A few weeks ago the BBC reported on a new sport known as ‘Speed Cabling’, which is taking America by storm.

It involves unravelling the wires of six Ethernet computer cables, some as long as 25ft. They are put into a tumble drier and spun for 3 minutes, until they are as intertwined as two pythons on honeymoon, whereupon they are taken out and detangled, racing against the clock.

The winner of the first championships, Matthew Howell, an LA-based web developer, claimed to have benefited from his time spent kneading pizza dough, and called his technique ‘fierce data cloud’.

This sounds like a perfect opportunity for a pot-hunting sailor to add to their collection of silverware. If you have ever trimmed a mainsail in a fast-paced race, forgotten to flake a spinnaker halyard, or worse still dropped a twisty trailing logline in a pile on the deck, you’ll know that a tumble dryer isn’t necessary. More importantly, chances are you’ll be able to untangle a mere 25ft of computer cable before some pasty-faced web developer has even had the time to look up ‘Dyneema’ on his BlackBerry.