Ultimate Star 3 - Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor....navigator

Peter Schofield is well known in Britain and beyond as a successful and highly experienced navigator and tactician who has campaigned in many national and international competitions over his long sailing career. A former soldier, Peter now runs SeaTrack, a software package that provides a one-stop, integrated performance, tactical and navigation system for grand prix racers, club racers and for cruising yachts. [Picture by Rick Tomlinson]

When did you start sailing and what got you into it?

I started sailing from a very young age, I was literally taken from my pram and thrown into a boat. My father owned a cruising boat, which was a 43ft Laurent Giles Design which I did a lot of sailing on, as well as sailing dinghies at school, but most of my sailing was predominantly on big boats.

What different boats have you sailed on?

I joined the army age 18 and did lots of sailing with them on the club yachts, regularly sailing on their Armoured Core, Rustler 30, competing in the Fastnet and various other ocean races.

Whilst posted in Hong Kong, I sailed with their Admirals Cup team Uinnamara. Then in 1982 the army was given an OOD 34 (Red Coat), I’d just got back from Hong Kong and was given the opportunity to be a skipper on that for 2 seasons. After Red Coat I wound up helming a potential Admirals Cup boat called Sapphire, a Yoeman 26.

Since then I’ve sailed on my HOD 35 Zafara for 18 seasons now, competed in 57 (yes that number is correct!) Cowes Weeks’, and18 (also correct) Fastnets. Recently having sold the HOD I’ve just bought a Nordic Folk boat, which I plan to race in the Western Solent and perhaps even as far as Denmark next season.

What are your Top 3 Races you’ve competed in?

1.       99 Fastnet – Tuesday of Cowes we got rammed and the boat de-masted. Just a day before the start of the Fastnet we got our new mast, got to the start of Fastnet, then managed to win our class.

2.       Caribbean 600 – We were the smallest boat bar one in the fleet,and finished second in the combined class 3&4, and won class 4. I had a group of inexperienced soldiers out in the Caribbean, Ordinary private soldiers don’t usually have any experience of the Caribbean, so for them to be sailing out of English Harbour was quite special.

3.       Fastnet 2015 – I took a load of soldiers from my old regiment.  Many of the crew hadn’t sailed before, or only once or twice, so it was a real baptism of fire and we finished 22^nd overall. I got huge satisfaction from that; getting soldiers out on the water who wouldn’t have usually had the chance.

When did you start focussing on Navigation?

It all started off when I was in Hong Kong getting the boats ready for the Admirals Cup, and the IRR rule - no one understood it, I wrote a programme to work on a Texas calculator with a series of cards you could put in. To help them optimise the boats for IRR.

Then moving back to the UK it all started to evolve, back then nothing linked up – instruments told you the wind angle but not wind direction. So I started writing programmes to resolved that, and it all grew from there.

You’ve got vast experience under your belt, how do your sails affect your performance?

I’m not a sail designer, and have absolutely no idea where to start, just a vague idea what I want, then take up an enormous amount of Kevin Sproul's time to discuss what I need and he comes up with the goods.

Six years ago, Kevin made a call to change to Jibs instead of Genoas, which made a huge difference. As he advised me, below 8 knots upwind it was a horror show but above that we had a rocket ship with a bloody good rating. Making the change lost us 18-20 points from our rating and it was hugely rewarding for us.

I was running the boat on a tight budget and by making the call it meant I could keep performance up, but prolong the longevity of the sails, while also improving my rating.

As the creator of SeaTrack navigation software, how do you combine your computer skills to help with sail performance?

With the help of Kevin together we created a small piece of hardware to log data to compare how a boat improved with new sails, or how the sails gradually degraded, using the polar functions on Sea Track. Although regular and accurate calibration was needed it proved hugely successful and rewarding. We are now trying to develop a tablet for smaller boats without computer systems in place, to be able to use the same features of SeaTrack.