Up and coming cat sailors

We talk to British cat sailor Ed Barney about his rise with Andew Walsh in the Tornado and F18

The Tornado has traditionally been a class that has rewarded those sailors who have been able to spend a huge amount of time refining the gear and the art of sailing these demanding craft. Since the Tornado Sport came out, however, there has been an influx of young, talented sailors jumping into the class and achieving very impressive results - breaking the long standing hierarchy. Two such people are Andrew Walsh and Ed Barney, who have been sailing a Tornado together for just over three years. At the World Championships in 2004 the pair managed an unassuming 54th position but followed this with a hugely impressive 15th overall at this year’s event. This leap in results has seen the pairing jump from the GBR Olympic Development Programme into the Team GBR World Class Performance Squad. As such the pair now sail full time on funding from the RYA.

Both Walsh (the helm) and Barney (the crew) have their roots in slower paced mono-hulls. Walsh started sailing when he was about ten in Oppies and from there moved on through the RYA youth squad system into a Laser Radial and eventually a Laser. He had reasonable success in the Laser but felt that success would be limited in the class due to his small size. It was after this that he decided to get a Tornado. His team mate Barney came to sailing fairly late in comparison, starting out when he was 14. He was part of the 29er youth squad at the age of 16 and then moved into the 49er which he sailed briefly with Alex Cherry.

The pair first met at Exeter University where they both studied Sports Sciences. Walsh was already sailing a Tornado at the time and in 2002 asked Barney to fill in as his crew for the UK National Championships out of Warsash, where they finished sixth overall. Following this credible result Walsh asked Barney if he would be interested in doing a Tornado campaign together. Since this was agreed the duo have notched up an impressive tally of results in a short space of time, both in the Tornado and the F18. Walsh graduated in 2003, Barney a year later and the pair are now in the serious business of campaigning for an Olympic medal.

With both Walsh and Barney coming from a monohull background we wanted to know their response to the standard assumption that multihull sailing is less tactical. While agreeing there are many differences between the two disciplines, Barney argues that you have to be more tactical in a multihull, not less: “Because you tack less often, you have to pick the correct side from early on. You have to make the right decisions from the word go. That said there are plenty of tactics involved throughout the race - there have been countless times where we have had a poor start or gone round the windward mark in a bad position and managed to pull ourselves back.” Barney also suggests that with faster and faster skiff-style monohulls these days the tactics of monohull racing are beginning to reflect those of multihulls.

The fact that neither of them had sailed a multihull before embarking on the Tornado together does not seem to faze Barney. He points out that the current crop of top British cat sailors have all come through their teens with a strong monohull background. “Generally the people who we are sailing and training with have a huge amount of cat experience now because they have been sailing them full time for a number of years.” Though the pair had people to train against who had plenty of cat expertise behind them, they were aware they lacked significant cat racing experience and set about rectifying this by racing in as many competitive multihull events as they could.

The major problem that Walsh and Barney faced was that by the end of 2003 the top Tornado teams were going to be preparing for the Olympics, and those who had missed out on Olympic selection would more than likely taking a break before rejoining the bandwagon for the next Olympic cycle. This meant that the team was were racing a lot in an Olympic class during a very flat year in the campaign cycle.

This problem however was fairly easy for the team to overcome with the surge in interest in the F18 circuit. Before Walsh had bought a Tornado he had sailed a little bit in a Hobie Tiger to make sure that multihull sailing was something that he wanted to do. He and Barney decided to go back to F18 sailing and bought themselves a Hobie Tiger.

The aim was to gain good fleet racing experience, and Barney says the F18 enabled them to do this at a reasonable cost: “We managed to get hold of an F18 to do the big events like Carnac and the F18 Worlds where you still have exactly the same calibre of sailors [the likes of Mitch Booth, Darren Bundock etc]. It gave us a great chance to get to the top of the fleet. Also it is possibly not so financially oriented in the F18 where there is not as much development of sails and spars and so on. Everyone is on more of an even keel [or the same two hulls…] so it was an ideal way for us to get more competitive cat racing in.”

So why the Hobie Tiger, rather than any other type of F18 cat? “The class is very strong in the UK”, explains Barney. “It has always been the most dominant class across various wind strengths. Also, it has been adopted by a lot of the best sailors like Bundock and Booth. The Tiger is a great boat and it made sense because it was the strongest boat in the UK. Also we needed racing experience so there was no point turning up with a boat that no one else uses and beating them. That would not have been very productive.”

Their F18 racing peaked this year achieving an impressive 6th place at the World Championships in Hook of Holland.

While admitting that they both enjoyed the F18 racing, the demands of the Tornado campaign has necessarily meant their focus has had to shift and their Hobie Tiger has since gone. This does not mean, however, that they will not be sailing an F18 again. They have been fortunate to borrow boats on occasion and Barney is optimistic about turning up to F18 events in the future.

This season in the Tornado the pair has achieved some notable results. As well as their 15th place at the World Championships, they were 11th at the European Championships and won the UK National Championships. Although part of this improvement must be contributed to their F18 sailing there are many other factors involved as well. “I think the big reason that we have improved so much is being directly involved in the GBR Tornado Squad, namely Rob Wilson and Mark Bulkeley and Hugh Styles and Graeme Vials,” comments Barney. “Also we are receiving more funding from the RYA which allowed us to have good enough kit to properly compete. The third thing is Rob Andrews, our coach, who has been pretty instrumental in making us see what we needed to improve.”

With Andrew’s help they have been able to identify exactly what they do well and importantly exactly what they need to improve. As a result they have a very clear idea of their goals for both the long term and short term.

While the ultimate target is a medal from Beijing in 2008 they have set themselves a number of more tangible mini targets in the short term. “Next year’s goals are to qualify for the pre Olympics and to get a top five at the Worlds in December 2005,” states Barney.

One area that they admit they need to improve is their starting: “We think that starting is one of the most important things about cat sailing,” says Barney. “We need to work hard on that - when we can nail our starts then it will give us better windward mark positions…and then we can work from there those and hopefully start getting some top ten results.” He also adds that there is plenty of room for improvement in all aspects of their sailing and that they still have a very big learning curve ahead of them.

In terms of funding both Walsh and Barney live almost exclusively off the money that they receive from the RYA. They do have some sponsors but at this stage there are limited to goods in kind, such as Marlow Ropes. While Barney says that they are on the continuous look out for further sponsorship and financial help, the demands of sailing full time are starting to preclude this effort.

Now based in Weymouth the pair schedule at least four hours sailing every day when the weather permits. The onset of winter in Dorset means that they will been relocating to the Florida coast at the end of December with the Miami OCR and then the Key Biscayne Tornado North American Nationals, in the calendar in January. Early February will see them head back to Europe embarking on the Spring Olympic classes circuit in earnest. The big goal for 2006 is the Tornado World Championships in Argentina in December - the top ten beckons for these young sailors.

If you would like to keep up with Walsh and Barney’s Olympic campaign you can log onto their website http://www.teamwalsh-barney.com