Taking on the Aussies

In Sydney, Andy Budgen talks to thedailysail about his 18ft skiff campaign

While 18ft skiff sailing is still predominantly a Sydney Harbour activity for Australian sailors, one team this year is representing the UK at the class’ effective world championship, the JJ Giltinan - that of ex-Olympic 49er sailor Andy Budgen.

Budgen is sailing with two 49er sailors he usually coaches, Matt McGovern and James Barker, on board his Project Racing. There are other Brits doing particularly well in Sydney this week in the form of 14 sailors Archie Massey and Matt Searle, who are competing on board a boat borrowed from the League, Activeair-2UE, and are holding an impressive second overall, two points off the lead).

Today it has been a lay day at the JJ, but yesterday saw Project Racing take a second and this has dragged Budgen’s team back up to sixth after a disastrous first race. “We went around one of the marks the wrong way when we were in the lead, which we had to retire from because we didn’t unwind ourselves properly, so that was a bit of a nightmare,” recounts Budgen.

Budgen and his crew have done their campaign properly, and have set themselves up to spend six months in Australia with the JJ as their main focus. Budgen will return to his property and Project Racing business (they charter out a Sigma 38 and a Volvo 60 in the Solent) in April.

Originally the plan was to buy a new boat in Australia, but to get some training in the UK beforehand, they bought a secondhand boat and ended up spending so much money on that that there wasn’t enough left in the pot to get the new gear. Their originally plan was to ship the UK boat out to have it as a back-up for their new one, but they have ended up competing in this. “Our boat was built in 1995, while the next oldest boat sailing here is 2002/3. So our boat is pretty ancient,” says Budgen.

Unfortunately their UK boat didn’t arrive in Sydney until Christmas, but until then they were able to borrow a boat from the League. “I wouldn’t say our campaign has gone to plan!” recounts Budgen. “We haven’t had much time to sail our boat and we’ve had all kind of problems with masts and sails and stuff. We have been struggling with our rig all week. We put a brand new rig up on the first day which we’d never raced with, because we were having so many problems with our other ones.”

18s have two rigs – no1 and no2 and Project Racing have a set from Southern Spars and a newer pair from Selden. It is the new Selden no1 that they have been using in the JJ. “It has taken us the whole week to get it roughly right, but we are still not happy with it even now,” says Budgen. “We would have preferred it breezy - a number 2 rig all week. But because we have had problems, we’ve had to work out what was wrong with them and we’ve learned a lot by the fact that our gear wasn’t right from the start. We’ve learned a lot about what we’re looking for in the rig and talked to the sailmaker a lot. In hindsight it hasn’t been a bad thing that’s happened, but it has slowed a bit on the JJ this year, because we weren’t fast from the start. It was only in the later part of the JJ that we have become half comfortable with our rig.”

While all the top boats are much newer than theirs, they have also been developing the rigs and sails much more than anywhere else in the world. “They have all done rig development through Michael Coxon at North Sails here," continues Budgen. "He is a very experienced designer/sailor and he has been developing for that two or three years, rigs and sails through Southern Spars and CST to a certain extent. All the top boats have all got the latest North. I think Rag is using Ullman, but they have all got new rigs and sails that work quite well. And they all sail. They sail on a Sunday and they maybe do two evenings in the week as well where they go out and practice. So just from a time and a development point of view, I would be very surprised if anyone in Europe is going to be able to hang on to them. 7 is ridiculously quick at times.”



Budgen reckons that these have been the biggest developments, to the extent that it is possible to take an old boat and stick new rig/sails on it and provided it is set up correctly (no mean feat on an 18), it is still possible to be competitive. “Having a new boat is a bit of an addition on top of that. If you get a new boat it is down to weight and it is stiff. We are quite lucky that our old boat was a good boat in its day and is still reasonably stiff.”

Around £30,000 is what he has spent so far on boat and gear and Budgen says a new hull would be a further £20,000 on top of that. And this excludes living and campaign costs. “And we spend quite a lot on breaking our boat…”

So far this week weather conditions have been very un-Sydney Harbour for the JJ. January was fine, but two weeks in the run up to the JJ it rained constantly. “It is still fairly unsettled,” says Budgen. “We have had a lot of winds in from the south. We had our first northeaster yesterday, but it wasn’t very strong and we are expecting a similar thing for Saturday and Sunday.” These will be the final remaining races of this year’s JJ. While typical Sydney Harbour conditions are a 20 knot northeaster, the most wind they have seen so far this week was 13-14 knots yesterday.

This is Budgen’s first time doing the JJ, although he is no stranger to Sydney Harbour, having been out here before the 2000 Games, and he is also no stranger to the 18ft skiff, only until now he has not combined the two.

“This was something I always wanted to do. We tried to get involved back in the 1990s with the Grand Prix circuit when it was happening. I was in my early 20s then, but unless you have got the means to just do it, it is very hard. A lot of the Brits come out here just to do the JJ and most of the time they are in the 15+ sort of numbers, because they don’t know the harbour and they haven’t done much time here. They fly out and do the regatta and fly home. Unless you have got more boat speed than everybody, you are not going to be able to come and win this regatta.”

Competing on the 18 circuit, there are some unique quirks to the set up, mostly relating to the class not wanting to see another escalation of costs that resulted in the bubble bursting on their class back in the Grand Prix days, when it was being televised live.

For example, to buy a new boat, there is one manufacturer in Australia and you cannot buy a boat directly. You have to go through the League.

You are allowed one suit of sails a year which you are obliged to use not only for races but also for practicing. “The league attempt to try and keep the more professional people at bay by making rules like that. So if you are going to keep going out sailing then you are going to trash your sails. So it incentives you not to do too much sailing,” says Budgen.

Another example is that at the JJ, boats are not allowed to leave the beach until just 30 minutes before the start of the one race that is held each day. “By the time you get launched and are out there, you have maybe enough time to put the boat on the breeze and have a quick look at your set-up and then the start goes off. So there is no time to do any sort of pre-race beats or looking at the wind - it is very very short on time. So if you don’t know the harbour well - we have only been sailing her for a couple of months - you don’t have the knowledge of the harbour. We got caught out on Wednesday on a course we’d never done before. You don’t have a clue where to go really.” Budgen compares it with coming in fresh to sail on the Solent.

“Here every day is different - on one day you want to tack on the shift and the next day you want to bang a corner, depending on the wind direction. Tide is also a big factor on the harbour as well - staying in and out of the tide, when it is coming in and where it chops up.”

And then on top of that there is the Manly ferry coming past every 15 minutes. “That is a big big part of the whole race strategy. A lot of the time you are thinking - when is the next ferry going to turn up, where is it going to go and how are we going to get round it? We had a couple of interesting ones this week - we had a start that went off on the first day when the ferry was really close. And then three days into the regatta we had a start, and the ferry pretty much tried to come through the start. It was complete carnage. I think the ferry actually stopped in the end with people within 20ft of it. It was pretty full on.”



One chief topic of conversation in the fleet in Sydney is the JJ coming to Europe this year, where it is to be held in Carnac, France over 27 June-5 July. The League are sending two or three containers (8-12 boats) out to this and Budgen is considering popping his boat in there, although his bowman is unavailable.

“I think there are quite a lot of European boats doing that and then you’ll get the British guys and a few people coming to do the event in borrowed boats. We have had 30 here, so I’d expect you’d get that sort of number or 35.”

But Budgen doesn’t rate European chances: “When the Aussies come to Carnac, there is going to be virtually no one in Europe that is going to keep up with them. Maybe Rob Greenhalgh, but no one else. They have done too much development out here.”

Part of this will be down to the wide variation in the gear. “Over here there is a League of 25 boats and they are all 2002 onwards and it is a bit more one design. My impression of Europe is that there are a whole lot of boats that have been made over the years, M18s and B18s and a lot that have been grandfathered in, boats in different countries and they don’t have the greatest equipment. And there is then the British group, where there is maybe a couple of decent boats and a few people who just do a couple of events a year. So I think Carnac you are going to end up with some good Australians boat and someone like Rob Greenhalgh will have the gear to do that sort of event and then there will be people with gear that will look like it has come out of a museum!”

So back to the JJ and there are two more races to be sailed this weekend and at present the top four boats are within three points of each other – in stark contrast to last year when the event was a whitewash for Seve Jarvin’s Gotta Love It 7.

Having sailed out in Sydney for a few weeks now, Budgen says this week has seen some change in the form. “We normally beat activeair in general racing, but they have sailed really well at this regatta, better than expected. And then there’s Euan [McNicol – Southern Cross Construction] who was one of the favourites before we started and 7 haven’t had their best regatta ever. They were whinging to me last night about they weren’t happy with their rig and they were actually faster with last year’s. The Rag guys know the harbour well but they haven’t got the speed of Ewan or maybe Activeair. They are good at getting back. Their first windward mark positions haven’t been great, but they are very good at coming back through the fleet, they have done that two or three times, coming from 15th to the top five.”