Very light air characterised last year’s ORC Worlds and there was little chance of conditions being different at this year’s event held in the Adriatic during high summer – and inevitably the expected conditions played a significant part in boat optimisations. The First 40.7 Mareus (above) was squeezed down into Class C with shorter new appendages including this shallow ‘demi-T’ keel, reduced displacement and RM plus a new sailplan. No one expects it to work in breeze… After a first nibble at racing a modified Melges 32 in ORC last year the Airis team got serious in 2017 with a new keel (right), new trim and another new sailplan. Compared with the Melges class keel (white) its fabricated replacement is 10cm shorter with pockets in the bulb and fin for lead pellets for rating tweaks
In C Class the panorama is much wider, yet results correlate
even more closely with wind speed! In light conditions, let’s say below 8kt, the Farr (Mumm) 30, whether optimised or not, shows excellent speed on the water against heavier, more traditional boats… often fast enough to stay ahead on corrected time. Upwind in more breeze sailing length kicks in and conventional,
bigger-displacement boats, often very refined in terms of appendages and rigs, take the lead (this is true for both older designs like the X-37, First 36.7 and M37 or newer designs like the Italia 998). The X-35 one-design is also successful in this class, in the same manner as the larger X-41: the standard boat is already competitive in the light with a wide range of well-tested upgrades to improve all-round effectiveness. In Poland the Class C winner was Pro4U, a First 36.7 hull… but
with literally everything else replaced! Pro4U was followed by Katariina II, our modified Arcona 34, with our NM38 Sugar in 3rd, just ahead of last year’s champion, Matteo Polli’s pretty Italia 998. Also this year an intriguing new actor appeared on the big stage
in Class C, suggesting an interesting future for similar boats of this type: the Melges 32 Airis made its ORC debut in 2016 following modest optimisation of weight/trim and sailplan. That was followed this year by more extensive work on the appendages including a new keel. There were further changes made to the sailplan. It was worth the effort – Airis is the new Class C World Champion. The Melges 32 is of course a very fast boat; longer than a Farr
30, it is therefore more competitive upwind in medium breeze against the heavier boats. And of course it flies downwind. Airis won races in 6-7kt in Trieste, but our simulations show that in more wind we would have been even more competitive, still fast through the water but preserving a rating advantage. There is still room for improvement! However, in Trieste the older, heavier designs like Extrema (X-35, 4th), Hansen, our heavily modified X-37 (4th) and Katariina (8th) were all still very much in the game… Last winter we also tried squeezing an even bigger boat down
into Class C: we were asked by the owner of Mareus, a successful Croatian 40.7, to explore the possibilities of racing in the small divi- sion. We knew, as explained, that using CDL it is no longer enough to just crudely cut sail area and add lead, but eventually we achieved what was asked with a new appendage package, reduced (not increased) displacement and new sailplan. This much-revised boat was nice to sail and relatively competitive in class and overall. Unfor- tunately in Trieste the Croatian crew never found their stride in a tough field, but this is still an interesting option for boats like this.
Conclusions? One-off ORC designs remain rare. The great majority of boats are series or production-built cruiser-racers. We are boat designers before we are boat optimisers and at times this can be rather frustrating, but optimising a good production boat can still be an interesting challenge.
Fortunately from a production yard elements like appendages,
rigs and so on are not of the quality of a one-off boat which allows us considerable room for improvement. Therefore with careful devel- opment there is scope for the racing life of a boat like this to be extended to the benefit of the owner. There are also plenty of good secondhand boats – that may never have been raced – that can be bought cheaply and made competitive. Next year we will see the first ever combined ORC/IRC Worlds;
while we wait for details on ratings and scoring we already see that this will be a thrilling chance to compare designs born and/or devel- oped under different rating systems. Contamination is a word widely used today, but in this case it offers a chance to introduce new ideas to each fleet. My feeling is that the newer IRC designs are more oriented
towards offshore courses in stronger breeze than we have found works on upwind/downwind ORC courses. But having observed this summer’s IRC Europeans in Marseille it seems that boats like the Mumm 36 can also be made competitive inshore, while other even lighter designs also shone at times. I have read with great interest recent Seahorse interviews with
Marc Lombard and Bernard Nivelt about the development of lighter, faster IRC boats like Bernard’s Teasing Machine and his Fastnet- winning JND 39. It seems clear how these boats sail perfectly in a breeze, while needing a bit more development to be fully competitive in lighter conditions… but wasn’t it exactly the same when the light downwind flyers first arrived from New Zealand in the mid-1970s? Very soon their designers found out how to turn them into all-round performers. That was the beginning of a new era.
Stock-take My feeling is that the ORC algorithm is currently working well but a few areas should be improved and made closer to IRC to make ORC more ‘owner friendly’: MeasuringPhysical weighing should be considered as the equivalent to freeboard measurements (the opposite should be done by IRC); this would also be a good way to validate measurement. Heresy!Maybe I am indeed a heretic but, with a database available of thousands of boats, and considering the now much-diluted effect of stability on an ORC rating, is it really so difficult in today’s world to derive Righting Moment (RM) statistically and do away with our tedious and complex heeling test? Scoring Having different time allowances for offshore and inshore races is desirable. But while for offshore races a single-figure GPH or TCC is now in common use, for inshore events performance curve scoring (PCS), with its implied wind calculations, may be theoretically perfect but in practice it is complicated, difficult to apply correctly and slow to produce results. This is bad for everyone. So keep it simple! There already are single-number allowances for inshore races on every ORC certificate. We should use them. Maurizio Cossutti, Udine, Italy
q SEAHORSE 27
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