New man at the top

We speak to the Royal Ocean Racing Club's new Commodore, David Aisher

If there was a person destined to become Commodore of the Royal Ocean Racing Club, then it would be the latest man to take up the role, David Aisher.

Aisher comes from one of British sailing's great dynasties, all of whom have held close ties with the St James-based club. Sir Owen Aisher, David's grandfather and founder of the family firm, Marley Tiles, was an Admiral of RORC and held the position of treasurer for years.

Owen was the first sailor in the Aisher family. He start off on board an A-Rater on the river Thames in the 1930s and had built the first of what would become of one of longest lineages of yachts - the Yeomans - no1 launched in 1936. David Aisher's present boat is Yeoman XXXI.

To add to the confusion, David's father is also called Owen as was his great-grand father - so at one point there were three Owen Aishers around. One of the most famous Aishers is David's uncle Robin, the youngest of Sir Owen's four children, who won bronze in the 5.5m at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and has since been a keen Admiral's Cup competitor. Robin is also an ex-Commodore of RORC. A regular crew on the Aisher family yachts was HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

The young David Aisher was brought weened on a diverse diet of dinghy sailing including Fireflys at school, Cadets and GP14s, although he says he later got into sailing big boats through friends rather than through the family. His 20s and 30s coincided with the heyday of IOR and heated competition in the quarter, half, one and ton tonner classes, an era looked back upon fondly by all those who experienced it. Aside from the ton classes, he also regularly sailed on board a 12m, a J/24 and his Sigma 33 called Mandrake.

"I did quite a lot of offshore and then when grandfather died in 1993, I took on Yeoman XXVIII, the Sigma 38 and sailed that until 1999 " Aisher takes up the story. However he sold the Sigma in 1999 to buy uncle Robin's Judel Vrolijk IMS 44 Yeoman XXXI. This he had Simon Rogers convert over to IRM - fortunately it was an early generation IMS design and thus not so tippy, which he campaigned in the 2000 Commodores' Cup. Since then Aisher says they have put the boat virtually back to her original trim, but with a new Rogers keel. Last year they were lying third in class in the RORC series until the Rolex Fastnet Race when they were pushed down to sixth .



Above: hull number one of the new Rogers IRC46 emerges from Pom Green's boatyard in Thailand. More photos on the following pages...

Over recent years Aisher has worked with Simon Rogers on the design for his new IRC 46. While this boat flowed from Rogers' hand, her concept is very much Aisher's. For example while most race boats destined to compete under handicap must have some sort form of ratable accommodation, this didn't entirely conform to Aisher's notion of what he wanted. "I do a lot of the offshore races rather than inshore and I never cruise the boat, so there was no point in having a cruising-orientated interior," he says. "I was looking to have a boat as racing-orientated as you could get it, but having the facilities down below where you have a head, a galley and pipecots, but nothing for show like wood trim. So it has no pretence to be a cruiser racer, it is a full-on race boat, one which you can take offshore and you can sleep the crew on when you get to the other end."

Another classic example of this is the TP52. The IMS rule these boats are built to requires a minimum amount of accommodation including a cabin top of a certain size - but yet you will never see a TP52 cruising, so why not leave it to be self-limiting? Even owners with boats that they race competitively under IRC will rarely use them for cruising maintains Aisher.

Aged 54, Aisher is perhaps surprisingly one of RORC's oldest Commodores. The Commodore is traditionally someone who actively sails in the club's events, and although there are many younger eligible members, Aisher believes that due to modern day lifestyles they don't have the necessary time available to devote to club duties. "Today people want to pay their money and go off and do something whether it is skydiving, handgliding, windsurfing, and let someone else handle the running of it, whereas before people were much more willing to organise it as well . That is a difficulty we have. But saying that we have some very good people on the Committee who are willing to put the time in and who do a great deal of racing ."

By way of introduction to the more thorny subject of RORC and handicap rules, Aisher talks about how the face of yacht racing has changed over the last 30 years. In the 1970s for example IOR was the only game in town and one raced in the 'ton' classes aboard very similar boats. Today how many classes can you choose from? Boats have also got bigger. In the 1970s a 50 footer was huge - seen perhaps in the same way as we view an 80 or a 100 footer today.

But the biggest difference is that the types of yachts have become more diverse with everything now available from displacement boats to state of the art light weight planing machine, with movable displacement in the form of canting keels and/or water ballast, made from a wide range of materials. Performance has also soared. Aisher compares a 50 footer of the 1970s with his new weapon: "Boats of 50-60ft you went racing in, traditionally were big heavy displacement ocean cruisers. If you went to weather I’d rather be on a big old Swan than my new boat, but crack off the wind and today it is a different sort of sailing - wow, you wouldn’t swap that for anything. This will do 20 + knots off the wind." As with his new Rogers IRC 46 so, the TP52es he describes as performing like big dinghies.

This great spread of performance, Aisher maintains, is perhaps the aspects causing the biggest headache when it comes to conjuring up a new Grand Prix Rule - for yes, RORC and the Rating Office are still working on this despite the withdrawal of the ORC and US Sailing from the rule working party.

Should, for example, a Grand Prix Rule attempt to rate all these new high performance boats equitably or should different styles of boat, such as canting keelers be separated out as perhaps multihulls have been? "If you take a race like the Rolex Fastnet Race or the Rolex Sydney Hobart – are you racing all the boats together under one rule to get one prize or say effectively 'we have three different fleets here' racing for three prizes?

"We are beginning to get to the areas of what you have seen in the car racing scene for a number of years where you have Formula 1, Formula 2, Formula Ford and club racing, etc but everyone accepts that the championship is Formula 1 and the club racers do something different. The advances they had in the car world 50-75 years ago, in terms of production we are now getting that within the boat world, so how do you actually deal with that?"

In racing at the moment, there is the demand particularly from events like the Fastnet and Hobart races to be able to race a 100ft state of the art canting keeler against a conventionally ballasted 30 footer. In motor racing terms this would like pitching up to a race track in your 1.2 Ford Focus expecting to take on in a meaningful way, Michael Schumacher in his Ferrari. "There is no other sport in the world where you can do that and the dilemma within our sport is in trying to make it work. We want to bring people together but we are trying also to say 'we’ve got different things out there'." To date IRC has been doing this successfully says Aisher, but what is needed is a rule that will sit on top of IRC, and is robust to withstand being prodded and probed by yacht designers looking for an edge.

Obviously one way of splitting race boats out from cruiser racers or cruising boats, or perhaps more accurately fast from slow boats, is to use a simple formula, as Cork Week have employed in the past, saying that boats under a certain displacement:length ratio must race under IRM, leaving relatively slower boats to fight it out under IRC. "They did a fantastic job," says Aisher of Ireland's top regatta. "Of all the regattas that I know of, you look at what Cork did and they have been incredibly successful – they have great parties as well – they have used IRM and IRC and they have one designs and they have used the full gamut of what is going on."

We will publish part two of this article next week