Chris 249 said..MorningBird said..Chris 249 said..MorningBird said..
A bunch of boats are damaged and forced to retire in a relatively mild front!
Define "mild". Some accounts are talking of a fairly concentrated zone of "un-mild" stuff, and a while back the incoming front seemed to be shifting the wind direction several times within a fairly small area, which could have kicked up a very nasty cross-sea.
The issue of retiring from a race like the Hobart is an interesting one. From one point of view if you start you should finish. From another point of view, if you've done a few you KNOW you can finish if you want to so there's nothing to prove in doing so, and plodding to the finish with a semi-broken boat can be just an expensive hassle that proves nothing. I notice in my other sport that the attitude towards finishing when you have no chance of doing well seems to vary from discipline to discipline and even from city to city in Oz. That suggests to me that there is no right and wrong answer in such things.
When I've checked the numbers of DNFs in bad Hobarts it has been interesting to see that there is no correlation towards "cruisers" being more likely to finish than racers. Not many cruisers would oftne find themselves in the situation a racing boat does (that of pushing hard upwind into a blow) and it seems that they are actually statistically no better at it than the racers.
Mark Richards said a 40kt breeze in his post return interview and that was the gusts. Richards gave a very honest interview and said they cocked up a few things and need to take the bad with the good. I was impressed by his explanation and attitude.
An hour or two of 40+ kts is par for the course for a front off the NSW coast and is really pretty mild. Some are as soft as 30kts but they can get 50+kts down south.
It would be good to know why a well forecast front like this one wasn't easily weathered by all the boats that DNF because of it. That would be a good lesson for all offshore sailors.
Yes, but we don't know whether other boats met tougher conditions than WOXI did. Sure, 40kts+ is par for the course - but to be a devil's advocate, running around a footy field is par for the course for AFL players and they still break hamstrings, driving around F1 courses is par for the course for F1 cars and they still blow engines. Isn't it just an inherent element in most sports?
Looking at the boats that pulled out, we have a cruiser with an S&S 34 legend (Billy Ratcliff of Marara) who has done 43 Hobarts; a luxury performance cruiser with a Transatlantic win under her belt; a boat owned by a shipping company to train cadets; a boat/skipper with a bunch of Transpacs and a doublehanded Melbourne-Osaka race to their credit; and the ancient and beautiful Landfall. It's not as if the DNFs are full of lightweight race machines driven by inshore heroes. Apart from perhaps a tendency to mainsail and steering damage there doesn't seem to be a pattern.
On the other hand, I'm a bit flummoxed by the retirement rate these days myself in some ways. I wonder if people are trying to use all-purpose mains instead of specialist offshore ones, and keeping them up instead of using a racing trysail like Hicko does?
It's OK to play devils advocate but if 24% of AFL players were out injured at half time!!!! There is another factor with ocean racing, somebody else has to come and rescue you because of your decisions.
From the Australian.
"Cruising Yacht Club of Australia commodore John Cameron couldn’t immediately recall the last time there were so many early withdrawals.“It’s the wind, but in this case we’ve also got the wind against current and that’s making the sea stand up and creating a terrible sea state for these boats to travel through,” he told reporters in Hobart.“And it’s the sea state which is causing most of the damage on these yachts … they’re powering through these waves, coming out the other end, then dropping feet before they hit the water.”"
I agree with your last paragraph.
Maybe, just maybe, they could sail the boat they are in to the conditions they are in! Just an idea.
It isn't just boat and equipment decisions, although obviously a major factor, but also the propensity to ignore good seamanship decisions. The keep racing until something breaks, boat or crew, attitude smacks of selfish egos which doesn't make for good sailors.
What sort of rescue effort would have been required if these boats had met tough but not unusual conditions, say 50-60kts for a few hours.
