Catamaran technique - part 5

GBR Tornado Olympic rep Leigh McMillan gives us his advice on how to drive hard downwind

Leigh McMillan and Mark Bulkeley have shot from relative obscurity into the Olympic spotlight, following victory at Spa Regatta in the Tornado, backed up with a second place at the World Championships in Cadiz. They have emerged as real contenders for a medal at the 2004 Games. One of their widely acknowledged strengths is their ability to drive the cat hard downhill, keeping the pedal to the metal a little longer than others dare to. Here, helmsman Leigh tells Andy Rice about his approach to this high-adrenaline part of cat racing.


Over the past year we’ve become pretty quick downwind, especially in waves. We owe a lot of that to one of the other top Brits, Rob Wilson. Last year he was outstanding, one of the quickest people in the world downwind. We were training with him and gradually grinding him down, working out what he was doing differently and applying it. Now we're very happy with our downwind speed. Mark works very hard on body movement, I think we’re more mobile than others, and we’re very precise about getting body positioning right.

There is a lot of technique, some of which I can’t really explain, it’s just stuff we do. The fastest way downwind is with the windward hull lifted, and driving on the leeward hull. One of the key things is that Tornados can go faster and faster, but they don’t have the buoyancy in the bow to cope with it beyond a certain point. So when it’s getting too hairy, we let the windward hull skim the wave tops just to provide that extra safety margin. But the more you drop the windward hull in the water, the slower you go and the more you lose the apparent wind that you’d generated. It's about how close to the edge you are. Quite often we're closer to the edge than others. We can fly the bow up more than others, it seems. The bows are always trying to go down, so you bring the windward hull down for more buoyancy, but sometimes in waves you can do the opposite, let the hull fly up for a moment, and that takes the heat off the bow too. It’s a question of experience and practice, I suppose, to work out which is the appropriate technique at any given moment.

For my part, I sit there and cleat the mainsail with the traveller fixed on the centreline. I vary the sheet tension, having it looser in the light and quite tight in the breeze. You keep the leech tension to stop the mast going over the front. But for me it's really all about steering. You don't even have to concentrate on it, you just gain a feeling for when the windward hull is about to come down, and you steer up to compensate. You’re looking for small increments of steering, just subtle changes.

You can keep flying a hull with the wind speed up to about 18-20 knots. Beyond that you'll have to flatten the boat down. In 25 knots you would pitchpole almost straight away if you tried it in anything other than the flattest of water.

Mark has his weight back as far as possible, trapezing behind me, with me sitting on the back quarter of the trampoline. I don't know how much sheeting he does. He'll give it a big ease if we're in danger of going into a wave. But it’s not like a 49er, you can't flap a Tornado gennaker, it just shakes the boat horribly. It’s more a matter of curling it than flapping it. It's quite a sharp ease and then in again. I don’t honestly know what he does beyond that, because we have very little communication in the boat in terms of how to sail it. We just do our thing and it seems to work well.

There can be conditions where twin wiring can pay, but it’s very rare, and I’ve never used it in an international regatta. Tactically it’s not a great option, and in any sort of waves it’s just too dangerous because you’d soon pitchpole. You can't drive the boat hard enough. Up to 15 or 16 knots you could twin wire in flat water, but that’s about it.

The helm stays in the same position down to 13 knots of breeze, when I might start moving forwards along the tramp. But in strong winds you can’t get back far enough really. So I suppose we have an advantage in me being light and Mark being bigger than average. I’m about 65kg and he’s 86kg, so we’ve probably got our centre of gravity further aft than most teams.

The added bonus is that he’s probably that bit stronger than most crews, which is great for playing the mainsheet hard upwind as well as working the kite downwind. The helm is doing very little physically, so you might as well have the weight and the power in the man doing the work!

To read the other parts of our catamaran technique series - see the right hand column of our catamaran homepage.