Volvo's navigating nipper

madforsailing spoke to Ian Moore about how navigating on the pre-race favourite illbruck

Fresh faced and 30 years old Ian Moore has managed to wangle his way not just into the Volvo Ocean Race, but has landed himself the plumb spot as co-navigator aboard pre-race favourite illbruck Challenge.

Moore admits that knowing the 'right' people helped him get this enviable position. He had worked with Roger 'Clouds' Badham on two Admiral's Cup campaigns. Clouds worked with John Kostecki in the last America's Cup, but when the Californian asked him to get involved with their Volvo campaign, Clouds was unable to oblige due to his commitments to Team New Zealand (although since then he has agreed to work with Grant Dalton's Amer Sports campaign). Kostecki asked him if he could recommend anyone and the rest, as they say, is history.

Moore got the bug for sailing in his native Northern Ireland, racing on Belfast Loch and increasingly it became central to his life. "I wanted to go to a university where there was good sailing," he says, explaining why he ended up at Southampton reading naval architecture.

While at university he was a regular crew on David McClean's Babbalaas and in 1996 sailed the Commodore's Cup with Eddie Warden-Owen's Welsh team as he jokes in his normal self-depricating way they couldn't find enough Welsh crew. "I was bowman, but they didn't have a navigator, so for a while I was doing both jobs - but things seemed to go quite well."

Warden-Owen was clearly impressed by Moore and invited him to be navigator on board the Mumm 36 Breeze in the 1997 Admiral's Cup. "It was the first professional event I'd done - quite a jump from the type of sailing I'd been doing before," says Moore. "It was quite exciting to sail against all the big names you read about in Seahorse." (This was pre-madforsailing, remember). "Eddie took me into the Italian team and after that the Italians asked me to continue when Ian Walker took over."

Moore joined illbruck in November 2000 at which time Kostecki & co where testing out of Fremantle in Western Australia. Apart from one day out on Silk Cut, this was the first occasion Moore had sailed a Volvo Ocean 60. He was thrown in the deep end. "John was keen to do some time in the Southern Ocean with the crew," he recalls. "So we sailed the boat round to Auckland round the bottom of Tasmania." He then took part in the Sydney-Hobart and has been with them training and racing ever since.

On board he shares the navigation workload with Spanish Whitbread veteran Juan Vila, who is currently undertaking his fourth race, while ashore they have Dennis Conner's America's Cup met man Chris Bedford keeping an eye on things and who advises them in port. "They were keen to have two navigators in the team because the race has got so orientated this way. This time round there is so much information available. New bits and pieces of forecast come through 24 hours a day. You can't stop navigating for four hours." While Vila has huge experience on the round the world race course, Moore is better on the technical side and says his naval architecture degree gives him a useful view of the big picture.

Key to Moore's role on board prior to the race was working on the number crunching side of the sail development programme. Much of this development was carried out on illbruck's two identical training boats (the former EFs from four years ago). As they announced their campaign so early, Illbruck were lucky in being able to do a bulk of their testing at a stage when many campaigns had still to find funding.



While Illbruck's sailmakers, including Robert Hook, who created Paul Cayard's revolutionary Code Zeros in the last race, would use their instinct and experience to create and develop new sails, Moore and Vila would be down below coming up with numbers to back up their ideas. The time advantage Moore says, worked to their advantage because building new sails takes time when they are made from 3DL, as a slot must be booked months ahead at North's moulding factory in Nevada, rather like booking a slot in a boatyard prior to have a boat built.

Moore believes that the way the boats are being sailed has developed slightly from the last race with more attention being given to the optimum angles which suit certain sail combinations. "You've got to sail the angle that is fast," he explains. "Each sail has a sweet spot and to get the maximum speed you have to really know your sail inventory and constantly be sailing on VMC". VMC is velocity made course, similar to velocity made good, except that it is to a waypoint and can be on any point of sail, rather than specifically upwind.

The most sensitive sail in this respect he maintains is the Code Zero. "It's got a fairly narrow angle at a particular wind strength." With the new carbon spars, these powerful sails can be used upwind in up to 10 knots of breeze. Above that it depends upon the sea state.

One of the biggest jobs for navigators during the race this time round is accumulating and then analysing the available weather data. Prior to the start of each leg each of the eight teams submits a list of 10 websites they want to look at. These lists are amalgamated and sent round to the teams, who are then allowed to look at any of the 80 websites listed.

The boats use their Inmarsat satcoms to surf the web. They have Mini-M, which is fine for voice communications but this is not global and with a 2,400 Baud rate is too slow for data transmissions (cellphones for example are usually 9,600Baud). For ISDN-speed data transmission they use their Inmarsat B terminals. While they are racing Moore reckons he and Vila spend around 1.5 hours per day on line this way. At $8 per minute rates (roughly $750 per day) this works out as a costly exercise, although Moore puts this in perspective. "It doesn't compare to the other money being spent on the campaign."

Moore is unquestionably an up and coming star in offshore race boat navigation and someone you will be reading more about in the future.

Juan Vila at illbruck's chart table



On the competition

Of the other navigators in the race Moore saying that he is in awe of djuice's Jean-Yves Bernot. "He is a god in offshore navigation. He is hugely respected. He has done so much work on the met for these races." Moore describes Bernot's style of navigation as 'analogue', by which he means he looks at historical data and trends so is aware from previous scenarios what can develop and applies this to what he encounters on the race course. "He looks at a weather system and says 'I've seen that pattern before' rather than analysing the minutae of the system. That's the way his manuals come across."

SEB's Marcel van Triest he sees as someone who likes to hit corners - born out on at least two occasions on leg one. "If he's right it's going to pay big time. That is difficult to sail against," he says. On News Corp, Nick White is primarily a weather forecaster. "He is a boffin. He is very, very clever and probably wrote his own software." In fact White was one of the brains behind the KiwiTech software that has since become Raytheon's RayTech Navigator software. "Weather models are not going to be right all the time. But Nick will be able to inteprete them well."

Amer Sports One's Roger Nilson is the oldest navigator in this race and Moore believes will have benefitted from working with Roger Badham on this event (Badham worked with Grant Dalton on The Race), while he also says that Dee Smith brings a lot to their program.

Moore also holds great respect for Tyco's Steve Hayles whom he has sailed with and against a lot. "Steve is an extremely bright guy. He's a boffin, a border line genius. He's adaptable and writes his own software. He's a lot more experienced than when he did Silk Cut." However he says at times he can be quite conservative and occasionally too dogmatic and inflexible. "If he believes in something he is more than prepared to stand up for what he believes in."

Of the previous winner Mark Rudiger, currently navigator and co-skipper on Assa Abloy, Moore says he has raced against him twice, when he went the wrong way in the Fastnet race and in the Cape to Rio race where he was in a much faster boat than Moore was on. "He's a good on-deck navigator. He's good at saying "this is the way we should sail around that cloud." EF sailed through the Tropics well. They put the boat in the right place." Indeed Assa Abloy was in the third place when they went through this time - although their tactics after the Ilha Trindade waypoint left much to be desired.