Roger Badham

Weather router for team Club Med in The Race 

A glamour job?

Most people fail to find meteorology glamorous, unless you include the job of weather-routing for the rock stars of professional sailing.

Australia's Roger Badham has been married to the dual specialties of sailing and forecasting since an executive at a Sydney television station introduced him to 18 foot skiff legend Iain Murray, back in 1977.

"Meteorology was something I got into at university," he recalls. "It was more interesting than just doing a physics degree. I got involved in terms of research and did a PhD in numerical stuff and low-level wind sheer. After graduation I went into partnership with a friend and the only place we could get work was in forecasting.

"One of the guys I was involved with was Channel Seven's General Manager, Ted Thomas. He was a great yachtie. I sailed VJs (Vaucluse Juniors, a class created on Sydney Harbour) when I was young, but was pretty average. When Channel Seven started sponsoring 18 footers. Ted asked me to go down and give Iain some weather advice. I worked solely with Iain from 1977 to 1982.

"You're not forecasting really, Iain knows more about sailing on the harbour than I do. And I have just spent four years on the harbour gathering wind data for the September Olympics. The big thing then was to pick the best rig for the winds and to take advantage of the right power. I helped to pick that in terms of predicting a developing sea breeze.

It seems Badham's skill with data collection and number crunching has held him in good stead. His recent work with the Australian Yachting Federation involved preparing sailors mentally and physically, but his primary role was to collect wind data and numbers and 'basically map the harbour in terms of the right and wrong things to do'.

From 18 footers Badham got more and more involved in 'yachting stuff'. It wasn't long before he was part of Alan Bond's America's Cup campaign and from there it has been a natural progression."

It was with Bond in the 1980s that Badham earned his nickname. "I was always looking at clouds, so the team started calling me 'Clouds'. The name stuck." 

There was plenty of great wind for sailing off the coast of Fremantle, although there was little joy in race outcomes. The America's Cup returned to the States just as quickly as it left it. And, anyway, Badham's days at the receiving end of the 'four o'clock doctor', as they call Fremantle's predictable afternoon seabreeze, failed to challenge this weather guru.

"Fremantle is the easiest place to forecast for," he says.

"It's like a big laboratory. It has a seabreeze which is well structured in terms of prevailing winds and big temperature differences between land and water. It behaves normally. Not everything in life is like that. Folklore has it that the seabreeze comes in at the same time every day well, that's rubbish, but the point is the weather at Fremantle doesn't go funny as often. It has basic ingredients: The water temperature is cool, the land is hot. As the famous San Francisco sailor Tom Blackaller once said: The desert sucks."

In the last ten years Badham has worked more with Paul Cayard than anyone, starting with his Italian syndicate on board Il Moro in San Diego in 1991 and most recently in Auckland with AmericaOne.

"The Auckland weather program one of the best on the water," states a pleased Badham.

And compared to Fremantle, the fickle wind of the Hauraki Gulf made for plenty of brain work.

"Auckland is a thin bit of land, with seabreezes on both sides and a lot of ocean around," he explains.

"Things come in from the ocean. Not major things: Those things are obvious, but little subtleties that run in from the ocean. Little trough lines that come in and which you can't see until they are right on top of you. I spent a lot of time, before racing began, developing numerical work - statistical models - to better understand how the winds there worked." 

"You win a yacht race by predicting wind shifts and understanding subtleties on a minute and hourly basis. And of course, you've got to have it right at the big picture level before you can look at the next level down."

Before the America's Cup in San Diego, Badham helped set up data collection for all the syndicates and then worked with Cayard with Il Moro. He also worked with OneAustralia in 1995.

Of course, Badham's skills go well beyond the harbour mouth. He has advised syndicates in four Whitbread 'round the world races, including Cayard's successful campaign in 1997, and five BOC single-handed 'round the world races . In each he has had to prepare skipper and crew to deal with a whole gamut of conditions, from the shifty squall-filled doldrums to the bellowing gales of the Southern Ocean.

But Badham, like most of us, reckons the grass is always greener on the other side.

"When I'm doing a Whitbread I like doing America's Cup races and vice versa. I generally like what I'm not doing," he confides. "That's human nature."

The biggest challenge for a weather router on a 'round the round the world race is a simple one: Make the boat go fast. 

"It is very important to point the boat it in the right direction for the 12 to 18 hour gain while also satisfying the requirements for the big picture: The five to 10 day plan," he says.

"When you leave the English channel, for instance, you have got to decide when to enter doldrums. But in the short term you have to sail right to satisfy the immediate requirements - to get around Brittany and into the trade winds.

"It is lot of hard work," he confides. "And you have got to have good decision making on the boat. I work with the guys at each leg. I work the guys up until they eat and sleep that leg. Then, after the start, they're on their own. They only get the standard wind files, the same as everybody else."

Every time a crew leaves port, they set sail committed to a game plan. Says Badham: "You commit left, or right, or up the middle, until you decide to cover someone. You have to commit to a game plan. You work to that plan. If things go wrong, then obviously you re-set your thinking, but hopefully I can train them well enough to make decisions from that point.

"In the last Whitbread, Mark Rudiger and Paul Cayard were all good decision makers. I was there effectively as a coach for weather. That's what it is all about in terms of long term strategy - weather."

Badham's latest project is routing for Club Med in The Race, to start on December 31, 2000 from Barcelona.

It is the first non-stop race around the world with rules which do not restrict boat size, stipulating only that yachts must be fully crewed. Sails cannot be trimmed with power assisted winches, for example. As well, crews cannot have constant weather routing information spoon fed to them during the race but, like the Whitbread, can receive plenty of training prior to the start.

For Badham, this foray into mega multihull racing is a whole new experience.

"The whole game has changed," he admits. "Unlike the Whitbread 60s, or Volvo 60s as they are now called, multihulls don't want 40 knots of breeze from behind. They would prefer 20 knots. You've got to route the boat differently."

No doubt the Badham will rise to the challenge. Whether Grant Dalton and his seasoned crew can learn the ropes aboard their 110 foot monster catamaran between its launch in early May and race day is another matter.

Whatever the case, a glorious era of modern sail is upon us and with the help of gurus like Badham, records will continue to be broken.

Postscript: Roger Badham will route for Team New Zealand at the next America's Cup in Auckland, in early 2003.

GLOBAL BRAIN-TEASERS
"The traditional places always tear your hair out: Crossing the doldrums, getting across any ridge of high pressure, getting in and out of the southern ocean. The east coast of Brazil is a tricky spot. In fact, anywhere north of 35 degrees south, along the eastern seaboard of South America is tricky. Heat lows come out and interact with fronts. Tropical systems can interact with frontal systems and trades along the top part of the Brazilian coast are tricky. They sometimes fire and sometimes don't. The East coast of the US is also difficult because of gulf stream. The Chesapeake bay leg in the last Whitbread was not something I enjoyed."

BADHAM ON THE ANNUAL 
SYDNEY TO HOBART YACHT RACE
At the start of the Sydney to Hobart, the race is port tack biased - meaning the breeze generally comes from the eastern quadrants: South east or north east depending on how far to the west the next frontal system lies. Skippers have to know when to head offshore - to collect favourable current - and for how far. Says Badham: "Basically the breeze is going to go left (winds change direction from right to left, or anti-clockwise) and I don't want to dig out too far and have another guy lift inside of me."

The second half of race is usually more difficult in terms of weather because the east coast of Tasmania is trickier than NSW. Winds are more subtle. Storm bay and the Derwent River are notorious for making or breaking a race.

Badham on the storm of 1998: While all meteorological models predicted the storm on the day, only one picked it days ahead of time. And while skippers were aware of a change - strong north east winds that drove the fleet quickly indicated this - no one could predict from deck level just how serious the situation would become in Bass Strait.

In the southern hemisphere prefrontal flow (north east to north west winds sandwiched between an anti-clockwise spinning high to the east and an approaching clock-wise-spinning low coming from the west) can be stronger than the south-westerly change, particularly if there is more crowding between the high to the east and low to the west, than between the approaching storm system and high pressure to the south. 

For instance, the previous record holder, Germany's Morning Glory, blasted down the NSW coast in 1997, with winds from the north at around 30 knots (Badham points out that along the far south coast of NSW, north westerly air flow tends to twist back into the north). Despite the powerful prefrontal winds, nothing worse followed the southwesterly change.

"Skippers can't always rely on their experience to predict outcomes," says Badham.

©  weather-wise.com 2000