Winning tactics

Skandia's navigator, former BT Global Challenge skipper Will Oxley, describes how they won

"The boys were constantly saying “so how many days did you do this for?” I’m clearly not right in the head," a normally restrained Will Oxley comments while bouncing around the cockpit of Skandia like a pinball in that strange place that is both extreme tiredness and euphoria.

It has been a good year for Oxley. He has won Lord Howe Island Race, the Hogs Breath on board the Swan 45 Joe, was second at Hamilton Island, did the weather for Wild Thing when they broke the Bass Strait record and back in Europe came second behind Zaraffa in the DaimlerChrysler transatlantic race. Today he added a line honours win in the Rolex Sydney-Hobart race.

"We have a new deck screen which I convinced them to buy so we knew where the line was and we were about a boat length off it at the start and we knew we had the controlling position on Zana," recounts Oxley. This was the first time the two supermaxis had lined up and it was Skandia that led out of the Heads at the start.

"Our initial plan was only to go about 1 mile off the offshore mark and then look at the layline. We knew that inshore it was going to be a little more left, but we knew offshore there was going to be a bit more favourable current. Once you get out to the 200m mark, traditionally at the shelf break is where the current is. Since the breeze was further right than we had anticipated we hung on going offshore. We then thought about tacking but Zana wasn’t tacking and we were getting a chance to guage off her. We could have tacked probably 25 minutes earlier, but we made the decision to change down to a headsail and it wasn’t a great change, so that kept us offshore a bit longer than we wanted." Offshore they were seeing roughly 1.5 knots of favourable current.

Headsail changes are a slight palava on Skandia as their headsails have hanks instead of a foil (see page 2...), so when they want to make a change they pull out the inner forestay out and hoist the number 4 rather than do the sail change bear headed. Effectively they carry out two sail changes in one.

At this point Zana pulled ahead and when Skandia finally tacked to head inshore, Zana tacked in their face. Coming out into the open sea, the wind was from the SSE and then went left and Oxley says that once they tacked the wind continued to back. Fortunately they were able to stay in favourable current and followed Zana down to Jervis Bay where the favourable current extends further inshore.

Once in towards the coast at 2000-2200 on the first night Skandia fought back with what proved to become their race winning move. "We made the conscience decision to foot off. In the afternoon on the coast it wasn’t going to turn into a true northeasterly, but it always goes left because of the heating up of the land and the Coriolis effect. But when the sun goes down and the heating goes away it always relaxes back. So we set ourselves up to make best use of that."

Knowing the wind would shift right relaxing the left hand 'thermal twist' as it went dark so Skandia cracked off by around 10 degrees losing height but managing to get south of Zana. As a result when the breeze went right instead of being overlapped the New Zealand supermaxi found themselves pointing at Skandia's transom.

Part of the reason for their ability to make calls such as this was that there seemed to be good corroboration between the various international weather models. "That gave us confidence about what was going to happen and this business about the breeze going left in the afternoons and also being more left inshore relative to offshore gives you a good feeling about the twist in the breeze and you can use that to your advantage.

"From then on we were controlling, so that off Gabo we wanted to be the windward advance boat because we knew we were going to be on starboard tack for 200 miles," continues Oxley. "So we did that and sometimes we went fast just to keep that controlling position. All the models had shown we were going to be a long way offshore and that there was this V of no pressure from Cape Eddistone at the top of Tasmania, going out. Normally the rule is that you have to be 30 miles off there. But in this particular situation we reckoned we had to be 55 miles off there. All the models were in agreement that it was soft there."

All was going rosily until 1600 on 27 December while Oxley and skipper Grant Wharington were talking shop down at the chart table. "Suddenly there was this huge bang and the bow went down and we came to a complete halt. It was a bit like when you are under kite and you go down the falls and the boat stops and the chute just blows out. So we went from 13 knots to zero and we were like ‘shit - is the keel falling off?’ People were ripping things apart to check the keel and everything. We looked over the side and the keel was still there and there was all this turbulence and because there were stopped we were making leeway. And it was bounce-bounce-bounce and then suddenly something disappeared and it was VOOM - off we went again and out the back popped something like a Sunfish or a big shark."

Oxley thinks that in the course of this incident they may have damaged their keel. "It seemed to hit pretty high. We had already dodged two sunfish that day and on the trip up we had seen six and they weigh about a ton. So that was nearly a race stopper."

The drama did not end there. Navigators are not supposed to sleep on the Hobart race but exhausted Oxley had negotiated himself a bunk for an hour. "I laid down for 10 minutes when there was CRRRRNCH – BANG and this huge tearing sound." The underdeck sheave for the Spectra steering cable on the starboard wheel ripped out. The helm dived for the port wheel mystified about what had happened, while down below it was quite obvious what had happened.

"Every time you bounce off a wave there is a huge shock loading. Clearly with a new boat, with lots of loadings it wasn’t set up properly. So the boys said 'we can stick it back in'. They drilled a couple of holes through the carbon and through the back of the sheave and then wacked two screwdrivers in! And where the carbon had cracked above, - the sheave is trying to pull out and up - we chopped up a fibreglass batten and then we had to self tap it. So one of the deck fittings has got some good self tapers so we unscrewed half of the self tapers and drilled through and set up braces either side. The problem was then we needed the screwdrivers to do up the screws…" However their top piece of running repairs held until the finish.

Back to the battle against Zana and Oxley believes that they had extended to around 6 miles crossing Bass Strait. When the wind dropped to 10 knots approaching the north of Tasmania, Zana closed their lead down to just one mile and which they then increased again to two miles.

To get away from the wind shadow of Tasmania Skandia found herself 70 miles offshore and here over the morning of 28 December they experienced the worse seaway. "We had 35 knots and a 3-4m sea state and the waves had no backs and we were just dropping off waves. So we had to back off a bit because we thought we were just going to break the boat."

Here they made another big call. "We were expecting that the breeze was going to go left on us, but there was a front going through and we were on the edge of it. Zana tacked off but we waited for a bit more left and got it about 40 minutes later, but we lost sight of Zana. So we tacked and fortunately an hour later we saw them again and we had doubled our lead - up to about four miles."

The tack back saw them heading for Tasmania but once again they were able to use the effect of the 'thermal twist', this time with the added benefit of the gradient breeze to lift them around Tasman Island at the southeasternmost corner of Tasmania. This lift proved so dramatic that they ended having to gybe to round the corner.

The home straight, but the race was far from being in the bag. At Cape Roaul, the final headland before rounding up into Storm Bay, the wind shut down. "Cape Roaul is always a difficult place. Tasman Island you can go closed to - it never seems to have a wind shadow. Then we reached across at good pace with a Code Zero and nearly got past the thick of it but then we went BUMP. The breeze went from a northeasterly to a northwesterly and we actually stopped." Zana closed down their lead to less than a mile.

This area is notoriously complex in terms of playing the conditions. "Last year on Wild Thing we were two miles behind Nicorette and we ended up six miles in front at the finish," says Oxley. "So we have all played that game a few times. It is all about holding your nerve and breaking out of the wind shadow."

From then on it was a case of keeping Skandia between Zana and the finish line. Aside from Grant Wharington who put the project together Oxley praised sailing master Barney Walker. A trimmer and helmsman on NewsCorp in the last Volvo Ocean Race, Walker has today notched up his sixth win in the Sydney-Hobart.

Aside from making a number of tactical calls that came good Oxley was very pleased with his technology on board. He has a new waterproof on deck computer. This is definitely waterproof because on a couple of occasions after he had been at the chart table, he had come on deck to look for it only to find his new computer skimming along behind the boat, towed along by its umbilical like a water skier.

He was also using the excellent local cellphone system called CDMA 1X. This is an alternative to GSM, working up to 40km offshore and offers data transmission speeds of almost three times that of a land line. Sailing up the Darwent River to the finish while on deck he could see the weather model as well as reading off the last observations from the shore in real time.

For some more photos of Carlo Borlenghi's photos of Skandia - see page two