All Piss and Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

Queensland still marks the location of that remarkable feat of salvage and the six-week repair that followed.
    Between the two World Wars, the ultra-competitive – and far from scrupulous – 18-footer skippers on Sydney Harbour sometimes made their heaviest crew jump overboard at the last windward mark so that the final spinnaker run home might be that much quicker. (Officials eventually altered the rules to prohibit this outrageous trick.)
    These days it’s common, if unseamanlike, practice in long-haul ocean racing to take on just enough fuel, water and food to last the distance. Any expendable excess is often jettisoned once the finishing line is less than 12 hours away. If the wind then dies, everyone goes hungry and thirsty. Too bad. Weight equals displacement, and even one unwanted milligram of displacement above the designed minimum is deemed to be slow, and must therefore be avoided.
    Grand Prix yacht designers and their millionaire clients search for the lightest possible construction materials for both hull and rig in their tireless quest for power-to-weight-ratio advantages. Decks are constructed from foam-core sandwich material that a child could break over their knee. Masts fabricated from carbon fibre weigh not much more than the rigging that keeps them up. We should therefore not be surprised when America’s Cup yachts snap in two and sink within seconds, or Volvo 70 around-the-world racers come apart mid-Atlantic and have to be abandoned. Less weight equals more speed, and damn the consequences.
    I witnessed a revealing little tableau of ‘weight aversion’ while spending a quiet Saturday with mates preparing a yacht for new antifouling at a commercial boatyard. As we rubbed down the hull and scraped off any accumulated weed or coral, the team working on a nearby yacht – a modern 60-footer – seemed to be disembowelling their boat with the urgency of Egyptian tomb robbers. Everything was being hauled out and hurled onto the hardstand below: anchors, chain, sails, bunks, the saloon table, ropes, spare water and fuel, floorboards, clothing, food, even the emergency tiller.
    What on earth was going on? ‘You blokes having a bit of a spring clean? Getting her ready for painting?’
    The paid hand gave me one of those patronising looks the hot-shot racing fraternity reserves for people who prefer to sail more wholesome boats. ‘No, we’re being weighed this afternoon.’
    I joined the dots. Under the current handicapping system thelower your all-up weight, the better the time correction factor is likely to be. These people were quite prepared to give the measurer a patently understated version of their actual displacement to shave a few minutes off the boat’s handicap.
    This pathological aversion to extra weight seems to afflict all serious racing sailors from a tender age, and I wasn’t immune from the disease myself. After a season of being mercilessly flogged every Saturday in our battered old VJ, my crewmate and I (both aged 13) decided to spend the off-season ‘getting some of that bloody weight out of the boat’. Good plan. We peeled off the deck and set to work boring so many holes through the frames that the innards of that poor little dinghy soon looked like Swiss cheese. After a fortnight of this passionate labour we anxiously assembled and weighed all the timber we’d so enthusiastically cut out of the boat. It was time to tally the massive savings. Nearly two whole pounds! Winning the next club championship now seemed a mere formality.
    But weight, there’s more. After the first few races of the new season we noticed the boat was becoming, well, heavier. An old-timer soon pinpointed the problem. We’d neglected to paint the inner surfaces of all those new holes. All plywood boats leak, so the exposed internal timbers of our VJ were now happily soaking up every drop of seawater they could find. Water is significantly heavier