Sailing the monster cat

One of Alinghi 5's helmsmen, Loick Peyron, tells us what it is like

After years at the front of the ORMA 60 fleet, 2009 has been a rare year when Loick Peyron hasn’t raced some form of hair-raising boat across the Atlantic. Since being forced to bail out of the Vendee Globe when his Gitana 80 dismasted almost a year ago, Peyron has left Baron Rothschild’s Gitana team and has spent this season helming the Renaissance catamaran for Oman Sail on the iShares Cup circuit, while continuing to sail with Nicolas Grange’s D35 team on Lake Geneva.

However Peyron’s big gig at the moment is his role as one of the helmsmen on Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi 5 and he is currently out in RAK with the Swiss team. Hand in hand with working up their radical 115ish ft long monster catamaran, they have been trying to work on the best crew combinations. When it comes to helming Alinghi 5, they typically have two helmsmen on the boat at any one time, Peyron sharing these duties with Bertarelli and Alain Gautier. Alinghi 5 is around 80ft wide, which represents a lengthy bounce across the trampoline between the steering cockpit in each hull and so it is necessary to have a permanent shot gun helmsman, ready in the leeward cockpit prior to manoeuvres.



"On a cat which is quite wide, you have to have two people steering," says Peyron. "For each tack and gybe, you have to be steering while the helmsman is crossing the netting. You have to tack well and get flying again as soon as you can.”

He confides that at the very beginning of their training in Genoa they even tried having a different helmsman on each tack, to avoid the crossing of the net.

So come the America’s Cup who will be helming? The million dollar question. "I don’t know, I would love to do it!" Peyron says with a large grin. "If they asked. But Ernesto, for sure, is going to say that too!"

Meanwhile Ed Baird, Alinghi’s helmsman for the 32nd America’s Cup, who helmed the Alinghi catamaran to victory on last year’s iShares Cup, seems to have shifted roles. As Peyron explains he and Gautier are more familiar with big multihulls, while Bertarelli himself has been helming multihulls on Lake Geneva for the best part of 20 years.

"Ed has done a lot of sessions here and in Genoa, but less now. It is very interesting to have his point of view from outside. He is a clever man, really smart. A lot of time with him it is about strategy, not really about match racing, because we are not really going to be match racing – not for this event at least. It is very interesting for us to share skills with him - he is great guy, like so many guys in this team."

Aside from helming, Peyron’s role in the team, as is the case with Alain Gautier, is a broad one - “we have to buzz everywhere in the hive,” as he puts it poetically. Both he and Gautier keep an overview of the project and add their advice on all aspects of the campaign. He says, like entering any family, it has taken a while for the hive to accept him, but now he is - you guessed it - making honey.

While he has spent two decades racing big multihulls repeatedly across the ocean, Peyron says his most valuable time in grooming him for his current job was when he sailed the 112ft maxi-cat Innovations Explorer (subsequently renamed Orange 1, Kingfisher 2 and then Gitana 13) around the world non-stop to second place in The Race in early 2001. Obviously though Alinghi 5 is a very different animal and the first of her type at this size to have been designed, engineered and built to race purely inshore.

Take the mast for example - on Innovations Explorer, a similar length to Alinghi 5, the rotating wingmast was a modest 41.4m tall compared to the new, larger 60+m wingmast found on the Swiss cat. Almost one third bigger...

"I am quite impressed by the weight they achieved and its efficiency," says Peyron of the towering Swiss-built spar. "Normally with offshore multihulls you don’t have spreaders - a classic wingmast, like they used to have on Oracle. This mast has spreaders and as a result it lets you have a lighter mast. With offshore boats there were a lot of reasons why we didn’t use spreaders – the drag, the overlapping sails, etc – but on this boat that is not a problem. The main goal is to have a light mast and it is really perfect."

As to how the feeling on board compares, Peyron says Alinghi 5's acceleration is really impressive, there being so much power available. However after that, when the hull is flying, there is no huge feeling. To experience the speed you need to go to the transom on the leeward hull.



However a light multihull, with a powerful and potentially draggy rig, is a combination not conducive to easy tacking. "For sure a multihull, especially a light multihull, is slow tacking, and when there are choppy waves and quite a lot of wind, but the way you can build up the speed is amazing," says Peyron, comparing the experience to the time he took off and landed in a jet on the French aircraft carrier Clemeneau. So successful tacking is down to technique. Out on the water on Monday and we saw Alinghi 5 complete one tack, which they accomplished without stopping or going backwards, despite what the team consider quite lumpy conditions out on the Gulf. "We need to learn a little more, because we have probably only sailed for three days in those sort of conditions," says Peyron.

Because it is light, Alinghi 5 also feels the waves more than one of the heavier and more robust offshore multis, and this induces pitching. Peyron says Alinghi 5 pitches less than he expected and having spent many of his evenings over these past weeks studying the BMW Oracle Racing trimaran sailing via a convenient webcam overlooking the waters off San Diego, reckons the black trimaran suffers pitching more than they do. "That is quite normal, because they have a lot less buoyancy everywhere and also because they are more flexible. The trim of the float is quite stable, but the main hull is still pitching."

While Peyron reckons the structure of the American tri is ‘flexible’, in comparison Alinghi 5 is completely stiff. "Yes, there is a little racking, but that was the first thing which impressed me,” he says of their rigid cat. "It is most impressive in no wind or when you are in marginal flying conditions - each time you have a little puff or you apply a little traveller, and the hull pops up. Six inches of traveller makes all the difference."

Brrrrrrr

On the powered winch debate, Peyron is against them, but reckons this is a special event with two very special boats competing. Generally on the supermaxi monohulls he says the crew don’t like it because it is boring, it has put grinders out of work, but he says his main dislike of it is that it isn’t helpful in learning how to sail a boat quickly. You don’t get the same feeling - and respect - for the loads. However he acknowledges that there are considerable positives, particularly in their case. There is, of course, the hoisting sails up a 60m tall spar, but he cites the example of the mast canting. Back in 1993, when he first fitted a canting wingmast on his Fujicolour 2 trimaran, cranking the rig up to weather when singlehanded took 30 painstaking minutes with a small hand pump. On his subsequent Fujifilm it was better when they installed a hydraulic rotary pump powered by the pedestal, but on Alinghi 5 canting the mast up to weather is achieved in a matter of seconds by push button.

"I have no reason to complain and say that is bad. It is just different. I prefer quite a lot of other things that we have. All the fibre optics and all the high level of the engineering - all the parameters we have to check - 100s of them! I like to see these new things."

As mentioned previously, Alinghi 5 is an engineering marvel, being such a new, giant highly loaded and light weight structure, but to be competitive she has to be light and there is the old engineering adage that it is easier to put structure in than to take it out once a boat is launched. To prevent costly delays, it has been imperative not to break it and so to preserve the boat and to warn the crew of any impending disaster, there are fibre optic strain gauges on all vital elements. One crewman’s entire role on board (although he won’t be there when they are racing) is to monitor these loads and to shout loudly when something is going critical, but there are also audible alarms to warn the crew. This is particularly important when powered winches are used that can very easily tear the boat apart if used without extreme caution. Over the course of testing when something has proved too lightly built - and this generally occurs when the sea state rather than the wind picks up - then the crew are able to fix this by beefing up the structure, as was the case on Tuesday when a crack developed in her port hull.



Cockpits

While both Alinghi 5 and the BMW Oracle Racing boat are nominally a cat and a tri respectively, both are in fact hybrids, the difference being that while the American boat is technically a trimaran complete with centre hull, on Alinghi 5 they have the three fore-and-aft spines running down the centre line of the boat instead. However the significant difference between the two boats is that while the BMW tri has a single cockpit aft on her centre hull with two small steering cockpits on the back of the aft beam, on Alinghi 5 they have had to take the weight hit of having the normal catamaran configuration of twin cockpits, one in each hull, with sail controls and winches duplicated in each.

From the transom forward: first there is a big cockpit where there is the runner winch, along with push buttons to control the cant and rake of the rig. The mast controls are here because there are locks on the halyards. So for example the gennaker is hoisted the mast raked forwards putting some sag into its stay, the halyard locked off when the sail is up and the sag then taken up by raking the mast aft. And whenever the rake or cant of the mast is altered, so must the runner in conjunction with it.

Forward of this is the helmsman and ahead of him the main trimmer where there are the lines for the traveller, Cunningham and outhaul. The mainsheet is controlled hydraulically via two rams positioned on the back of the boom, like a pair of chopsticks.
Then there is a third cockpit forward for the headsail trimmer and the pit - there is no pit at the foot of the mast as there is on most of the offshore cats of this size.

Performance

When it comes to the performance differences between Alinghi 5 and the BMW Oracle boat, Peyron says that the most interesting aspect of the American tri is its new solid wing rig, otherwise the rest of their boat is quite ‘classic’ and, in his view, ‘too soft’. He believes when they fly their hulls their wetted areas are similar (although we reckon it will be less on the tri). "The main difference between the two are the rig, the sail power and the weight."

Peyron reckons the tri will be heavier, but not by as much as other pundits suspect. We put it to him that the tri’s centre of gravity must be higher, as their solid wing must be heavier, thus causing it to pitch more. He agrees, reckoning that the solid wing sail is about 3.5 tonnes, but he has noticed that despite this, the tri appears to be pitching less with its new rig. It is also now trimmed further down by the bow. This is because with the solid wing, the tri will be sailing cat-rigged most of the time, so they have had to move the mast step forward substantially. Peyron has also observed that once they had stepped the wingsail, soon after they had to increase the amount it could rake, which, he presumes, is because they may have been developing excess lee helm when they hoisted headsails.

We put it to Peyron that the tri may tack better than Alinghi 5 and he agrees, for two reasons. "They are heavier which helps quite a lot. And also a tri is interesting for that because you have a bit less drag on each side. You just have the drag from the middle hull which in terms of wetted area is helpful, even though they don't have a rudder in the middle and also because of the wing. A wing is really efficient even at really, really small wind angles. Maybe their minimum speed during a tack is a little higher than us, but the time from flying on one tack to flying on the other is about the same. In choppy conditions it could be another picture because then weight is interesting and having a jib is interesting too."

As to whether there will be more than one tack on the windward legs come race day, Peyron reckons this will depend on the course. Off RAK he reckons that it would be possible to do what he calls "the grand lozenge" - a one tack beat, but off Valencia they may be forced to play the shifts more. "On any multihull, tacking penalises you, but it is going to be interesting because if one boat seems to be better at tacking or gybing than the other, then one is going to play maybe..."

In the meantime their practicing and boat development continues off RAK prior to the boat being shipped (if they lose the appeal) to Valencia over Christmas and the New Year. It is unlikely whether the helmsmans role will be confirmed until much closer to the Cup. Whenever that might be.