Yacht race takes IT on board

Technology has brought big yacht racing to the masses, writes James Brown

Even in the tough world of ocean yacht racing, the Global Challenge Race
is unique.

The brainchild of former solo round-the-world yachtsman Sir Chay Blyth, the race involves 12 identical boats sailing around the world in the wrong direction – anti-clockwise – against the prevailing winds and currents.

The race ensures the hardest possible and least comfortable sailing conditions.

But instead of hardened crews of professionals, Blyth sends out his yachts with groups of 17 near total beginners, including accountants, lorry drivers and office workers.

The technology-oriented age of ocean yacht racing is making it possible for these non-professional sailors to take part in races such as the Global Challenge – something that was inconceivable in the past. The boats have become more reliant on technology – a particular passion of Blyth’s.

‘The one thing that is crystal clear about yachting now is you cannot hope to get near the podium if you don’t have computers on board,’ he says.

‘You need technology and systems that will feed you information all the time, so you can get the very best out of the boat. If you don’t have it you are going nowhere.’

And the Global Challenge Race is no insulated thrill ride; the danger is real.

‘Going the wrong way makes it very uncomfortable and very hard,’ says Blyth. ‘But that’s the ingredient that attracts people to do it. It’s the roughy-toughy that makes them want to get in there.

‘It’s when you get to Cape Horn that things become difficult,’ he says.

‘I have been around the Cape four times. The last time I was capsized in a trimaran and was in the water for 19 hours. I have also been in three hurricanes and it’s pretty horrific stuff.’

Despite the danger, there have been five Global Challenge yacht races since 1989, each one more successful than the last. The next one takes place in 2008.

Technology is also making the sport of big yacht racing more accessible to a wider audience.

Technology allowed the public to follow Ellen MacArthur’s solo round-the-world record attempt on a daily basis, with a flow of data transmitted to her base
headquarters in the UK.

And Global Challenge skipper Denise Caffari is a big supporter of the impact technology has made on yachting.

For a start, it is the technology on the Global Challenge yacht Aviva Challenge that supports her current effort to become the first woman to sail non-stop the wrong way around the world single-handed.

Speaking before she left on her epic voyage, Caffari – who was also a crew
skipper in the last Global Challenge race – said she believes in the role of
technology as a force to make yachting better, faster and more popular.

‘We now have GPS, which allows you to navigate and fix your position all the time,’ she says.

‘We have electronic charts routing us and we have grid files from a web site
on weather that we can download and overlay on the chart.

‘There is a touch-feely weather and sea condition information system that tells you where you are, the conditions you are in and where you are geographically, all represented on a computer,’ she says.

‘You can plan your route, to a greater or lesser extent, to avoid the potential
dangers and traumas.

‘Then the system is logging data all the time from the instruments on board – all information you could want, such as wind speed, sea temperature and wave height.’
Data logging is what separates a boat that is simply trying to be safe and know where it is, from one that is trying to race and constantly looking for an extra knot of speed.

And to aid data collection, the fleet of 12 boats that sailed on the last Global Challenge race in 2004 left port with a new addition to their complement of
technology – a business intelligence software package known as Applix TM1 – see box, below.

Caffari says TM1 was used to input data regularly, so that over a period of time, competitors could receive more information and pitch their target boat speed accurately.

‘In theory, you could increase your boat’s performance by learning which
conditions gave you the result you were after,’ she says.

‘If you found yourself in those conditions again, you could find out the target speed you were after before.’

Like most of the crew volunteers in the Challenge, TM1 is used more regularly on dry land than on the rigours of the open sea.

But the support staff of the Global Challenge made sure the system was well adapted to its new role as the crew’s speed performance monitor.

And Caffari and Blyth are both content that the adapted system performed
well in the race and, with additional tinkering, could prove extremely useful in the long term.

‘Once we had the basics in, we could say: “In this set of conditions we are after this kind of speed”, and it just gave us the chance to obtain targets to look at,’ says Caffari.

‘As soon as those conditions matched the ones we had data for, it was ideal. But it definitely could be even better if time was spent on it.’

Though also keen on the system, Blyth issues a word of caution.

‘The class rules we had would not allow some of the information to come through automatically,’ he says.

‘The crews liked using it, but they were also frustrated by it because of the manual input aspect.

‘That is something we are going to have to alter as time goes on.

‘The trouble is that technology is moving so fast, it is becoming hard to keep up with it.’

Yacht race takes IT on board

Technology has brought big yacht racing to the masses, writes James Brown

Adapting TM1 for the Global Challenge Race

Global Challenge logistics director Alistair Hackett had an important job – he had the key responsibility for adapting the Applix TM1 business intelligence application.

The process of adapting the software for a life on the sea took a number of months.

‘The first stab at the application was implemented in early June and development continued through the summer on one particular boat,’ says Hackett.

‘It was then a question of putting a version of the software on the boat and giving the skipper and crew time to go away and look at it.

‘We needed to test it not just when they were alongside the docks, but to look at how usable it would be once they were bouncing around in the ocean, getting cold and wet.’

Adapting TM1 was a process of trial and error. Successive versions of the business performance package were put on the boat, tested and then taken away for further modification.

Hackett says the finished article was not ready until a couple of weeks before the Global Challenge race was due to start.

The package was eventually installed on a laptop on each of the boats, alongside complex navigation, weather and communications systems.