Ian Moore talks to madforsailing

The new man at illbruck tells Ed Gorman how he started in sailing and talks about the big challenges ahead

Being selected for illbruck must be pretty lucrative and it's a high profile job?
It's reasonably lucrative. It's not the sort of money you hear about from the other America's Cup programmes. It's just not in the same league, but it's nice to have a steady income for sure. It's a high profile job but I am working with another navigator, Juan Vila, who is tremendously experienced. I was quite scared in a way to start with. I told them I am very enthusiastic, I do have technical skills but I do lack experience. John Kostecki said 'we want you as a navigator and you are also a good sailor and you've got experience in other areas. We've got lots of experience in Juan and we want to try and combine the two things together.'

Can you describe your role in illbruck?
I'll be a navigator but I may have to stand watch as well. My principal role will be as a navigator but we're still trying to work out the best way of sailing the boat. Sometimes that will be navigationally-intensive, sometimes sailing-intensive.

Are you and Juan both navigators and tacticians or is one of you more of a tactician and the other more of a meteorologist/navigator?
I think we're both navigators. If anyone's the tactician it will be John who is the skipper and tactician.

So will it be half you on and half Juan on - that sort of thing? Or will he have a lead role?
The way we've worked it so far, it's not a lead role/junior role situation - we're both on an equal par on the boat and it's not as simple as four on and four off. When we're doing straight navigating we're working eight on,three off, which you can do when you're not doing too much deckwork. When you are doing the deckwork, you get tired after grinding for four hours, so you need more sleep.

During the last Whitbread, when you were still working as a naval architect on the Isle of Wight, we saw an amazing amount of focus on tactics and routing - going left or going right - the media seemed to concentrate on that much more than boat design and sails and some of the navigators had pretty hard times. How are you going to cope with the pressure? Are you ready for that?
It's different because I haven't really been exposed to that sort of pressure from an outside viewpoint. Obviously when you do a big offshore race as a navigator, you are the person everyone looks to and, if you go the wrong way, it's your fault. It's going to be a whole new thing, all this pressure from the outside, and I think I'm just going to try and shield it out a little bit. I'm not going to do anything special otherwise you start making decisions on how it makes you look.

What's your sense on how this Volvo's going to be decided? What aspects are going to be critical?
Navigation and weather routing are fundamentally important and probably the biggest aspect of what goes on. But during the racing we've just done, it has also been clear that design differences can be quite big between the boats. Around the world it tends to even out, but when you get two boats going down the same leg together it can become obvious that one boat can be very favoured for that particular point of sailing compared to another boat. At the start of the Sydney-Hobart, we were VMG running and the two Merit Cup boats (News Corp and Tyco) were significantly faster than ourselves ( EF Language) and to some extent ASSA ABLOY (Chessie Racing). When it became heavy airs upwind, the advantage came back to the EF-style design which is a bit stiffer and a bit more stable.

Did the Hobart convince you that you can handle the extreme unpleasantness of going upwind in a breeze in a Volvo 60?
Yes. It was horrible. It was no fun. It was wet and very unpleasant. But in a racing environment, it's still a race and you kind of put all that to one side and just consider it as a race and look at it from that point of view.

Was the Sydney-Hobart your first big try-out with illbruck?
I went down to Fremantle at the begining of November and did some training with them. Then we sailed to Auckland which was Southern Ocean. We didn't get really far South but we got in some big breeze and big conditions. The whole two-and-a-half months has been a sort of test period to see how it worked with two people navigating and the feeling is, it can be very strong. Also, I wanted to decide whether I wanted to do the race because I just didn't know and had never sailed on one of those boats before.

The relationship between navigator and skipper is critical isn't it? How do you find your working relationship with John Kosteki is going?
John has got quite a strong reputation as a match racer and Olympian but I found it remarkably easy to work with him. He runs a very open campaign. If anybody has got any ideas it is very easy to input those ideas into the programmes and all ideas are discussed openly. It's the same on the boat. He seems to have quite a lot of trust in both Juan and I and, in any case, one of us doesn't make decisions on our own. The fact that you've got two people to talk it through on the navigation side is a huge help. Sometimes we do disagree and we come to a compromise on what we think the best solution is.

Does the campaign have a feeling of pressure because, rightly or wrongly, it is regarded as the favourite?
I guess a little bit. I felt that a bit going into the Hobart race with everyone expecting us to do really well. Luckily we did do really well, we won the Volvo 60s. The reason we did well is because we'd been together longer than the others and the boat was well-prepared and we didn't break stuff and things like that.

So you must be looking forward to this year?
It's going to be a huge year. I'm really looking forward to doing all the training at our new base in Charleston and getting ready for the race even though I know I'm going to miss out on a lot of other regattas, having been doing the circuit for the last two years.

But it can't be hard to do that when you're right up there in the stratosphere?
Well ... that's not exactly what it feels like. It's a huge opportunity though and it's fantastic.

And ambitions for the future?
I'm going to see how this goes. I have signed with illbruck to do the Volvo and the America's Cup.

So you are going to be busy for a long time.
Yes. If we go the whole way, until sometime in 2003.