If the navigator’s only job was getting from A to B, this would not be a story. But in high-end ocean racing — for example, the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, which starts on Friday — navigators on the big boats are brainiac professionals in the hot seat.
Winds change strength and direction. Ocean currents create a playing field that shifts under you. Your competitors are doing whatever they’re doing. The job is to solve and re-solve complex problems with an ever-developing multidimensional data set.
Farther along, different waters will present different challenges, so the meteorologist/navigator looks ahead, comparing weather models that probably disagree and ocean-current models that probably disagree while making bets about the other boats’ bets.
It’s poker, but in rough seas, the game might not be a game at all. People have died on the way to Hobart. If you make a bad call, everybody’s looking at you.
Why would anybody do this? Forget luxuries. Even a 100-foot boat may not have standing headroom below deck, where the navigator’s workstation includes nothing that would add an ounce of weight.
Chris “Lew” Lewis, an American who navigated the first-to-finish 100-footer, Law Connect, in 2023 and 2024, said, “Nav stations are always carbon, all black, unpainted, because paint adds weight. And the motion of the boat can be violent.”
Add a noisy diesel engine running full time to power movable parts — the ballast keel, say, which gets swung toward the new high side in maneuvers — and it is hard to imagine a more a hellish environment for doing graduate-level math.
And, Lewis said, “The diesel fumes make most people seasick. And every boat leaks. When water’s dumping on the computers, it’s combat conditions.”
Lewis said, however, that the battle left him “refreshed and grateful for my family,” returning to his day job as the lead generative A.I. commercial counsel at Google Cloud. “What I get out of this is almost spiritual,” he said. “Becoming a navigator was a calling.”
Lewis can name eight navigator heroes, but he had one mentor, a man known internationally simply as Stan. “The great one,” Lewis calls him. We will meet Stan later.
The boat that Law Connect, a two-time first-place finisher, nosed out at the end of the 2023 race was the Andoo Comanche (now called the Master Lock Comanche), another 100-footer, to be navigated this year by Andy Green, an Australian. He became a navigator at 18, racing a 40-footer, he said, when “somebody gave me a hand-held screen on deck and told me to have a go.”
Green launched as a pro after college. Now 34, he spent most of this summer sailing international events in Europe before heading home for a command performance. More than a race, Sydney-Hobart is an Australian obsession.
Among the challenges posed by the 100-footers, Green said, “It can take 20 minutes to change a sail. If you think the next phase of wind strength or wind direction or sea state demands a change, you’d better be right.”
Known widely and simply as Comanche, Green’s ride has a proud record in the Hobart and beyond. It also has a nav station famously touched by the man who navigated many signature victories. “Stan has this boat all set up,” Green said. “I was fortunate to sail with Stan once.”
A 100-footer’s demands are also familiar to Alice Tarnawski, navigating a celebrity boat once known as Wild Oats XI, now as Palm Beach XI. The new identity comes with dramatic modifications including huge, adjustable foils that lift the hull enough to reduce drag.
Tarnawski worked to master navigation during the Covid lockdown in 2020, developing a complete skill set for racing on a two-person crew (called doublehanded racing), and she discovered something about herself. Now, she said, “It’s a passion. Every day I spend time looking at navigation software.”
Preparation means obsessing over a boat’s speed and capabilities in various wind and sea conditions. With Palm Beach XI almost a new boat, computer modeling outweighs hurried sea trials.
“An ordinary boat can probably sail safely from A to B with a compass that’s 3 degrees off,” Tarnawski said. “We need an accuracy within one-tenth of a degree. We’re up against the likes of Comanche, and Andy Green would say the same of us.
“Usually there is only one navigator on a boat,” Tarnawski said. “I’m pretty excited that Stan is going to be here too, but I don’t want to be fan-girly.”
Yes, that Stan.
Stan Honey would have his Wiki even if he had never won a boat race. He co-founded companies that invented the first in-car navigation system and then sports graphics, beginning with the yellow line in American football. He has navigated records across the Atlantic (on Comanche, after computing 8,000 experimental routes), across the Pacific and around the world. Racing doublehanded from California to Hawaii, he and wife, Sally, placed first with their vintage Cal 40, Illusion.
Sailors tease Honey about being US Rolex Yachtsman of the Year only once, compared with Sally, twice Yachtswoman of the Year.
Honey is an innovator, but also a thought leader and conscience in the fellowship of specialist navigators. In his freely-shared, 23-page bible, he advises: “Talk to experienced navigators. What are the key decisions and when? They will answer. So must you.”
Born or made? As a teenager Honey was already trusted to navigate races from his native California to Mexico using the stars and traditional celestial tools “and I loved it,” he said. “I liked math.” Later, he pioneered early features of electronic marine navigation.
Now, in a presentation he gives on the craft, Honey counsels budding navigators to “retrieve 11 years of weather data for the 11 days surrounding the calendar date of the start. Run 121 routes, 11×11, for your boat and for each configuration being considered. Analyze.” Then the real work begins.
Honey raced against the Palm Beach XI in its previous form many times. Underway, he said, the job becomes triage: “You’re never caught up. For each change, you let some things go and move on.”
Honey advises first-time Hobart finishers to “go straight to the Customs House pub, not to your hotel. Navigators talk through the race over whiskey. That’s another thing we share.”
The post The Brainiacs of the Seas appeared first on New York Times.
