Brought to you by Boats.com Europe, Scuttlebutt Europe is a digest of sailing news and opinions, regatta results, new boat and gear information and letters from sailors -- with a European emphasis. Contributions welcome, send to Team Great Britain 2012: Ainslie's In He will be joined by the latest twist on the 'Three Blondes in a Boat' tradition - the 'Match Race Girls', sisters Lucy and Kate Macgregor and Annie Lush. For Ainslie, the target is a fourth gold medal to go with the silver he took at his first Olympics in Atlanta 15 years ago. Ainslie will start as the firm favourite having overcome the second best Finn sailor in the world, Giles Scott, in claiming the one British slot in the class. That was a remarkable achievement given Ainslie only returned to the Finn last autumn after his America's Cup ambitions fell through. www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/ * The first selections for the sailing team to represent Britain at London 2012 will be unveiled on Tuesday morning with half of the 16-strong squad expected to be named. Four of the 10 crews who will compete at Weymouth and Portland next August have been selected at the first available opportunity because there are no serious British contenders for their spots. Beijing gold medallists Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson will be named in the Star class while Bryony Shaw, a bronze medallist in 2008, has been selected in the women's RS:X windsurfing class and Nick Dempsey in the men's RS:X windsurfing class. Lucy Macgregor, her sister Kate and Annie Lush are also expected to be revealed as the Britain's women's Match Racing team. In addition, three times gold medallist Ben Ainslie is almost certain to be announced because of his remarkable performances in the Finn class since returning to Olympic sailing last October, a move prompted by the break up of Team Origin, the British America's Cup campaign. -- Kate Laven and Jacquelin Magnay in the Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/sailing/ Musto Performance Skiff European Championships 17 year old Dylan put together a consistent series in the spotlight of national TV and press and joins World Champion, Daniel Henderson, as another hugely talented young sailor emerging from the class. The regatta started with the opening ceremony by the swimming pool at Restaurant LAGUNA in Marina Portoroz on a warm sunny evening. There were a total of 45 competitors from 12 countries: AUS, AUT, BEL, FRA, GER, GBR, ITA, NED, RUS, SUI, USA and SLO. For the first time Slovenian class regular and previous Olympic 470 campaigner Mitja Margon was joined by top local young sailor Dylan Tidd. The class continues to grow in Europe with fleets of over 50 in Germany and Switzerland, the EuroCup series will end this year with well over 100 competitors taking part. Medal winners: First place: SLO 271 - Dylan Tidd - 39 pts Full results on the event site www.gosailing.si Sail Management On The Go! With North Sails Sail Scan app you get a 'lite' version of Sailscan, which is the powerful program North uses internally. The app, available for both iPhone and iPad, makes it easy to take photos of your sails during racing or training, for later analysis. You can quickly compare different trim, and also see how the shape changes over time. And it's easy to email all the data to the crew or your contact at North Sails who can compare it to the original design. "The app helps our customers to be more scientific about their sails", says Lars Ive at North Sails. "It's fast, easy and fun to collect data and it makes it much easier for us to engage in discussions about sail shapes." "I love when I get these kind of tools from my sailmaker", says Peter Gustafsson, racing J/109 Blur. "It makes my life so much easier by keeping it all in one place. I even shot my sail measurements to keep them in the app. I wonder what's next? Real time trim advice over video?" In the app it's easy to manage both different boats and sail inventories. All scans are attached to the correct sail. On each photo you trace the trim bands and get draft, camber and twist. Then make quick note about the weather, rigtune and anything else you want to remember. And then, by just pushing a button, everything gets emailed to your contact at North. The North Sails Scan App is available in your local iTunes App Store or at North Sails Scan. itunes.apple.com/de/app/north-sails-scan/ Hot Palma As expected, the final field of competitors is one of the strongest and most talented ever. Reigning Melges 32 World Champion Luca Lalli with tactician Tiziano Navi on B-Lin Sailing has returned to the international arena, ready to defend his title. Another very important noteworthy competitor who has returned as a charterer is 2008 Audi Sailing Series Champion and former Let's Roll owner Claudio Recchi aboard Audi Fratelli Giacomel. Over the course of the weekend, teams have not only been in full preparation mode on the water (both Saturday and Sunday were designated formal practice days), but also on land as well. Long days of boat and sail measurement, and weigh-in are almost complete as registration wrapped up on Monday. Five full days of official World Championship racing is slated to begin on Tuesday, September 20 and through until Saturday, September 24. Full Entry List Event site: www.cyberaltura.com/melges32/home/home_uk.php Corsair/Seawind Australian Multihull Championships The promise to race in a stronger wind system will be welcomed by the 25 crews representing South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland after they fought to protect their tactical reputations in an unpredictable and shifty four knot breeze yesterday. Specialist skipper George Owen and crew revelled in the challenge to claim a runaway line honours win with the super fast Victorian catamaran APC Mad Max while the consistent Keith Glover skippered trimaran Trilogy claimed an important lead in the championship with a convincing corrected handicap win. These were the expected results from a day which most crews would claim to forget when they were left on the disadvantaged side of the unpredictable wind which regularly changed direction and rarely gusted above 4 knots. The unstable nature of the breeze was really a lottery some crews got lucky while others placed their championship prospects in damage control when their tactical options 'crashed' with a series of wrong choices. "It was easy to go the wrong way in search of more wind pressure, thankfully our errors were minimal". Said Trilogy skipper Keith Glover. Trilogy remains as the one to chase in the tactical battle for the Division 1 championship points while the George Owen skippered APC Mad Max is favoured to win the line honours in the two windward leeward races today. Interest will also focus on the tactical struggle for the Division 2 championship lead between Victorian Shaun Fishley in Frassid and Queenslander Peter Hackett's Intrigued who featured in a close match race for the important points in race 1 yesterday. Local Moreton Bay skipper Phil Day who steered his Brisbane to Gladstone race champion Rhythmic to a comfortable win in the Classic division yesterday remains as a strong favourite to master the challenges from the Glen Stewart skippered Cliffhanger and the George Bulka helmed Skedaddle when the sails are tensioned for the short windward leeward races later today. -- Ian Grant Clipper Race 3: Rio De Janeiro To Cape Town However, the wind direction is not doing the fleet any favours as it is blowing from the very place the crews are trying to reach, forcing the ten skippers to head off at a tangent. Commenting on the race underway, Clipper Race Chairman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston said the skippers need to head south to pick up the westerlies that are forecasted to fill in a couple of hundred miles to the south over the next 12 hours or so. "The race is now on to get south to find the westerlies and Welcome to Yorkshire is currently best placed to pick up the favourable winds first," Sir Robin said. "The skippers need to think tactically and focus on the long-term gain by positioning themselves to the south," he added. Gold Coast Australia, one of the teams that has been heading south, emerged from Stealth Mode this morning with an increased lead having spent 24 hours under the invisibility shield. With a lead of 47 miles now separating them from their nearest rivals, Visit Finland, Richard Hewson and his team are maintaining the form that has placed them firmly at the top of the leader board having won the first two races in the 12-month series. The fleet is expected to arrive in Cape Town between 23 and 26 September where they will be berthed at Victoria & Alfred Waterfront until the start of Race 4 to Geraldton in Western Australia on 5 October. Positions at 1200 UTC, Monday 19 September Boat - Distance to Finish 1. Gold Coast Australia, 1639nm Marlow Ropes Release Free iPhone App. The Marlow Ropes App is the first comprehensive rope information app to be released for the iPhone. It's free and easy to use, wherever you may be. Overview The Marlow Ropes App consists of five tabs: 2. Technical. Understand your ropes with 3. Catalogues. The latest Marlow Catalogues in PDF format - Use the inbuilt interactive barcode reader to scan the QR barcodes found on Marlow's new point of sale chandlery racking to discover further information Login to the iTunes store and search Marlow Ropes to download your free copy of the App and start discovering everything it has to offer. Download the Marlow App here: Bermuda Hosts World's Best For Renre Jr Gold Cup The RenaissanceRe Jr Gold Cup showcases the talent and potential of the island's youth and their international guests. This is never more evident than in the final race on Hamilton Harbour when Bermuda's young sailors get to compete against an international cache of champions in front of the spectator fleet gathered to watch the finals of the Argo Group Gold Cup. With the skipper's age ranging from twelve to fifteen, the 2011 teams will come from sixteen different countries including New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, Great Britain, Germany, Mexico, the US Virgin Islands, Poland, Singapore and the United States of America to compete. The RenaissanceRe Junior Gold Cup will hold its final race Sunday Oct. 9 on Hamilton Harbour just prior to the Argo Group Gold Cup finals. -- Laurie Fullerton Overseas countries and sailors facing the Bermuda contingent: AHO (Netherland Antilles) Odile van Aanholt #9 in IODA Worlds Malaysia Telefonica Moves Closer to the Gibraltar Strait Despite the high average speeds of around 20 knots over the past few hours, "Telefonica" is well aware that conditions will change in the next few hours, with a patch of lulls along the last few miles before crossing the Gibraltar Strait, and then a long close-haul to Alicante. "The forecasts indicate that we'll probably be left with no breeze ahead of the Strait and once we are across it we'll get mainly Easterly breeze, which means we'll be close-hauling all the way to Alicante, our home until the 5th of November," said Iker Martínez. According to Andrew Cape, "Hopefully we may past Gibraltar just after midnight." After that it will be time for some crashing around on board and some of the typical shaking about when close-hauling... "We are going to get hammered after that, with more than 30 knots on the nose," points out Cape. Latest ETA at Alicante: Tuesday 20th, 13:00 local time www.teamtelefonica.com Pinpoint Technology Behind AC World Series If you've watched any of the YouTube videos from the AC World Series, you'll probably be familiar with the aerial views that place course boundaries and two boatlength circles round the marks right on the live camera pictures of the sailing. This system is called Liveline. How it's achieved, and how it links with the penalty system being used here is very clever stuff indeed. Each boat carries a box of tricks that sends and receives data from the race management system. Rather than using standard GPS, a much more accurate system called RTK (real time kinematics), which combines military and civilian signals, calculates the position of each boat to an accuracy of 2cm and the roll, pitch and yaw to 1/10th of a degree. The key to calculating how close boats are to marks and overlaying the graphics is on a similar unit on a helicopter. This posed Honey and his colleagues a much harder challenge, because the helicopter is flying 1,500ft above the water but to avoid the graphic animations bobbing around the TV pictures the data coming from it has to be ultra accurate. The difficulty was to measure the attitude of the helicopter accurately. A combination of RTK signal and an inertial measurement unit achieves this to 1/1,000th of a degree. -- Elaine Bunting's blog, full article at www.yachtingworld.com/blogs/elaine-bunting/ British Yachtswoman Dee Caffari Accepts High Naval Honour Caffari, who set her third world record earlier this year by sailing non-stop around the planet more times than any other woman in history, joins the likes of adventurer Bear Grylls and fellow British yachtswoman Dame Ellen McArthur who have both received similar naval distinctions. One of the main links Caffari has with the navy is through her work as an ambassador for the tri service initiative, Toe In The Water. The volunteer based charity uses competitive sailing as a direct extension of the rehabilitation programmes carried by the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre (DMRC) Headley Court to re-inspire profoundly and traumatically injured service personnel to explore life beyond their injuries. Caffari first competed with Toe in the Water at the Dartmouth Regatta in 2009 and has continued to work closely with them since them, racing alongside many injured and able-bodied Royal Navy and Royal Marines crew members, as well as soldiers and airmen. Caffari's next goal is to compete in the Vendée Globe 2012 with the intention of securing a podium position and the search for a new title sponsor to support her on-going sailing campaign continues. Letters To The Editor - * From Adrian Morgan: re: AC numbers 644, 1,380, 3,291, 13,380, 492,327. Guess which Youtube figure related to "The Plymouth Capsize Club"? Seems like the Facebook generation want cheap thrills, and to hell with the subtleties of yacht racing. And me too. Having waded dutifully through 20 minutes of race coverage, which all began to look much the same (spray, frenzied activity, lurid graphics, frenetic musak, inane commentary) I too was tempted to cut to the chase, or rather the capsize. And I don't even have a Facebook profile. Featured Brokerage On a passage the boat is sailed very easily single handed or by a couple. Returning to Australia in 1992 after the first cruise to Thailand, Summersalt did the 2500 miles from Singapore to Thursday Island in 18 days thru the reef strewn waters of Indonesia. This passage was done 2 handed with the autopilot steering nearly all the time in mostly variable but following winds. The fact that the only form of charging for the single 75amp battery was one 42 watt solar panel is indicative of how easy the boat is on the helm, even in following seas. In 2004 Summersalt had a refit in Phuket with the cabin being raised to give a head room of 1.58m in the saloon. In 2007 all the standing rigging was replaced as were all the halyards. On one hull the bottom has a copper-epoxy treatment with antifoul on the other hull. Brokerage through Pippen Marine: www.yachtworld.com/pippenmarine/ Complete listing details and seller contact information at The Last Word |
Use this box to send a copy of this issue of the Scuttlebutt Europe Newsletter to a friend: Or [FORWARD] for a page where you can send copies to up to a dozen friends. [USERTRACK]About Boats.com See the Boats Blog at Boats.com -- www.boats.com/blog/ To subscribe, unsubscribe, and select HTML or Text format visit scuttlebutteurope.com Editorial and letter submissions to Advertising inquiries to Graeme Beeson: or see www.scuttlebutteurope.com/advertise.html |