Coming in from the cold…
Round the world singlehanded to foiling round the cans, it’s easy to regard multihull racing as being fully established. But what about the increasingly fast boats that make up a growing fast-cruiser fraternity competing somewhere in the middle? Nigel Irens has a proposal…
Multihulls have traditionally had a slightly shadowy presence in the well-disciplined world of yacht racing. In the early days their owners came from anything but a yacht racing background and their compet- itive activity on the water was limited to creeping up on yachts engaged in serious racing and swooping past them – usually pretending not to notice their presence. This gambit was of necessity only possible when sailing off the wind because owners of those multihulls generally had lean budgets and not much exposure to current developments in rig and sail design, the result being that upwind performance was dubious at best.
36 SEAHORSE
I was part of that nascent multihull world, and well remember the frisson of excitement as we (that’s the two of us) swept past Morning Cloud off St Cather- ine’s Point in a 31ft Val Class trimaran during the 1978 Round the Island Race. Back in the Island Sailing Club after the race Edward Heath commented (in a kind of friendly way) that our pride and joy was ‘not a proper yacht’. The trouble is that with hindsight I think he might have had a point. While our little yellow plastic multihull was a hoot to sail it could have been more accu- rately listed under the heading of ‘Sporting Goods’ rather than as a ‘Yacht’. Fast-forward 38 years and of course things are completely different… Or maybe not. I’m sure Mr Heath would have happily given the nod to the current main- stream Maxi fleet as being worthy succes- sors to the likes of Morning Cloud (even if they’re not made of wood). They are surely as beautiful as any of their forebears as well as being unrecognisably faster. And the multihulls? Well, they too have evolved beyond recognition and have more than maintained their performance advan- tage over the best of their single-hulled counterparts – but now both upwind and down. They may still not have earned ‘Yacht’ status but by ‘Sporting Goods’ standards you can’t get much slicker than something like the 140ft, 45kt Spindrift 2. But these two boat species still exist in two separate worlds and there’s no obvi- ous way of bringing them together. The
annual Caribbean circuit is one of the few places in which both monohulls and multi- hulls
compete (obviously in different
classes) so the impressive turn of speed offered by the odd MOD 70 trimaran that shows up is certainly there for all to see. So why wouldn’t you want to be on the fast one? Because from a racing crew’s point of view there’s a problem. While the monohulls are rated under the local CSA (Caribbean Sailing Association) rule, which seems to be generally popular, find- ing a good multihull rating system has always been a headache such that cor- rected time results are often seen as being frustratingly meaningless. The bottom line is that most visiting crew have travelled all that way to enjoy a Good Race and once the multihulls have scattered across the Caribbean the monohulls get on with doing just that, their rating system being rendered even more satisfactory by the steady and predictable trade winds that normally blow through these waters. Meanwhile, although the guys on the fast multihulls are enjoying a great sailing expe- rience there’s not much hope of a decent race as the small fleet is probably a mixed bag of anything from pure racers to ordinary cruisers. Fast multihulls are also susceptible to extreme speed differences. resulting in extreme apparent wind speed disparity. The best multihull racing under these conditions in recent years has been between the one-design MOD 70s; but today it’s unusual to have more than two
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