Champion chat

We talk to dinghy champions Nick Craig and Keith Bedborough

Nick Craig (above right) has had a pretty successful year of sailing by anyone’s standard. In the OK singlehander, he was runner up at the World Championships in the summer. At the Enterprise Worlds, however he went one further – this time the victory was a family affair.

Two titles came his way in the RS 400 too. Sailing with long term crew Keith Bedbrough (above left), the pair won the Nationals and the Inlands and then went on to take the Endeavour Trophy to finish 2004 off in suitable style.

TheDailySail caught up with the pair after their Endeavour win.

TheDailySail: How do you both adjust to sailing the RS 400 together, especially after spending much of the year sailing other boats or on you own?

Nick Craig: “It is quite difficult, especially for Keith. When we sail together a lot our communication is very slick, whereas this year often I have stepped into it and Keith has said ‘Ergh, what’s going on?’ It’s just little things really. In the OK I throw all my ropes forward to keep them clear of the traveller, so I am instinctively chucking everything forward which means that in the 400 I am wrapping everything around Keith’s legs! So Keith finds it more annoying than I do."

Keith Bedborough: “It’s tactical stuff too. Last year we sailed the RS a lot and it was all becoming really fluid and automatic, and this year your boat handling is a little rusty. It’s harder now for me do to as much 400 sailing as I live in Geneva, when I was living in London it was great because we could sail twice a week but now we really tackle just handful of events each year."

TDS: So Keith, have you cut back on you sailing?

KB: “I do a lot of windsurfing now. We get down to Lake Garda and it’s just brilliant down there. It’s a five-hour drive so you can go for a long weekend. But obviously with RS the main competition is over here and so you have to do the old Easyjet flights back for the weekend."

TDS: Nick, you have really focused on your OK sailing this year, how did that go?

NC: “It was really good year and I did quite a bit of two boat tuning with Jim Hunt and a few of the other Brits in the OK, that was really good and we moved it up a level and went really well. The Worlds proved elusive and I was second. That was the main goal of the year and it didn’t happen so it was a bit frustrating, but it was the way it went. I would put it down to just getting a few shifts wrong really, Jim sailed a outstanding week – it was very difficult week with very shifty beats with 30 or 40 degree shifts, so you were either in the chocolates or in the forties at the windward mark!"

TDS: With the worlds being in Poole this year, are you going to carry on sailing the OK in 2005?

NC: “I have been sailing OK’s for 13 years, between other stuff, so there is a bit of unfinished business there! We get eighty boats at the worlds, there’s limited entry and it’s held in a different place each year. That’s the bit I love really, you tune up all year, do stuff and you turn up to the worlds and you’ve got no clue whether you have got it right or not. All of that is great fun. I am definitely going to do more and try and get onto the continent and race against the Europeans. The worlds are in Denmark in July, and then we are in Australia in February in 2006 - so that gives you two good cracks at it."

TDS: Nick, you have had a surprise victory at the Enterprise Worlds this year, how did that come about?

NC: “I’ve sailed them on and off for ten years or so an always had one. I usually sail with Claire Upton Brown, but she did her knee in a month before, and with three weeks to go I had had two offers – one from my sister and one from my mother!
I’ve only sailed with my sister once before but she is an outstanding crew…which I didn’t know. The competition is not as hard as it was in the eighties and nineties, but still pretty tough, by race three most of the leading contenders had put in twentieths."



TDS: Would you like to see more international competition in the RS400?

KB: “It’s a shame that RS aren’t more international. Like Nick says in the OK, you think you have got it all together but then you go to an event in Germany and there are other guys doing it completely differently."

NC: “If the 400 was international it would be fantastic. You can get a bit bored with it because you are racing against the same people every week. But we have tried to keep our interest up by always doing a year on hard, like last year, and then backing off the following."

TDS: How do you think the RS 400 class is fairing at the moment?

KB: “For me the best indicator of the class is how many young people come into it. Say for the last four or five years the 400 numbers have been waning and it’s because they haven’t been able to get the young people in, because it costs a fortune and the rest of it. This year though is the first time that we have had new young guys in the top ten, and that’s what the class should be pushing, because that’s what you need. Its fine having guys who have sailed them since they came out ten years ago, but you really need to get the new people in as well."

TDS: Why don’t you think the 400 has taken hold abroad?

KB: “The 400 is still pretty unique in that it is a hiking asymmetric, and for the likes of us being brought up in Enterprises it’s just the perfect next step. The people I have spoken to abroad sail a lot more trapeze boats, so the idea to spending however much money on a boat that is bloody hard work and hiking and they kind of look at you and go ‘where’s the trapeze?’ It needs a decision by a club or an organisation to buy fifteen or so. I know when the Laser 4000 was launched and they were going out to Garda the locals just loved them, and now there a quite a lot of 4000s out there."

TDS: Where do you think RS get it right, and wrong, with their boats?

NC: “Generally the RS boats, as a rule, are fantastically designed. They are all really well balanced and beautiful to sail. The thing that really annoys us is that they are not very well finished. So we’ll get a new 400 and then we’ll literally spend two days taking all the fittings of and putting decent ones on, swapping things over and actually making them work properly. So that is pretty frustrating as, in essence, the boat itself is spot on - you can sail a 400 downwind in 30 knots and it will be perfectly balanced it’s just the little things let them down a bit."