27th October 2009. Mike Golding Yacht Racing
Pictures of yachtsman Mike Golding (GBR) and co skipper Javier Sanso (ESP). Shown here whilst training their IMOCA Open 60 prior to the TJV start in Le Harve next month
|
27th October 2009. Mike Golding Yacht Racing
Pictures of yachtsman Mike Golding (GBR) and co skipper Javier Sanso (ESP). Shown here whilst training their IMOCA Open 60 prior to the TJV start in Le Harve next month
|
Over the weekend and heading to day eight of the 2009 Transat Jacques Vabres. Mike Golding and Javier Sanso are in second place on their Owen Clarke/Clay Oliver designed Open 60 Mike Golding Yacht Racing. All the yachts are now clear of the clutches of the savage depression which resulted in a range of damage across the fleet. The most extreme example of this was the abandonment of Seb Josse’s BT. Few boats have got through completely unscathed. Three hours ahead of second place, Mark Guillemot reported a half metre tear in the leach of her mainsail; “which in this downwind phase is not causing us a problem at the moment.” On second place, Mike Golding Yacht Racing, they were without instruments and pilots for the first few days. Golding and Sanso regained full function only a short time before loosing both masthead wind wands as well as their Windex in a storm which saw winds of up to seventy knots batter the fleet. Groupe Bel makes up the third of the first three IMOCA Open 60’s which are now fast reaching away from the rest of the fleet at speeds of fifteen to twenty knots. The ‘bungie elastic’ affect will see advances and slowing in the fleet as boat speeds rise and fall. A comfortable lead of sixty miles at twenty knots can be squeezed to half that as the boats compress in lighter or unfavourable winds. The sailors have to keep pushing, balancing risk against gains and losses they see ahead and behind them on the race course. Commenting over the weekend on their performance Mike Golding reported during the radio vacation that: “It is completely unknown, we have no idea what the windspeed is, we have no way of judging it other than the data we normally get (Ed: by feel and instinct) .” “We’ve been doing quite a bit of hand steering. One of the disadvantages of this is we can’t track the wind. Normally you would track the boat to a wind angle, and the boat steers its way to that wind angle around each tiny wind shift. All we can do is set the pilot to compass, and like that it goes in a nice straight line, but with every wind shift and small change you are going faster or slower. So consequently we are trying to do as much hand steering as possible, but as a consequence it is pretty tiring between the pilot and ourselves.” Explained Golding today, “We are doing our best to hold on to Safran, but we are struggling a bit in terms of just knowing where we are, particularly going downhill. We kind of forget how reliant we are on our systems to give us advice on our sail plans and all that, and now here we are just trying to judge whether we have enough or not. Sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong. It is quite hard to gauge it, and to some extent we are using them to measure it, if they are faster we push harder…and if they are slower…..well we push even harder!” The other Owen Clarke 60 on the race course is Aviva, Dee Caffari and Brian Thompson, currently lying in eighth place.
For pre-start interview with Mike Golding about his boat go to:
Mike Golding - pre race interview
Background websites:
www.mikegolding.com
www.avivaoceanracing.com
www.jacques-vabre.com
|
