Mark Chisnell's diary

The latest from One World in Auckland

It seems that not many of these diaries will go by over the new few months without someone, somewhere putting a new IACC boat in the water. The latest being the British launch – and wasn’t that Hollywood? A little more West Coast than West Cowes? It could hardly have been more different to our own low-key affairs, though at least our bottles smashed first time …(sorry Lightning, couldn’t resist it).

It must have been a mainsail or two worth of glitter and glamour, and it will probably raise expectations among the media and supporters. That’s usually a bad thing in Britain, with the brutal newspaper culture. But having said that, it does seem that expectations are rising within the team – the latest pronouncements make the semis a realistic goal, rather than the dream it was said to be at the original launch back in 2001. But with a year of hard work under their belts, the boys are clearly feeling more confident, and good on them.

Meanwhile, down here in Auckland, it’s anything but glittery or glamorous as the teams all struggle to meet their goals – and we’ve been up against a vindictive weather pattern. For the last couple of weeks the weather has been glorious down here – for anything but sailing. With a high pressure clamped firmly over New Zealand, it’s been one unbroken day of sunshine after another.

Since this has coincided with our first couple of weeks with two new boats up and running we’ve been working hard at getting the most out of it. It puts a lot of pressure on the weather team to make good calls. In our particular hot seat are Ken Campbell of Commander’s Weather, and Hamish Wilcox, who also worked with the British Olympic sailing team in Sydney.

It’s no trivial task putting a couple of twenty-odd ton boats into and out of the water, and towing them for ten miles out to the Hauraki Gulf – and back. In our case it involves about fifty people, up to six support boats, five hours of effort and several hundred gallons of diesel and unleaded petrol. As I mentioned in the last diary – our environmental program calls for 10,000 trees to be planted to balance the hydrocarbons put into the air!

Doing all that only to find that there’s no wind – or too much, is a serious drain on resources. All that time and energy could have been spent on shore projects, in the boat shed, on the computer, in the gym.

So the call to go or stay is a big one when the forecast is marginal. Get too many wrong and you’ll waste a lot of time, money and energy, or you can miss valuable time on the water.

And the whole thing has plenty of momentum, once the decision’s been made to go it’s hard to call it off or put it on hold if the situation worsens. If you’re already out there the temptation is always to hang on and give it a chance to improve, even when it looks hopeless. But that can be throwing good money after bad.

All of which makes the weather team’s job a particularly tough one – and you can guarantee there’s no shortage of people happy to second-guess the call at every stage of the operation! This is not a task for those of a nervous disposition or an inclination to ulcers ….

But it’s been good for us these past couple of weeks. We’ve worked hard at finding the breeze, leaving the dock early on several mornings to go look for the action. This aggressive strategy has meant we’ve got a lot more sailing in than we might have expected. But it now looks as though we’re going to go from one extreme to the other, from not enough wind to too much – but that’s Auckland for you …