Comment: SailGP set to blast into Lyttelton

The harbour at Lyttleton. Photo / Susan Wright, The New York Times

OPINION:

Lyttelton can barely sleep for the excitement. Three weekends from now, the world will come to us. There will be helicopters. There will be television cameras. There will be traffic jams. There will be no hope of getting to the supermarket. And there may be dead dolphins.

Several friends are so excited that they have chosen to go away and rent their houses for prodigious sums to people who like this sort of thing. And this sort of thing is SailGP. It’s a form of yachting.

I have been on a few yachts over the years and have experienced only two emotions. The first is boredom and the second, terror. I am no sailor.

But sailing is as old as our species. It harnesses one element to help us cross another and until 150 years ago, it was the only way to reach these islands.

When I bought a house in Lyttelton in 1988, my next-door neighbour was 93 years old and still climbing trees to prune them. As a young man, Les had crewed on the last of the great sailing ships. His fingers were a mangled mess from mishaps with the winches, but there was nothing those mangled fingers couldn’t do with rope.

Les is buried now in the graveyard overlooking the wharf where his ships are tied up.

Going from sailing for a purpose to yachting as a sport was a natural step for a competitive species. And New Zealand, with its abundant wind and waters, has proved good at it. But however splendid a pastime it may be, yachting isn’t good to watch.

Remember the America’s Cup. Despite the best efforts of commentators and computer graphics, for every moment of excitement - a snapped mast, a sinking, an abnormally close finish - there was hour upon hour of coverage that could be bottled as a soporific.

But now comes SailGP. The GP is a nod to the Grand Prix circuit that began in 1950 and morphed into the travelling circus of Formula 1. I was taken to a Grand Prix once as a kid. My brother was fond of cars and we went as a family. Brother was agog with delight, I with boredom. Character is formed young.

The Canada SailGP team helmed by Phil Robertson nearly capsize during the French SailGP event.

Motor racing’s attraction is a blend of speed, danger and technology. The same seems true of SailGP. The boats are catamarans that rise on hydrofoils and go at greater speeds than we’re allowed to drive our cars at in Lyttelton.

The boats are powered by nothing but wind, and SailGP touts its ambition to become the ‘most sustainable’ form of sporting entertainment. Exactly how it plans to do this I can’t tell you, and I somehow doubt that all the crews, support staff and spectators will come to Lyttelton without resorting to fossil fuel.

But, be that as it may, SailGP does feel more 21st-century than Formula 1.

The only fly in the eco-ointment is Hector’s dolphin. It’s the world’s smallest dolphin and the only one endemic to New Zealand waters, and it’s commonly seen in Lyttelton harbour, right where the racing will take place.

The Hector’s dolphin is already having a tough time of it, solely because of us. It is poisoned by our pollution, maddened by our sonar, drowned by our fishing nets and not infrequently struck and killed by our boats. And these are boats going at a few knots.

If a SailGP catamaran went through a pod of dolphins there would be carnage - dorsal fins amputated, flippers flying and spectator boats spattered with dolphin gore.

Keen to avoid this, SailGP planned to blast the harbour with a high-pitched noise that would repel the dolphins. It seemed a tad unfair to drive them out of their ancestral homes just so some high-tech visitors could amuse themselves, but apparently, that plan’s been scuppered because it wasn’t certain it would work.

The idea now is to put watchers with binoculars on hills around the port, experts with binoculars on boats about the port and devices underwater to register dolphin calls, and should any of these detect a dolphin, they are to call the race director on the instant and it will be ‘dolphin stopped play.’ Which would be nice.

But then what? Dolphins are playful creatures. They like to interact. Having wandered on to the race course, they would find plenty to amuse them. Any attempt to shift them would seem like a game. They could easily stay all weekend. And half a billion dollars of technology would lie idle for two days while the dolphins had a jolly good time. I’d pay to watch that.