Making Waves
Edgar Denison on the contenders for the Irish Admirals' Cup Team
Halfway through the selection trials to choose an Irish team for the Admirals' Cup, Frank Woods' Justine V seems certain to have secured one of the three places on offer after five days hard racing in Dublin Bay. Woods' French-built Beneteau One Tonner is barely one month old and will join the seven other contending yachts in the Solent on June 8th for the first of three more races under the close scrutiny of selectors from the Irish Yachting Association.
The biennial Admirals' Cup is the premier offshore yacht racing challlenge in these islands and is effecctively the 1985 world championship. Three boats from each of 19 nations will meet off the Isle of Wight in late July for a series of five races that conncludes with the strenuous and unnforgiving Fastnet race.
Established in 1957, the Admirals' Cup series is conducted under Interrnational Offshore Rules which is a handicapping system devised to permit yachts of varying size, shape and design standards from all over the world to compete fairly in a single fleet. The IOR assign each boat a "rated" measurement calculated from a complicated mathematical formula that takes in to account a boat's length, displacement, type of keel, number of sails, size of crew and dozens of other factors. Weight and balance are important, so the interior cabins are stripped bare, leaving the crew with extremely spartan quarters.
The yachts race against the clock along courses that require them to sail under all poin ts of the wind. After a race each boat's elapsed time is matheematically "corrected." by its lOR rating num ber to determine its placing. Thus a large and fast boat could commplete a race with "line honours" by being first past the post, but could find itself. placed well down the list of finishers on corrected time.
The two "heavies" among the eight yachts that have been racing in Dublin Bay during the past two weekends face exactly that problem. Moonduster is 51 feet of varnished elegance and has the highest lOR rating in the fleet. Doyle, who owns a stevedoring firm in Cork Harbour, is the most experienced skipper. He first raced for the Admirals' Cup in 1965 and began offshore racing 20 years before that. With Grattan Roberts at the helm, the Crosshavennbuilt Moonduster has taken line honours in several of the races, but has been placed well down the list on corrrected time.
Rating just under the top level is the other big' boat, Born Free, sailed by Norman Cordiner and David Kennsett. Designed by Ron Holland, Cordiner built Born Free two years ago in his fitted kitchen factory at Bangor, County Down. The only contender from the North, Born Free is a flyer in light winds, but is not at its best in heavy weather. Some observers have remarked that its performance could be bettered if a couple of feet were chopped off the mast.
That is exactly what happened to Ciaran Foley's Stormbird just 60 seconds after the start of the very first race. The briefest touch was all that was required to snap off the top third of Stormbirds highly tensioned hollow alloy mast when it collided with the observing selectors' yacht Deerhound. After a few frantic phone calls, Foley, a Dublin barrister, sent Stormbird off to Holyhead under jury rig to collect a new mast, and was back racing within 24 hours.
Stafford Mansfield has chartered Confusion for the trials, a two year old English-built David Thomas One Tonnner. If the Cork clothing manufacturer is selected to the Irish team, he would likely charter yet another boat to race in the AC series.
Brothers George and John Sisk are campaigning the Danish-built Alliance. They've fitted a newly designed ellipptical keel to improve the boat's perrformance and have assembled a very sharp crew from former Dun Laoghaire dinghy sailors.
S chollavaer, sailed by David Anndrews, is the eldest of the eight boats. A Roger A9, it is the same design as Insihanier, 'which was the only memmber of the Irish team to survive the storm in the 1979 Fastnet. Andrews, head of Weirs jewellers, is joined at the helm by Philip Watson, the highly exxperienced Howth sailmaker. Schollaavaer's co-owner David Thomas has temporarily jumped ship to join the crew of Panda, a very high tech 433footer sailed by Du blin prin ter Michael O'Leary. Designed by Hugh Welbourne, who has joined the crew, Panda has received a new keel and a number of other modifications have reduced its 10 R rating to allow it to carry an extra sail.
And then there is the Beneteauubuilt Justine V, the leading contender and the very latest design, sailed by property developer Frank Woods with Ro bert Dix. They take their sailing seriously and see their campaign as an exercise in management. They will have ensured the support of the French yacht builders Beneteau in organising their challenge. And Beneteau in tum will want to capitalise on Justine's progress.
The Irish team selectors can hardly refuse a place to Justine, but choosing the other two boats may be difficult. Chaired by Sean Flood, managing director of Chubb, the selection commmittee of seven includes Hugh Coveney TD, Ken Rohan and Brian Buchanan, all of whom have sailed in previous Irish AC teams. Flood, who will also manage the team challenge at the Isle of Wight, is keen to ensure that Irish teams can keep up with the rapid and expensive design evolution in world class sailing. He has noted that it is important to "have a go with older Irish boats in order to gain experience." But those boats will not fare well against the newly designed boats that other nations will enter.
The British team, for example, will choose three entrants from a field of twenty, most of which are brand new yachts. The British owner of a new boat which just misses selection to its national team may choose to offer it on cheap charter to a team from anoother nation. The owner, therefore, gets to boast that his boat raced in the Admirals' Cup, which enhances its reesale value, while the foreign crew get a newer and faster boat to race than tteir own.
The selectors, therefore, may face a dilemma. Do they choose to campaign Justine and the next two best boats, or should they select two crews in the 'hope of chartering the speediest losers from the British and German trials to sail with Justine. •