Peter Lester: Right decision despite the banter

There might have been a bit of banter, but the decision to call off racing yesterday was absolutely the right one.

The main difficulty the principal race officer, Harold Bennett, was having was not the strength of the wind, but the stability.

The air stream was coming directly off the Browns Bay area, and that was making an already unstable airstream even more unstable.

And what that does is create big variances in wind direction, as much as 30 degrees. Bennett is empowered to run a fair race and it's pretty difficult to do that in those conditions.

So there was a bit of talk off the boats, especially from Alinghi. But that's just part of the gamesmanship; it's normal banter.

The other talking point yesterday was Bertrand Pace's coming on board NZL82.

I think it's a good move, it's a positive move and it's not as radical as you might think.

In the past when changes have been made it's been helmsman and tactician. But the specific helming skills are such that if you take a person off the helm, the new man - even Russell Coutts when he replaced Rod Davis for New Zealand in San Diego in 1992 - doesn't have enough time to accustom himself to that particular boat.

So Team New Zealand have made a smart move leaving Dean Barker on, although I don't think taking him off was ever an option.

Putting Bertrand on in that tactician's role is good for a couple of reasons.

He's not a Kiwi, and the afterguard of Alinghi - given that they're all Kiwis apart from Jochen Schuemann - are used to the style of the New Zealanders.

It's thrown a small element of doubt - I repeat, small - at Alinghi and that's good.

Coupled with that, looking ahead, if New Zealand start to get on a roll Bertrand could be used as a starting helmsman. We have seen the rotating helmsman used with Prada and Oracle, where the person at the helm is switched straight after the start.

I don't think it works very well because you lose continuity, and I'm certainly not advocating it at this stage.

But it does open up another helming option for Team New Zealand.

Bertrand was absolutely thrilled to be sailing. The images off the boat looked as if he'd just got the cream off the top of the milk bottle.

For Hamish Pepper it is very hard, and we should be sympathetic. But in terms of the three lost races, a change was probably needed and it had to happen at the back of the boat.

He'll bounce back. He's young and can live and learn from it.

* Peter Lester is Yachting New Zealand's high performance director.

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