Gavin Brady on racing maxi boats

The BMW Oracle helm was on board Stewart Thwaites' Konica Minolta when she broke in the Rolex Sydney Hobart

Between Christmas and New Year Gavin Brady was taking a holiday from his normal duty as helmsman for BMW Oracle Racing duties, but the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race was perhaps a holiday too far. Here Brady describes the hours and minutes that led to the structural failure and subsequent retirement of Konica Minolta, Stewart Thwaites’ water-ballasted 98ft maxi which at the time was leading the Boxing Day run south.

"Stewart and I were both laughing early on in the race that if we could get line honours this would be our last Rolex Sydney Hobart," says Brady. "We’ve both won on handicap so to win line honours would complete it, and we could spend many Christmas dinners at home. But it looks like we’re going to have come back again."

The dramatic incident occurred at around 0600 on 28 December. "When it happened, I was down with Stewart at the nav station, considering if we’d gone far enough into the beach for smooth water," Brady continues. "We went over the first wave, and thought 'I hope we don’t go over any more of those', and then 30 seconds later we went over another one and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. The bow felt like it was facing the sky and I would probably say a good part of the keel was out of the water, and then there’s that lonely five seconds before the boat lands back in the water. You just hope that you may have a soft landing, but we had a hard one. We were fortunate we didn’t break the mast. The guys did a good job of unloading the boat, but when the boat gets 30 feet in the air, with 28 tonnes, there’s no such thing as a soft landing."

The landing was so hard in fact that Konica Minolta fractured her deck. "We had this big swell from the south and a chop coming from the west. Unfortunately we got one with the chop and the swell coming together and that was it, all over. I thought when I heard the bang, and the boat came down, I thought I was looking at OneAustralia. I thought the crack was going to go down the side of the boat, and it was going to break in half. It was pretty scary. Luckily it stopped where the windows are. We put floorboards up underneath the deck and did everything we could to patch it up. When we tried to get going again and said ‘let’s just try to finish the race,’ we put it back on the wind. I went up to the bow to see how it was going but the bow was moving six inches. We were going to snap the boat in half if we carried on. You just can’t have carbon fibre doing that."

Fortunately instead of the hull breaking, as happened to OneAustralia for Konica Minolta it was the deck that partially broke and this was what enabled to get the maxi safely back to port. "But it’s only going to take three days to repair. We’ll cut it out and laminate some new stuff back in there. You can chop chunks out of the boat, gain 2 grammes, and redo the whole boat."

Designer of Konica Minolta Brett Bakewell-White gave his view on what happened:
"The damage to the boat was relatively minor. It consisted of a core shear failure across the cabintop from window to window - approx. 1.8m long - the skins remained intact. The transverse crease in the cabintop was about 150mm in front of the keel tower and behind the mast. Essentially it was caused by the keel's momentum compressing the cabintop as the boat crashed out of the back of a very large wave. This part of the cabintop had received a significant design effort when the boat was designed and was capable of exceeding ABS grounding requirements, so it is rather surprising that sailing loads have managed to exceed these quite stringent requirements. Whilst we tried to shore up the damage by bolting through the cabintop with bunktops above and below, we found that the continuous movement of the keel began to slowly tear the carbon skins with the inevitable result being a gaping gash across the cabintop and the possibility of water entering the cabin. We chose to withdraw at this point in the interests of crew safety and limiting damage to the boat.

"Once we turned and ran with the seas the cabintop was fine and we contacted local coastguard who guided us to a mooring at Bingalong Bay. This took us a couple of hours to make port and tidy the boat.

"Over the next few days the cabintop was through bolted with plywood either side (as we had attempted at sea) and she was motored down the coast to Hobart - still arriving before many of the race fleet. Had we had some substantial material such as plywood we could have affected the same repair and won the race, but only having panels of Nomex with thin carbon skins meant that we had nothing substantial to bolt through."


Racing at 100ft maxi

Aside from this dramatic incident Brady has some interesting observations to make about how this 100ft long maxi behaves: "These boats move around a lot. When you’re looking from the bow back down the boat, in these waves the boat looks somewhat like a train. It’s moving - the whole boat’s moving - which is a pretty scary phenomenon. If the leech line on the main is too loose and it start flapping, you’re lying in the bunk, and the bunk starts rattling. It’s a bit of a scary feeling when the whole boat vibrates just because the leech line is set slightly wrong. The room for error is so incredibly small.

"But she’s one of the strongest maxis out there. She’s almost been around the world, in terms of the number of miles she’s sailed. No boat would have got over that wave without breaking, and if it did it would be so bloody slow it wouldn’t be worth racing.

"The cockpit of these boats aren’t that deep, so there’s no real protection. The bow is 80ft in front of the helmsman and when the bow is going through the wave in front, the stern is in the previous wave. So while you’re looking forward trying to concentrate, you’re wondering what’s going to come over your shoulder, maybe a freak wave, and sweep the helmsman straight off the wheel.

"Smaller boats are a lot more forgiving because they fit into the troughs. A little move of the rudder and you can soften the landing dramatically. Whereas with these big boats, a bit like a 747, when you make a move you’re fully committed. The approach is done. Once you’re going up a wave, how you come down it is already decided. By the time the wave reaches you it hits you with such force, it’s unbelievable. So you need to look forward, but you can’t look forward."

While all this is going on so precise helming of the boat must be maintained. "You’ve only got a five degree steering angle to work within around 30 degrees apparent. If you let the boat get to 35 degrees apparent, the forestay stretches two feet - two feet! So then the jib gets bigger and turns into a spinnaker and then it drags you even further off the breeze and before you know you’re reaching, fighting to get the boat back on the wind. I don’t know how many times I was yelling my head off, and no one knew what I was on about. I went ‘****! ****!’ And the guys are saying ‘What? What’s wrong?’ And I’m just head down, saying: ‘Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter!’

"Normally I’m used to sailing America’s Cup boats at 18 degrees apparent, but they’re so refined, so well balanced, you can keep it going at 18-19 degrees apparent because you can see where you’re going, the sails are in balance, everyone’s in their position, everything’s brand new, you've got all the controls in the world, plus computers and stuff. Then you’ve got this big 100 footer in these big seas, and you’ve got to sail it within a 5 degree angle - you just can’t do it. It’s just impossible. And the consequences are, well we’ve got a split right through the deck unfortunately, to prove the price of sailing outside that 5 degree wind angle."

So were they pushing too hard? "We had a Code 5 jib up, which was conservative because to change the jib on this boat takes about 40 minutes. During the night we went through what we thought was another thunderstorm. At one point we had to bear away back towards Sydney to change the headsail. It was so windy we couldn’t change the sail going upwind. We were going downwind doing 20 knots towards Sydney. We must have given away three miles. But if we hadn’t have done that the jib would have been ripped out of the guys’ hands. If the jib had ripped out of the puller once, it’s done, it’s knackered, you can’t pull the jib up again. But it’s horrible doing that. You don’t want to do it. Your opposition are down here and you’re going to turn. You can get the jib down a bit easier, sail with the mainsail for 15 minutes, get everything ready, get the new one up while you’re doing 23 knots towards Sydney. But we felt we had to do it."

Konica Minolta will be repaired in Hobart. At present her structural engineers at High Modulus are completing a repair specification. Once fixed the boat will be sailed back to New Zealand. Her next race may be the NZ ORC Club National Championship to be held in Wellington in February.