Seventh win for Ashby at the A-Class Worlds

Glenn Ashby spills the beans

After several months contributing to his pension fund at BMW Oracle Racing where he was one of the main coaches, Australian sailmaker Glenn Ashby has now returned to his roots and last weekend managed to earn himself a seventh World Championship win in the singlehanded A-Class catamaran in Cesanatico on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

This was Ashby’s fourth consecutive A-Class World Championship win. “I feel quite fortunate,” he told thedailysail this morning. “They have all been very very different regattas in different conditions. Obviously sailing in the really light breeze down there I was really happy to come away with a win, but it felt like I sailed the boat as accurately as I could.”

According to Ashby the windiest it got last week was 8 knots and typically it was 3-7... “so just on trapeze or fully stretched on trapeze upwind at times and other times you were sitting on the hull, just crouching in and out on trapeze upwind and basically sailing flat downwind. There was only one race where a few of the guys flew a hull downwind. I went flat for the whole regatta. You only need 7-8 knots to fly the hull downwind on the A-Class...”

Due to other commitments Ashby says he didn’t get as much training in as he usually might – instead he did a single two to three week long session just before the regatta. This achieved the desired objective: in eight races he discarded a 17th and had no other result out of the top four. Despite this impressive scoreline his win was not uncontested – another Australian, Steve Brewin, finished just four points behind him – but these two dominated the regatta with third placed Jack Benson (yet another Australian) more than 40 points adrift of Ashby.

With Australians claiming half the top 10 spots, it would seem his country is the dominant force within the fleet? “The Aussie guys have always been into their A-Class,” says Ashby. “Sailing-wise in Australia, it suits the A-Class - you can go to different clubs, and in 20 minutes you are off the trailer and at the end of racing 20 minutes and you are back on it. That is one of the beauties of A-Class - we sail at different clubs in different places and everyone really loves the boats there. Multihull sailing in Australia - there has always been a fairly high level and the same with skiffs. In fact in all high performance sailing Aussies do well - we are good in big breeze and everyone enjoys going fast.”

During the season in Australia, Ashby says that they might typically have 15-20 A-Class cats each weekend.

In terms of the gear Ashby used for this World Championship win – the platform he designed and built himself with Todd Pickering of Gel-Tech in Ashby’s native Bendigo (100km NNW of Melbourne) and was launched last March just after the A-Class Worlds in Belmont. The platform is called an ASG 3 and is unique in having the front (mast) beam around 300mm further aft than the competition. The wave-piercing bow also has a reduced volume both in the topsides and at deck level. “That is good for windage and perhaps for sailing as well in flat to short chop the boats don’t pitch as much having less volume in the hull up high and the rig being further back in the boat,” says Ashby. “At the end of the day it is nothing super left field, but the fact that the rig is so far back in the boat makes the boat feel a little bit different.”

According to Ashby in the fleet the boats all look essentially similar in terms of their rig packages, all with similar rig heights - the A-Class is a box rule with 18ft LOA, 7ft 6.5in beam, 150sqft of sail, 75kg minimum weight, trapeze permissible. Impressive at present is that there seems to be no one dominant builder – Ashby reckons there were ten of his ASG3s in Cesanatico but there were around eight or nine different designs in the top ten this year.

“The foils and the shape of the boats are the biggest things that have changed. Our boat is fairly conventional wave piercing-style boat – probably now, after looking at some of the other boat designs, you can see it was designed a year and a half ago, because there’s some of the new technology and new thought, some of it from the America’s Cup, but our boat still performs extremely well.”

For the Worlds Ashby used straight foils – while elsewhere in the class curved foils (a la ORMA 60/BMW Oracle Racing) are becoming popular. “We tried curved foils, but I opted to go back to the straight ones just to see if they were any different. In the lighter conditions at under 9-10 knots of boat speed the straight ones are better. They have a bit less in the slower speeds and possibly a little bit better lift in just hull-popping conditions.”

Like most of the fleet, Ashby’s mast was a standard medium carbon fibre wing. His was three years old, the same he used in Belmont. However for this World Championship he used his big sail. A-Class cats are una-rigged and for a World Championship only one sail can be measured in before the regatta. “Normally it suits 80-90 kg guys and I was mid to low 70s, so I was certainly powered up in the light stuff, but if it had got windy at any stage I would have really been struggling to hang on to it upwind speed-wise. So I put all my eggs in one basket, after having looked at the forecast and having a bit of a chat to a couple of the local fisherman one night when we were down having dinner who said it was going to be light all week. Certainly in the lighter conditions it was ideal - jumping out on the wire nice and early and lots of grip and height upwind. I was fortunate enough to make the right decision.”

Ashby reckons that around 35% of the fleet were using his sails and he would like to increase this over the next 12 months, now he is free from his America’s Cup commitments with BMW Oracle Racing.

Following the development carried out by Ben Hall, there were no solid wing sails at the A-Class Worlds this year. Hall’s A cat was acquired by BMW Oracle Racing as part of the development program for the wing on their AC33 trimaran. While two or three are currently in build for the Moths, Ashby reckons that the singlehanded foiler might be an even better vehicle for it than the A cat. “You can go from such a huge camber to get up on the foils and the de-power aggressive from there, I think it will suit the Moth well, Fortunately the guys that will use them are the one who don’t tip over so much.”

While the F18 Worlds this week feature 159 entries, given the A-Class, being built to a box rule is a more expensive animal, they still managed to get 100 boats to their World Championship. “They have limited the fleet to 100 boats for the last six or eight years, so basically you have to qualify to go,” says Ashby.

The racing also differs to the F18 in that they race Barcolana-style in one fleet. “100 boats on the start line and the line is probably 800-900m long - it takes three minutes full trapeze to get from one end to the other. It is a totally different style racing to smaller fleets. The big fleet management side of things comes into play and often the guys who are going the fastest don’t win the regatta because they get caught up on the start line or go the wrong way. Everyone who goes to do the Worlds enjoys that aspect of having so many boats at the start.” And this year the entry list included other America's Cup luminaries such as Alinghi sailmaker Luc Du Bois and BMW Oracle Racing’s design head Mike Drummond.

This week Ashby has headed to northern France where he is currently competing at the F18 World Championship with BMW Oracle Racing skipper and fellow Australian James Spithill on the wire for him...

“He is doing a great job,” Ashby assures us. “We talked about it but it is ‘no worries’ both ways. James said ‘it is probably better if you get on the wood for this one’. At the end of the day I’m sure he’d do an extremely good job on the helm. We are doing it more as a fun thing.”

Spithill’s baptism of fire in the F18 came recently when he and Ashby sailed at the Dutch F18 Open prior to Round Texel which was ultimately cancelled due to excessive wind. “That was a bit of an eye-opener for James, sailing in 25 knots every day,” admits Ashby.

After day one at the F18 Worlds Ashby and Spithill are lying 16th. “We had a little bit of an issue in the first start and got a bit tangled up with a few other guys and got a hole put in our boat and then the spinnaker block jammed at the top of the rig and we couldn’t get the kite up or down in the first race. We managed to get off the line a bit better in the second two races. But given the amount of time and effort we have put in together with the F18 – if we can be anywhere near the pointy end of the fleet it will be a fantastic result for us.”
The duo are sailing on a Hobie Wildcat as part of the Hobie works team. “The boat is going great. We just need to get off the start line and point it in the right direction and go around the corners well...”

Business as normal then.