Sailing

After nearly 18 months with Optiniche’s “Clean Holiday” wordpress theme, I’ve decided that a new look was in order; this theme is “Mountain” by Sadish Bala. Mountain works well for me because it has the page links at the top, making it look more like a “proper” website, and the headline picture can be easily changed without hacking PHP. Having said this, my challenge is now to get the Kubernetes logo back onto the front page properly rather than just in a post.

The current headline picture is of Shamrock V one of the original America’s Cup class yachts taken at the America’s Cup Jubilee in August 2001.

For those that don’t know, the Stern Review is the report published today that has the headline figure of the global economy shrinking by 20% if we don’t take action on climate change immediately. Robin Knox Johnson (RKJ) is the first man to sail non-stop around the world single-handed in 1968/9 and, at 67, is doing it all again as part in the Velux 5 Oceans Race. So the immediate response to my question is not much.

However if one is looking for Zero Emissions transport (or as close as possible), it is difficult to find a better candidate than a sailing vessel. Once the carbon has been used to create it, a yacht does not have to create any emissions to get from A to B. There are of course a few challenges.

• Yachts don’t go that fast and the wind does not blow all the time. However for freight, in particular, decent management of logistics can mitigate the effects. This will need a move away from “just-in-time” to having strategic stockpiles of e.g. raw materials which can be seen in the reaction to latest oil crises. It is also worth noting that the technology that powers RKJ, Ellen MacArthur, Steve Fosset and others around the world in under 60 days has not yet been fully exploited.

• The Ocean is a dangerous place. This is why I linked specifically to RKJ in that he had to turn back to port late last week for repairs after being knocked down in a huge storm in the Bay of Biscay. He is acknowledged as one of the safest and toughest of sailors so it must have been bad. One his favourite quotes is that more people have climbed Everest than have been solo around the world.

I suppose my real point is that if we are going to get to grips with climate change these are the nature of the challenges we will have to meet and overcome. Flying will not be a option for much longer so we all may have to endure storm conditions at sea.

This gives me one last thought. Gale force winds at sea when in on yacht really impresses on you the power of Mother Nature and how precarious your personal hold on life really is.

Having been sailing in strong winds (about half of what RKJ had) myself relatively recently, I’d like to suggest that everyone should spend a night sailing off-shore in a gale. The government could pay for it as part of the “marketing” of “green” taxes.

I’ve been racing a yacht at Cork Week (blogged at www.bsar.info) and was re-reading a favourite sailing book “Winning in One-Designs” by Dave Perry. In Chapter 1, Dave tells a story of how he explained why sailing was so compelling using American Football as a comparison. To paraphase and anglicise think about other complex team sports e.g. Rugby Union.

Sailing and Rugby have some strong similarities; to succeed in both sports you need to creat a team out of a group of people with signifcantly different roles and skills, some primarily physical, some needing significant awareness and intelligence both at a tactical and spatial. They both have complex rules, tactics and strategies that take years of practice to become truely fluent at.

Where sailing differs and adds significant additional complexity is that Rugby (and nearly all other sports) takes place on a field of play that is defined to be similar. In sailing the “pitch” is constantly changing in fact the equivalent rugby pitch would

• be moving slowly under the players
• be a diffferent size each time you played
• change size during the match
• have patches that were soggy, icy and/or sandy
• have irregular 1-3 foot high ridges all over it

In addition a sailing crew does not have all the coaches and substitutes able to offer different tactical options depending on how the game progressed and usually the rules are enforced by referees that are typically not on the pitch and disputes are sorted out in a pseudo court after the race has finished.

Even on a techical level there are some that say that the highest performace yachts are more complex to design and get to go quickly than a Formula 1 racing car. It is worth noting that Adrian Newey, probably the most sucessful Formula 1 designer, has an ambition to design America’s Cup yachts.

I believe there is no more complex sport than sailing. If you accept that sport can be used as a metaphor for business, then in today’s increasily complex business environment sailing has more to offer than any other sport.