The video of the race is exciting, much of it taken  with a camera attached to a kite, but the really interesting bit is listening to the clubroom discussion among the participants afterwards – each showing interest in and respect for the technology and skills involved in the opponent’s craft.

Luckily, our chosen day off was almost windless – I remember swimming around in a pile of floating cabbages in Cowes Roads, with a young New Zealand skipper called Chris Bouzaid looking down at us from his own cockpit. Our owner’s tactic worked, and we started winning with smiles on our faces after the egos had deflated a bit.

As a bunch of dinghy sailors thrown suddenly into a pit full of wealthy owners of long standing, who had bought their crews shore uniforms topped with T-shirts of golf shirts emblazoned with their boat’s name, we felt a little out of it, but found a quick solution – we all wore white slacks (who didn’t?) and each of us sported a T-shirt of a different bright colour.

In those days, a decade before the PC and a couple of decades before inkjet printers, it was no trivial matter to supply your crew with clothes carrying your boat’s name. It wasn’t cheap, and there was quite a delay between order and delivery.

Now it’s easy – the price is on a par with undecorated kit, and delivery is quick. And, of course, you do it over the Internet. Do you have someone who is hard to buy for on your holiday shopping list? If that person likes to boat (or fish), then BoatNameGear can make your life a lot easier.

The crew at BoatNameGear have spent the past three years helping people find sailing gifts for the boat owners on their shopping lists – spouses, bosses, parents, grandparents, kids, friends, whatever… With fast shipping, no minimum order size requirement and no set-up fees on most items, BoatNameGear is where I’ll be going for gifts that carry the name of a boat – my boat, my friend’s boat, or perhaps any boat that I feel like supporting. How about City of Adelaide, for instance?

How’s this for a sample of sailing gifts to whet your appetite (if your boat’s not big enough for some of these things, why not use them in your house or flat?):

• all-weather welcome mats
• guest bathrobes and towels
• polo shirts
• jackets

A few days ago, a Facebook friend highlighted this video, in which a US Coastguard lecturer highlights the latest understanding of what happens to people who fall into cold water – and illustrates it by making his students jump into water at 45 degrees Fahrenheit (about 8 degrees Celsius). Watch it, and you’ll never go without your lifejacket in temperate climates again – not even in a tender taking you ashore in a quiet anchorage.

Cold

For those who sail in the tropical harbours of my childhood, I should point out that the English Channel water is below 60 degrees Farhenheit most of the year round, and I spent an evening combing the Solent foreshore 50 years ago for a fit 21-year-old who was a strong swimmer, who fell out of a sailing dinghy about a quarter of a mile offshore in sheltered water. He was found the next morning. Don’t take chances.

Each project of this kind needs people with the necessary technical and management skills, access to the necessary funds, and the drive to sell the idea. Teamsurv appears to be well-provided with all three. It’s a community-sourced project whose goal is to provide freely-available detailed depth and position information for the shallow waters frequented by yachstmen, divers, fishermen, workboat operators – in fact, any recreational or commercial user of shallow inshore waters. Volunteers use either a software application running on their onboard PC or a hardware data logger, attached to their GPS and echo sounder.

Teamsurv’s ultimate goal is to cover any location in the world where they can find volunteers. Even now, you are welcome to submit data from anywhere, but Teamsurv are testing their system for manipulating the data (correcting for the height of the tide at the time of logging, as well as a few more subtle things) on the following four trial areas:

• UK South coast, Poole to Chichester
• UK East coast, Thames Estuary to the Wash
• France: Brittany coast including Golfe du Morbihan
• Lithuania: Curonian Lagoon, Klaipeda and adjacent coastline

One consequence of this is that the associated website is in three laguages – English, French and Lithuanian – which makes it pretty unusual.

If you sail or motor (or if your rowing boat carries a GPS and echo sounder, for that matter), why not volunteer? Once you’ve set up your PC application, or borrowed one of their hardware data loggers, all you have to do is upload the data when you get home or when you next manage to access a wi-fi point.

For details, and an interesting blog, see the teamsurv website

TeamSurv’s research is being part-funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 247998) and aims to demonstrate that the more accurate positioning made possible by the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) may permit community-sourced depth sounder information to be used as a low cost source of survey data, with comparable quality to traditional survey techniques.

To do a technical product review of a synthetic fibre rigging product, I’d need to have access to some serious lab equipment, and to have been sailing regularly over the past ten years. On those grounds, I don’t qualify.

This article is concerned with the products of one of the major manufacturers of synthetic fibre rigging, who were kind enough to send me offcuts when I asked for them. Since I’m currently living a long way from any harbour full of modern yachts, that was the only way – other than jostling the crowds at a boat show – that I was going to be able to see the stuff for myself.

I was amazed to see how fine the fibres are – there must be more than a thousand, so fine that I can break them by scraping with my thumbnail. EasyRigging’s equpiment builds the equilvalent of a Selvagee Strop with this stuff, maintaining a perfectly even tension on all strands – otherwise they would break one by one.

The potential weak point in all terminal systems – whether spliced wire rope, solid rod or synthetic fibre bundles – is abrasion and corrosion. EasyRigging’s terminals are sealed during the manufacturing process, with no obvious weak point that may eventually allow water in or expose fibres to UV light, and the fibres are not clamped because the ‘rope’ is made of one continuous fibre wound round the terminals. This makes them intrinsically stronger and more durable than any system that relies on clamping the terminal to a mass of cut ends.

EasyRigging is the small boat (10 – 45ft) lightweight rigging division of SmartRigging, a company founded in 2004 by Rinze J. van der Schuit, a former Dutch, European and World champion catamaran sailor, and already well-known for supplying synthetic fibre rigging for America’s Cup boats and for round-the world raccers such as Vendée Globe IMOCA 60s.

Here are some videos of racing craft that use EasyRigging and SmartRigging synthetic fibre standing rigging:

INTERNATIONAL 14 Tiger Trophy. I learned to sail in an International 14, and crewed them once or twice, but they were totally different from the ones below. 14s adopted Aussie skiff-like rules in 1984.

MOTH BladeRider with Rohan Veal and Andrew McDougall. Veal told EasyRigging that using their PBO rigging would probably knock 30 seconds off his time for a race lasting around 40 minutes.

TEAM ALLINGHI Extreme 40 training cats. Don’t ask me about these – I’ve never been near one.

But what about cruising? As Nigel Calder is always at pains to emphasize, racing boats tend to have comparatively short competitive lives, and are subject to regular and intensive maintenance. Cruising boats, particularly ocean cruising boats, expect their gear to last many years – and they often spend long periods far from any high-tech yards and sources of sophisticated spares. Ocean cruiser owners have two choices:

- use rigging materials that can be repaired fairly easily

- use rigging materials that are unlikely to get damaged in normal use, and hope that you can limp back to somewhere accessible to a courier service such as DHL in case of accidental damage.

Ocean cruising owners often carry a spare length of shroud wire with one termination already swaged on, and tools to cut  the other end to the required length and fit the requisite terminal. Although you can’t do this with made-to-length rigging, I’d be tempted to carry a spare for the longest shroud, plus a kit to cut it and fit a cone-clamped terminal. That way, I could send a really reliable terminal aloft and keep the other down below where I could keep an eye on it.

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