

In taking this approach Doyle made sure to ask all the appropriate questions of the relevant authorities to ensure the sails complied with the IRC rule used by the Maxi72s and other large offshore racers; but then as their obvious performance advantages attracted more followers, the rulemakers moved against them… Last December IRC issued a new interpretation, arguing that these sails could be considered as having a double luff, due to the physical luff as presented for measurement not being the same as the effective luff of the sail when set.

Top: Maxi72 Proteus also at the Maxi Worlds this year; of interest here is the way the leech profile is flying correctly due to the extra material needed for measurement being removed from the roach and transferred to the luff. And (above) Bella Mente trials the very first cable-less Code Zero during the 2017 Corfu Challenge.
Below: in this computer generated render the multi-part composite lens area of the sail is highlighted in purple. The other fibre variations within the sail are similarly denoted with a variety of colours

‘They did not outlaw the sails, but they imposed such a high rating penalty they were effectively dealt out of the game,’ says Ferris. However, as is often the case when innovators push and probe around the edges of technology, valuable lessons had been learnt along the way – paving the way for the current mark two version of cable-less Code Zero.

What they had discovered was how the vertical luff panels, which replaced the cable, projected forward when the sail was flying. Instead of a cable locking the luff in a bar-taut straight line from masthead to bowsprit – with tack loads up to six tonnes on a Maxi72 – the cable-less version was free to assume a less-constricted attitude. And, in one of those rare win-win outcomes, the cable-less version flew straight but with loads reduced by 30-40 per cent.

Moreover, despite the reduced load, the entry and shape of the sail tended to project forward in a positive curve – the lens effect.

Developing this characteristic, the new sail takes full advantage of that lens effect with the three equal continuous vertical luff panels now absorbing much of the required mid-girth volume. ‘We no longer have any folding flaps,’ says Ferris.

‘The new sails are a lot more conventional in profile and shape. We use the luff projection to soak up some of the girth, which allows us to leave the leech as it was, while still managing to keep the flying shape flatter and faster.’

In terms of structure, the load reduction is a significant bonus. ‘There is obviously still a safe working load we must achieve with the fibre group,’ says Ferris. ‘We need to ensure there is enough carbon fibre through the luff of the sail to sustain the load while keeping the band narrow enough that it will furl and fly evenly and project forward.’

The carbon concentration is most dense in the ‘luff-lens’ panels. Closely packed carbon fibres are laid down running the full length of the luff as continuous single strands. From the lens area back the sail structure and fibre mix changes, moving into lower modulus fibres and concentrations away from the most loaded areas.

Without a cable the sail has to be bottom-furled, but the process remains unchanged and grand prix crews have had no difficulty switching to the cable-less version; in fact, they welcome the ease of handling. Shedding a high-torsion composite cable of up to 30mm diameter makes the furled sail much easier to fold and stow – which will come as particularly good news to Volvo Ocean Race crews and Imoca 60 singlehanders.

The Maxi72 Bella Mente owned by Hap Fauth has been a pioneer with both versions of the Doyle cable-less Code Zero sails. The first outing with the mark two version was in the final race of the inaugural Corfu Challenge regatta in July. ‘Bella Mente flew this sail on a three or four-mile reach in that final race and put 45 seconds on the opposition,’ notes Fong.

‘By the time the boats docked in we had two more orders; by the Porto Cervo series in September three of the five Maxi72s – including Momo, the 2017 Maxi72 world champion – had cable-less Code Zeros in their inventory. They are definitely effective.

‘And we are really only starting to scratch the surface with these sails, for which we have a patent pending. We are also exploring other applications. Certainly, we can see demand expanding into other classes. Classes without the 75 per cent mid-girth constraint can benefit just as much, if not more. The shape ranges we can deliver with this system are much greater than with a cable sail; it offers much greater flexibility.

‘We are also in the very early stages of looking at whether this can be useful with jibs, not that we are talking about eliminating forestays, but possibly sharing the forestay loads with a cable-less headsail. That of course could have meaningful knock-on implications for other performance areas. There is a lot of potential still to be realised.’

Click here for more information on Doyle Sails »