From the Qingdao boat park

The latest on the Tornado Code 0 saga plus some measurement issues in the Star class

The story of the 2008 OIympic sailing regatta is almost ready to be told. Tornado Class Measurer Leo Sanchez is under no obligation to reveal who presented what, but rather like the America’s Cup where your strongest rivals know the most about all the things you are trying to keep secret, the rest of the class have named Mitch Booth and Pim Nieuwenhuis NED and John Lovell and Charlie Ogletree USA as the only teams to have got sail stamps for Code 0 gennakers. Only when the class commence racing on Friday, can we be really sure who’s carrying the gennakers.

If the information is spot on, this means that neither the Aussie favourites Darren Bundock and Glenn Ashby nor the Santi Lange’s Argentinian entry has elected to use the controversial sail despite their recent tests. The forecast is critical to the call, with much fresher winds expected at the weekend. One Chinese forecast predicted 20 knots on Saturday and, accurate or not, this could still validate the Code 0 choice. Opinions differ about the gennaker’s precise optimum operating range, but 5-11 knots upwind seems to be the consensus. After that the Code 0 is short of grunt downwind, until the wind increases to the late teens when the small 18sqm gennaker boats can sail as fast as Tornadoes carrying conventional full-sized 25sqm spinnakers.

A second class has had its own issues with measurement: the Star. Those boats built by Italy’s Lillia from its latest mould have required extensive re-shaping in order get through. The amount of rocker in the hull and chine heights have been issue. Seemingly the boats were not fully checked out by the class measurers until they had been built. Caught in all of this have been recent world champions amongst others. Brazil’s Robert Scheidt confirmed the amount of filler needed to reshape his Lillia was in the range of 2-3kg.

Crews knew this coming to Qingdao and had the work in hand. “As you all know there was a little anticipation about measurement of this boat as there was some work done to make it comply after we launched it in May this year,” wrote Hamish Pepper’s NZL world championship winning crew Carl ‘Tiny’ Williams in his Blog. “The measurement process took about three hours and all went really well.”

The British pair of Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson had to do work on site in Qingdao with a separate issue of their own. They asked permission earlier in the week for out-of-hours boat park access. Followers of Percy and Simpson will be aware of their efforts to have a faster Star designed for them. The first new boat of 2008 and second new boat of the campaign was a Juan Kouyoumdjian-tweaked shape which won them the class' all-important Bacardi Cup but which Percy at the time felt was a weapon downwind but wasn't showing adequate upwind pace.

Percy’s situation was made more acute because he’d sold his Athens boat, considered a good one, to Ireland’s Peter O’Leary. A late call was made to build another boat for the Games. This is something of a special, another Juan K design from Germany’s Mader, but actually built in Switzerland.

During measurement the boat was found to have a couple of millimeters too much freeboard at one reference point. This had to be ground back and the deck edge re-filled to the correct width.

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