Up a gear

Former 18-Foot Skiff and International 14 title holder Rob Greenhalgh talks to Tim Jeffery about his new day job: as a helmsman onboard the radical Juan Kouyoumdjian-designed ABN AMRO 1

SH: Put us behind the wheel of ABN AMRO 1.
RG: It's not heavy on the wheel. You've got control, so you are never on the edge and you've got power. It is more like driving a lorry because you can go anywhere. If you want to come up a bit you can. There's plenty of power with the keel out there and every time you heel over a bit too much, with no daggerboard, you can slip sideways a little and take some of the pain out of it. Then when you want to go a bit faster you just head up a bitŠ

It is not uncommon these days to find design review articles where great emphasis is placed on the development of a sailboat design using a Velocity Prediction Program (VPP). Assertions made about VPP use in a design development project may lead to the conclusion that because of its use there should be some assurance that the design would be fast.

There is no doubt that any serious modern design effort should include the analysis of several designs by means of a VPP, but the progress made in recent years that has led to more accurate VPP predictions has also led into a variety of VPP methodologies, some of which may not necessarily mean more accurate predictions.

What should it mean to the average sailor or owner that a VPP was used in the development of their boat? It should mean that the designer, guided by VPP predictions, was able to develop, from a baseline design, several candidate designs and then choose, for a selected set of operating sailing conditions, the one that offered the best performance. The VPP predictions are therefore critical in mapping the path to a better design, but the result is necessarily closely related to the particular features of the VPP used in the development process.

To read the remainder of this and many other articles, please purchase your copy of the January 2005 edition of Seahorse International Sailing available at selected newsstands or by calling: + 44 (0) 1590 671899 or by email at: info@seahorse.co.uk

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