From our December issue:
Opening photo shows: Whooper at the RYS Bicentenary regatta. Inside her is Cereste, third yacht is the S&S Clarionet – Photo James Robinson Taylor
Solent based Whooper is a winning yacht – last year she won the Gold Roman Bowl in the Round the Island race… not bad for a 1939 wooden boat.
We sailed with the crew last summer to see how they approach things and to see if we could pass on some of their tips. This was our report (by Dan Houston):
Sat with the crew out on the windward rail I’ve had to shut my eyes. It’s to give the corneas some respite from the constant sousing of seawater spray, thrown up by Whooper’s cantering upwind progress through the Solent chop. The spray is also in my nostrils, up the sleeves of my light summer waterproof and trying to get into my hood and down my neck. Which it will succed in doing in a couple of tacks’ time.
Luckily I didn’t wear boots, even with my good all-weather salopette trousers velcroed over them at the ankle – they’d be full of water too, by now. My shoes can’t get any wetter, but it’s OK, they work as well as if they were dry.
It’s time to tack, I can open my eyes and see Cowes Roads and the Royal Yacht Squadron, celebrating its 200th anniversary this week, through the bouncing vista of spray. I’ve worked out the moves of getting across the coachroof now, but it’s still slightly awkward, as we shove backwards against the cabin sides, pulling our legs through the guardwires, sometimes getting limbs tangled – like lovers disengaging to rush for the phone.
Then you’re lying across the coachroof, under the swinging boom, and the trick is to haul yourself across using the far handrail, pull the knees against your chest again and then turn and shoot your legs forward and through the opposite lower guardwires before plonking onto the side deck and hooking your neck under the upper guard wire. It should take a few seconds; a few bruises are to be expected.
I’m sure it’s not always like this on Whooper, Laurent Giles’ 39ft (11.9m) shoal-draught centreboard sloop from 1939, and I could tell instantly by the attitude of the crew that this is a great boat on which to be sailing.
And look, she’s this season’s boat! A few weeks back she had won the Gold Roman Bowl – the IRC’s jewel in the crown – in the Round the Island race, for the second time (2004 was the first), and she has been cleaning up at the British Classic Yacht Club regattas and other events… so to be aboard is a privilege; the damp is merely literal, my spirits are high.
There are a few of these old boats now, which are sailed like new boats. With rebuilt structures, often putting some extra strength into the hull and deck, owners are putting modern racing gear onto them and watching the speed dialling up. It’s not an approach that appeals to everyone and for some the idea of putting carbon and Dyneema into an old boat is anathema… yet we almost always allow ourselves Dacron sails…
So I’ve been intrigued about how Giovanni Belgrano, Whooper’s owner since 2001, has got her onto such winning form. And he has a great expression: “We want to keep our eyes out of the boat.”
Whooper’s winning crew in 2015 (and family!) – photo Jez Touch
What he means by this is that when racing you want to have your systems and drills completely under control; no-one even has to think about what they need to do according to each manoeuvre. “That way,” he explains to me later, “we can keep our eyes out of the boat – looking for wind shifts, other boats, anything else that will affect us.”
It doesn’t always go right. During our start a few minutes earlier in this 15NM race around the cans off Cowes, we had a moment when the spinnaker halyard slipped on the winch and it looked like Whooper was going to run over her own sail. The boys put another turn on but with 25 knots of breeze and gusts of 30 it was always going to be hard work!
Speaking later (maybe because he saw how wet I was!) Giovanni said that the boat was on the edge of her limits that day. The spinnaker move may have cost us a little time but it had not stopped us from winning (again) putting five minutes between ourselves and Clarionet, a 1966 S&S boat of the same length which is also raced very competitively.
Giovanni has since put a block on the deck with a jammer and winches so that the spinnaker could not pull its halyard out again. “It’s too dangerous for your fingers on a winch to have that happen again, I know others who have been hurt like that,” he said. “We also have some little Velcro strops on the sail so that we can hoist it rolled up – the IRC doesn’t allow us to use wool anymore but this will work well.”
It’s an approach he has used consistently over the years to improve the boat’s safety and performance. “One of the first things we did,” he remembers, “is to change the genoa sail for a blade jib that has no overlap – that improves tacking time, and improves the tacking angle by three or four degrees, because we can now lead it inboard of the shrouds and the sheeting angle is much better than with the old genoa.
“In 2002 Harry Spencer made me a new spruce mast. The old Columbian pine one was too heavy. That new mast is like a musical instrument – you can tune it! Originally Giles would have given her a decent mast though so I was taking her back to her old self like that. And I cleaned up the interior – we have a galley now rather than the domestic kitchen, which had grown over the years.
“She was sheathed in the 1980s but only on the outside, so inside the boat still breathes. She is built of pitch-pine planks on oak frames and they are 100 per cent pre-war, although we replaced several rusting iron floors with laminated wood ones. Her deck was also replaced with two layers of plywood – before I got her; it’s heavy but it’s watertight.
“We changed the iron keel for lead. Again that was on the original specification but when Woodnutts built her it was just before the war so they had used iron.
“We tidied up the rig and removed quite a lot of the clutter from her and my view is that she is a simple boat and more in keeping with how she might have been when she was launched. We replaced the blocks with Harken and we use Anderson winches and we do have a carbon boom for racing at IRC events with our black dyneema sail… She’s still Whooper you know? And she always was fast. I was told about her being in a race in the Channel where she averaged 10 knots! For classic events we use our wooden boom and Dacron mainsail.
“The Dyneema is a good racing cloth – there is no loss through it. It’s the same material that they use in the Volvo Ocean Race and it lasts three times as long as a normal sail. It holds its shape well and that is a benefit because we don’t get overpowered so much; Whooper can get overpowered very easily but the new sail means we are not on our ear so much.
“The carbon boom is also very light – about 9kg compared to the wooden one at 24kg I think. Plus it’s stronger.”
Giovanni Belgrano – skipper/owner of Whooper, up her mast
It’s fascinating talking with Giovanni, whose day job is as a structural composites engineer – mainly in modern boats. He was principal structural engineer for Emirates Team New Zealand in the last America’s Cup. And he understands materials at a molecular level and applies the science to make his beloved old boat behave better on the water.
He is also keen on getting the best from himself and his crew. For instance he moved the stanchions outboard by 50mm so that the crew can sit about 100mm further out – on the very edge of the deck. “It’s more comfy for them too,” he avers (and with only one race to go by I didn’t feel really qualified to comment about that, dear reader).
The key to getting a race crew up to speed is to practice. It’s like the old Royal Naval tradition with gunnery (or anything else); you do it again and again until you have the manoeuvre so smooth that it becomes second nature. Plus you keep yourself sharp to ways of improving.
So Giovanni races on Tuesday nights with the Island Sailing Club, and does as many local events as possible.
Try harder, prepare better…
“We start sailing in April and we join the spring series at Warsash. We often find that painful. It’s after winter and we are with boats that can manoeuvre on a dime but we really improve by doing that. Our boat handling and systems get organised early in the season so that at the beginning of the season we can already have our eyes out of the boat.
“Many of these boats are dry-sailed now, they have smooth bottoms whereas we have antifoul and we stay in the water all season. So we have to try harder and prepare better.
“And that really is the difference. It’s a question of preparation and execution to get everything running as smoothly as possible. Before the Island race this year we had a coach, Andrew Palfrey, who came to join us for two days. That was fantastic – we all improved a humungous amount – we learned a lot really quickly. People accept having a coach when they play tennis or golf… why not for sailing? We also take video from a RIB and watch ourselves to see how we are doing.”
Giovanni tells me he got into racing at his childhood home in Genoa, racing dinghies, (International) 420s and then 470s up to national level before he came to England to study engineering at the Southampton Institute in 1979. “And I like cruising too,” he says. “We take Whooper out for the weekend or just for Sunday lunch with the family and it’s fun. I would like to cruise her further – to Ireland maybe. I would not do the Fastnet though – she isn’t up to more than coastal racing, but a cruise to Ireland, where you can pick your weather window, that would be good to do.
“When you are racing it is hard to find and keep a good crew. We are all amateurs and we have to fit our sailing into our busy lives but as we improve it gets better and that makes it fun. It’s fun to win but you have to work at it.
“When we first did Round the Island we were 300th and then next year we were 100th and so on. This year we went out to the start line the evening before and pinged our place on the line with the GPS and worked out a tacking plan and I’m happy to say we could look at our track and it was exactly like the plan.”
It’s late October and Giovanni has put Whooper in a shed in Bembridge. “I’m varnishing now,” he tells me. “I do a lot of the work myself and sometimes I get help. But if I do the varnish now it’s good and hard by the time the next season starts.” It’s an important detail; Whooper not only sails well but looks great too.
Whooper with her modern mainsail