Moving to two hulls

Artemis Racing's Terry Hutchinson at the Extreme Sailing Series

While one half of Artemis Racing recovers in Auckland from the embarrassment of being the first to flip the new AC45, the other half of the Swedish Cup team’s squad is in Oman this week for the Extreme Sailing Series, Muscat.

For skipper Terry Hutchinson and his crew Sean Clarkson, Morgan Trubovich and Andy Fethers, this is their first ever big boat race in a multihull. So far they have got off to a good start – one of the four teams tied in first place on day one, slightly off the pace in the brisk conditions of day two, before being the stand-out team yesterday as the format of the regatta changed to ‘stadium sailing’, with short courses laid off the beach here at The Wave, Muscat. Artemis Racing is now second overall, just three points adrift of Groupe Edmond de Rothschild with two more days of racing to run.

Hutchinson admits he is still getting up to speed with these new catamaran things. “We are figuring it out slowly. I am so used to sailing a boat with a little tug on the helm and a little rudder load, but on these boats in particular if there is a little pull, anything other than neutral on the helm, it is an indication that the boat isn’t going well - for me it’s usually an indication that it feels well, but that’s not the case [with the Extreme 40s]. So we are all learning on the boat and it was really nice to have a good day because we had a clanger in the last race yesterday and I was pretty disappointed with how I sailed and it was nice to come back.”

Luna Rossa won the first race yesterday and this slightly bemused Hutchinson as while theory states that typically minimising the number of tacks is the way to win in catamarans, Paul Campbell-James’ team passed them despite putting one more tack. “Those are the things - just learning how to sail better and being more confident in the tactical manoeuvres of the boat, but we’ll get there.”

All-in-all Hutchinson has been thoroughly enjoying the high speed sailing at the Extreme Sailing Series Muscat. With 18 knot winds, sun and 30degC temperatures for the first two days, it would be hard not to. While Hutchinson says that minute-by-minute this is among the biggest adrenalin rushes he has had sailing.

“I’d be curious to wear a heart rate monitor to see how we’re all going, because I know that all the guys when they are doing the boat handling stuff are just flat out the entire time and that side of it is an absolute rush. Yesterday was not a great day for us, but you see the spray and it was a full-on day and it is hard to not be smiling when you are going along at 22-23 knots.”

But Hutchinson acknowledges that they are also getting used to making decisions at such high speed and sailing with the smaller crew (just four of them) compared to the AC monohulls or the TP52 in which Hutchinson’s Quantum Racing team won the Audi MedCup in 2009.

In terms of the decision-making on board the Artemis X40, Hutchinson says much the same as what Herve Cunningham told us occurs on Groupe Edmond de Rothschild: before each race they discuss their strategy but in the heat of racing, it is entirely down to Hutchinson.

“When the racing is on everyone else is so head down and trying to focus on sailing the boat well that it is a difficult one at best. Andy and Sean do really good work in the pre-start talking about the waves and talking about the angle and the position of the boat for the trigger [ie accelerating for the line].”

Several crew from other boats remarked on how well Artemis Racing was starting yesterday. Hutchinson confirmed this: “Probably the biggest thing we did well today was when we positioned the boat in the pre-start - we weren’t always the first at the spot but when we got into our spot we kept the momentum of our boat over the guys around us so that when we did sheet on and we did go we had a bit of a slingshot.”

A lot of this is about grunt – several teams are relying on big guys, the Craig Monks etc, to sheet on quickly prior to the gun going, but Hutchinson says there’s more to it than just that. “It is also about having the boat at the proper angle so that when they go on the traveller the boat accelerates. Then Sean and Andy go on the traveller and I pump the main and then we turn up and we go.”

In terms of training, Artemis Racing did 20 days of two boating in two stints in Miami, Hutchinson helming one boat and double Tornado bronze medallist Santi ‘the capsizer’ Lange in charge of the other. Hutchinson then followed this up with eight days in Oman prior to the start of this regatta.

In addition, like Dean Barker, Hutchinson has taken up A-Class catamaran racing and this year has sailed two regattas in Florida including the Coconut Grove Intergalacticc. “That was really really good. I was second in the first one with 35 boats and the second one turned into a one day regatta with four races and I ended up seventh. My goal both times was just to be in the top ten and I probably over achieved in the first one and finished where I deserved to finish in the second one.”

In the first he finished just ahead of Morgan Larson, while Italian AC helm Francesco Bruni, who is expected to be named skipper for Mascalzone Latino at some point, came home 10th. In the Intergalactics where Hutchinson was seventh, Larson came home second while Bruni was ninth.

When we spoke to Hutchinson in the autumn he was expecting some input into his cat sailing from US Tornado ace, Charlie Ogletree, who was at college with him. However Ogletree is now working with Bruni and instead the team are using ex-AC and round the world sailor and Extreme 40 skipper Nick Moloney and Andrew ‘Dog’ Palfrey (Iain Murray’s Star crew) as their coaches.

“One thing that Dog talked to us about was to make sure that our expectations don’t exceed our preparation and our time, and that’s all fine on paper but there’s a bunch of type A personalities that regardless of the amount of time that we have we just expect big things of ourselves! So when we don’t deliver you take it on the chin and try and figure out how to make it better.”

Despite the level of sailing at the Extreme Sailing Series not being quite as immaculate as the AC or Audi MedCup, Hutchinson is still respectful of the competition. “Everyone here is very very good and you sail against Roman [Hagara – double Tornado Olympic gold medallist] and the Alinghi guys and Pierre [Pennec] on the Gitana boat and they are really good. You can’t help but be impressed with how they sail the boat. We did some training with him [Hagara and Red Bull] and you watch him downwind – he is very nice and smooth and very fluid in the boat. Some of the sailing I have done in the past, you can work the boat around the race course and get away with it a little bit. Here, if you are not nice and balanced in the boat, you pay for it.

"We are seeing a side of the sport where the incremental measurement isn’t in 2/10ths of a knot, it is in 3-4 knots and you think about the % gain you get, it is a great learning curve.”

So what has he learned? “You learn that you have to be that much more focussed on the boat speed component. In our TP52 we didn’t always have the fastest boat, but we did start well and we could tack on people and put them behind you and you could play a defensive game and beat them. Here if you tack on someone and they bear off, they go through you to leeward and they sheet back on and then they come around your bow. So the speed component is a very big thing to be focussed on. It is an obvious statement, the percentage gains are way bigger.”

Hutchinson says that he won’t be skippering the Artemis Racing Extreme 40 for the next event in Qingdao, China. Instead Lange’s team will be aboard. “Artemis is really targeting the Extreme 40 as a great way to upscale our sailing team in high performance multihulls. We will choose getting all our sailors into it over the potential risk of being inconsistent on the race course, because it is more important for the longer term positioning of the team. We have 12 sailors on the sailing team so at any given time everyone will be sailing. This America’s Cup it is so different we are pacing ourselves. It is not the environment where you have two Version 5 boats and you load them up and go two boat testing for the next 24 months.”

As to Artemis Racing’s capsize of the AC45, Hutchinson confirms that it occurred while the boats had been brought to a standstill and the crew were taking five as they sorted out a jammed furling line. A gust caught the wing, the boats started reversing with the crew unable to react in time as the transom scoops dug in causing the AC45 to flip over...backwards.