Avoiding the 8 ball

Barking Mad edges into the lead after excellent second day at the Rolex Farr 40 Worlds

Another day of sun, big breeze and a short lumpy sea in San Francisco Bay, proved to be the favoured diet for Jim Richardson’s Barking Mad team from the US east coast. With five races sailed and the first half of the four day long Rolex Farr 40 World Championships over, the Farr 40 Class Association President’s boat has pulled out a useful lead and is the only boat in the 31-strong fleet still to have a score line comprising single-digit results.

As happened yesterday the first race began in lighter conditions with the sea breeze kicking in and building during the afternoon to more than 25 knots. Richardson’s New England-based team, World Champions in 1998, set the tone today by winning the first of three races held on the ‘Berkley Circle’ race course.

After some extreme tactics at the Rolex Farr 40 World Championship in Sardinia last year that saw them disqualified from the penultimate race, the Barking Mad team have been playing it safe this time, as Jim Richardson explains: “The thing about the early days of a regatta is that you can put yourself behind the 8 ball and that’s difficult to recover from. So we’ve been trying not to lose the regatta in the first couple of days and position ourselves for the end.”

Richardson’s tactician Terry Hutchinson, who won the J/24 World Championship on this course six years ago, expands on their approach: “We were doing our best to get off the starting line in a position that wasn’t going to be at a disadvantage to the rest of the fleet. We’ve been doing a pretty good job at that, trying to get the best starts without too high risk, and then from there pick our way through when we can. We aren’t trying to hit any home runs. We’re relying on the things we do well to get us past boats in our groups.”

As ever there is much dockside discussion here about the tactics for sailing San Francisco’s Berkley Circle, with the most common advice being to ‘hit the right’ side of the course going up the beat, where there can be advantageous current in the deeper water followed by a favourable shift off Angel Island. In fact today’s three races were all effectively won off the start line.



“It was a perfect race,” commented America’s Cup veteran Peter Isler, tactician on Peter Stoneberg’s Shadow, winner of race two today. “We started in the upper third of the line, punched on all the boats around us, just upped the speed - a classic good start, our first of the regatta. We pushed for two minutes and tacked over and I said to the boys ‘we could win this race’. Then it all just fell into place. The right was favoured and we were fast. Then we kept it simple.”

The same was true for Richard Perini’s Evolution team from Australia, winners of today’s third race, sailing a brand new boat in anticipation of being top local team when the Rolex Farr 40 Worlds are held in Sydney next March. “We got a great start down the pin end and we were able to tack across pretty much straight after the start,” described tactician Hamish Pepper, recently returned from Athens where he has been representing New Zealand in the Laser. “We had a good lead right from the beginning. We jumped out at the start and had a good lane across, the breeze shifted to the left and we had a nice 50m lead at the top mark. They don’t often come like that but when they do it is fantastic.”



Peter Isler’s view about why the winner of the start turns out winner of the race is simply due to the carnage that can take place behind. “If you get into the middle of the pack when the boats converge at the marks it is full-on survival and it is down to good fortune to find a hole and slot in. Luckily when the breeze gets stronger with the choppy water there is a disparity with the speed, so the boats do get spread out more.

"It is challenging and now the breeze is up, it is a good hard regatta. At this level it gets back to the basics. Nothing fancy here. It is good starts, about having the gear shifts and the speed and a bit of good fortune, minimising the complexity of what you’re doing because these boats are hard to sail in a breeze."

In the big conditions Isler says there are big gains to be made sailing downwind: "It is not only the wind tactics, of where you put your boat, but also whether you start doing the 'wild thing' or not. We were right on the edge of it. You should be shifting gears between doing the 'wild thing' in the puffs and then going back to the low mode. The Pegasus guys sailed brilliantly downwind. They were doing the wild thing better than anything with guys stacked on the back like a Volvo 60."

Following their win in the first race Barking Mad scored a fourth and a second and returned to the St Francis Yacht Club today on 18 points, 12 ahead of the defending World champions, Massimo Mezzaroma and Alberto Sodo Miglori’s Nerone from Italy, with Peter de Ridder’s Mean Machine from Holland relegated to a close third.

The Italians with Vasco Vascotto calling tactics, seem to be almost shadowing their old rivals on Barking Mad around the race course. “They are the defending world champions,” explains Jim Richardson. “They know they have to beat us and we know we have to beat them.” While 12 points sounds a lot, Richardson and his tactician are only too aware that all it takes is one bad result in one race to see this evaporate. “It’s a war of attrition right now to get to Saturday,” says Hutchinson.

But the final word today goes to Peter Isler: “This Rolex Farr 40 Worlds is the best big boat regatta for owner drivers that there’s ever been. In terms of the performance, two or three years ago, any boat here in the top 10 would be just gone, the game has been raised so much.”

Results:

Pos	Boat	Owner	R1	R2	R3	R4	R5	Tot
1	Barking Mad	James Richardson	9	2	1	4	2	18
2	Nerone	Massimo Mezzaroma	10	3	3	8	6	30
3	Mean Machine	Peter De Ridder	7	1	10	12	4	34
4	Warpath	Steve & Fred Howe	15	12	5	2	10	44
5	Riot	Marc Ewing	8	19	8	6	9	50
6	Shadow	Peter Stoneberg	11	6	24	1	11	53
7	Evolution	Richard Perini	12	11	11	20	1	55
8	Twins 2	Erik Maris	5	13	6	10	24	58
9	Norwegian Steam	Eivind Astrup	1	5	21	18	18	63
10	Le Renard	Steve Phillips	17	10	2	26	8	63
11	TWT	Marco Rodolfi	2	16	20	23	3	64
12	Pegasus	Philippe Kahn	6	27	4	3	29	69
13	Heartbreaker	Robert L. Hughes	13	22	7	14	13	69
14	Sled	Takashi Okura	3	17	22	13	16	71
15	Mascalzone Latino	Vincenzo Onorato	21	25	13	7	7	73
16	Slingshot	Chuck Parrish	16	9	15	5	32	77
17	Joe Fly	Giovanni Maspero	20	8	18	17	17	80
18	Samba Pa Ti	John Kilroy	26	4	9	22	21	82
19	Crocodile Rock	Scott Harris/ Alex Geremia	14	26	16	11	15	82
20	Sotto Voce	Arien van Vemde	19	29	14	16	5	83
21	Groovederci	Deneen & John Demourkas	25	14	25	9	23	96
22	Temptress	Alan Field	4	21	19	28	26	98
23	Astra	Mary Coleman	30	7	26	21	19	103
24	Peregrine	David Thomson	31	15	17	15	25	103
25	Virago	Stuart + Marrgwen Townsend	28	20	29	19	12	108
26	Struntje Light	Wolfgang Schaefer	22	23	23	30	14	112
27	Pendragon V	John MacLaurin	27	28	12	24	22	113
28	Nitemare	Tom Neill	24	18	27	27	28	124
29	Kokomo	Lang Walker	29	24	28	25	20	126
30	Flash Gordon	Helmut Jahn	18	30	32	29	27	136
31	Piranha	David Voss	23	32	30	31	30	146

More photos on the following pages...