Sailing Magazine
by Richard Crockett
This is an interesting feature article as this was no ordinary Rothmans Week. The first race for the 62-boat fleet was ready to hit the start line at 10h00, but Table Bay remained bereft of wind until well past midday, when the race started and then had to be abandoned. Then sometime after 14h00 the southeaster roared through, gusting up to 40 knots at some points.
And if that was not enough, the author of this feature opened with this: “Near the end of Rothmans Week, someone remarked that the IMS rules and ratings, the series of computer-derived formulae that decide a yacht’s handicap, must obviously be based on Chaos Theory. Well, that could have been just well seasoned irony.
“The implication was possibly that the whole shooting match was decidedly chaotic, but since Chaos Theory hangs on a set of mathematical models developed by weather fundis to try to make sense of their endlessly changing data, perhaps it is or should be used somewhere in deriving the IMS formulae. And yes, the Rothmans Week weather was certainly changeable. Dead calm one minute, gusting a gale ten minutes later, and then changing direction!”
READ IT ALL HERE: Pages from 1994 02 – SAILING Magazine – OCR-2
Please note that this is the last “Talking Sailing” for some weeks as I have surgery tomorrow for a troublesome shoulder. It means 3 – 6 weeks of being in a sling, which also means that I am not sure yet how quickly I will be able to tickle the keyboard and bring you more scribblings”.
