The Snake in New Zealand

Our forked tongued Around Alone correspondent on chaos theory and the latest news from Tauranga

The welcome in the North Island town of Tauranga has been the most effusive of all the Around Alone stopovers so far. The enthusiasm here for yacht racing, indeed for sport generally, is high. Admiration for the skippers’ achievements is evident and mirrored in the imagination and breadth of the events organised locally for the duration of the fleet’s stay here on the Bay of Plenty’s coast in a combination of traditional Maori hospitality and the community’s genial disposition.

Tauranga has many similarities with Cowes, Isle of Wight. It is a seasonal tourist town and destination for weekending Aucklanders and absentee landlords that is intensely boat and water orientated. Tauranga, though, is not burdened by the stifling and often oppressive racing history and tradition that pervades Cowes and has an animated and highly charged atmosphere that is more karaoke than Corinthian.

Much of the focus here is on the Kiwi skipper of Hexagon, Graham Dalton, who finished third in Class 1 after an impressively sailed race from South Africa. The support is, naturally, partisan and The Tauranga Yacht and Motorboat Club is a mass of Hexocentric banners; “Welcome Graham!”/”Follow Hexagon around the globe,”/”Support New Zealand’s solo sailor,”/”Come and watch Dalton smoking tabs,” sort of thing. Dalton does deserve praise; his performance in this leg of Around Alone has propelled him up the points table and he now lies in fourth place, trailing Emma Richards on Pindar by one point.

New Zealand represents the 'halfway point' of The Around Alone and work in the race yacht’s base, The Tauranga Bridge Marina, reflects the effects of the Southern Ocean and the distance still to race. Bernard Stamm (Class 1 victor) has hauled his Bobst Groupe-Armor Lux out of the water to repair an eight feet long section of delamination on the yacht’s starboard side; a legacy of Stamm’s ability to race full-on with the hammer down from start gun to finish line. Emma Richards briefly lifted Pindar out to replace rudder bearings while her torn 3DL mainsail is at the North loft in Auckland undergoing surgery.

Second in Class 1, Thierry Dubois' Solidaires and Class 2 winner Brad van Liew's Tommy Hilfiger Freedom America have both removed their rigs for checking. Sadly, van Liew also has his yacht in a cradle to undertake some carbon and Nomex work on his hull; an injury sustained not in the fury of the globe’s most wicked ocean, but from being stuffed onto a pontoon by a RIB chartered to assist with docking the boats after crossing the finish line (all propeller shafts remain static until a scrutineer can snip the seal). Coincidentally, earlier in the day the same RIB managed to both run out of fuel and ram Pindar whilst ‘assisting’ the yacht post-finish though, fortunately, Richards’s boat suffered no damage.

Close to van Liew’s 50, fellow American and guitar-playing Class1 skipper, Bruce Schwab on Ocean Planet has cut a large section from his yacht’s plywood bow and is planning an attempt to remedy his narrow, Californian designed, sixty-footer’s forward buoyancy problems. Schwab has found that Ocean Planet buries her bow consistently in big seas.

The Snake is a Chaos Theory evangelist. Chaos Theory is not a dogma one is likely to hear amid tambourines in Holy Trinity Brompton, but seeks to confront why, for example, the stream of smoke rising from a cigarette should randomly eddy into a mass of wild swirls. The Around Alone is rich with Chaos applications (to avoid confusion or upsetting anyone, Chaos will be referred to as ‘non linear dynamism’). One of the foundations of Cha…..non linear dynamism is The Butterfly Effect. This proposes that the minute turbulence caused by a butterfly moving its wings in Tokyo will have an effect on storms taking place in New York.

We can see profound evidence of non linear dynamism in the Around Alone immediately. During the second leg of the race form UK to South Africa all of the class 2 yachts took shelter in a Spanish port from a filthy gale in the Bay of Biscay. The delayed arrival of these competitors to South Africa forced an extension of the Cape Town stopover and the shifting of dates in New Zealand and leg 4’s destination, Brazil. Consequently, the race will now finish in Rhode Island towards the end of May. Any Class 1 or 2 yachts wishing to enter the doublehanded Transat Jacques Vabre Race will have, effectively, four months to return to Europe, plan, repair, rebuild, rebudget, modify, and prepare before being locked in Le Havre pre-start.

This situation cannot be wholly attributed to the race organisation as most of Class 2 have no agenda or wish to enter the TJV later this year, but this decision has compromised the Class 1 teams for whom this transatlantic race represents an integral part of their competition calendar. Next week in “Chaos Corner” we will attempt to construct a Lorenzian Waterwheel from bits of an old quantum physics professor.

Taking a break from Tauranga, The Snake travelled to Auckland and watched Oracle throw away the opportunity of prolonging the Louis Vuitton Cup. Posing as sailing correspondent for 'Shrub and Lawn Monthly', your reporter found paradise on the race media boat in The Hauraki Gulf; both close to the racing and drip-fed information by the stunning Virtual Spectator screen onboard.

While waiting for the breeze to fill in, The Snake pestered the press boat crew over the individual names of the islands encircling the racecourse and was assured that Tiritiri-Matangi (the island just NE of the windward mark) is Maori for “Sacred Place From Which To Watch Ridiculously Expensive Match Racing.”

Any disappointment felt when Oracle failed to completely explode their gennaker on the finish line was quickly made up for by the Alinghi victory party thrown at the team’s pink headquarters in Viaduct Basin. Slithering passed heavy and appropriately scary security (should Vinnie Jones ever ponder the existence of Kiwi cousins he must contact the Maori Heritage Bureau) your fearless gardening hack mooched with the Louis Vuitton ‘eminences grises’ and cream of New Zealand womanhood while attempting to drink his own bodyweight in champagne. The party cranked until shortly before dawn in the boatshed/nightclub and after taking a brief, but essential, snooze in a very comfortable portaloo, The Snake was convinced that whatever the Swiss (known locally and inaccurately as ‘Team New Switzerland’) manage to achieve in The America’s Cup, they have certainly won the battle of the parties.

Indeed, it is going to be almost impossible for Alinghi to generate any positive press over the coming weeks as the America’s Cup spin police within the nation’s media seem to have lost any objectivity and is rapidly working itself into a righteous, patriotic frenzy.

On Sunday 9th February The Around Alone sets off on leg 4; destination Salvador, Brazil. The fleet will arrive shortly after Salvador’s carnival; a festival stretching over four weeks during which the town’s streets are awash with happy partygoers, beer and bodily fluids. There are two aspects of arriving in Salvador immediately after carnival; one bad, one good. On the downside, most of the town’s population are either dead, asleep or in an STD clinic and whatever the financial rewards you are offering, it is difficult to achieve much whether you wish to buy a spanner or enter the complex world of Brazilian bureaucracy.

A bonus of arriving post carnival is that almost all the local pickpockets, footpads and ‘capitoes d’aeria’ (‘captains of the sand,’ lightening fast, juvenile beach thieves) take a well-earned rest after an intensive, exhausting and lucrative month of robbery. Coincidentally, many of the Salvadorian police (who individually pack enough military hardware to give Andy McNab the jitters) choose this time to go on holiday or brush up their skills at the local gun and bazooka club.

What is certain is a warm welcome is guaranteed from certain trades in this vibrant country of sinhoritas and marguerites.

Yours, hiding out in the bottle bank behind The Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron,
The Snake.