No ordinary 49’er sailors but World Champions and gold medal favorites Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes. Great interview on BBC’s web site. It’s clearly not a bad life and they are very confident. I always wondered how you sail one of these bad boys. It’s all about coordination. This pretty much sums it up:
It’s intense, short bursts of energy very often, with no breather.
Sailing upwind, he’s playing the mainsheet [rope] which controls the
mainsail. At the windward mark he’s got a six-second explosive burst to
hoist the spinnaker, basically a massive sail stuffed into a sock.If we gybe he has to winch it to the other side and at the
bottom mark, we drop the spinnaker. Getting that back into the sock is
almost harder. It’s another explosive burst and then we round up into
the wind. I then simply hand him back the mainsheet.Put like that it sounds like I’ve got a pretty cushy job. I’m not as stupid as I look!
Added to all that Ben is concentrating as hard as I am on strategy and tactics and looking at our competitors and the wind.