Contents May 2018


FEATURES 4 Keep your head down


30 Getting organised Range of boat type nuts… future plans secure ANDREW MCIRVINE


32 Counting blessings Plenty to smile about… ROB WEILAND


Tipping point Interesting new IRC designs continue to appear steadily, speeding up with each iteration. While the French school pushes forward with its current genre of fin (not bulb) keel offshore-oriented designs, with more powerful hull sections, they are not the only game in town. In Turkey MAT Yachts continue to deliver their range of fast Mark Mills racers (this is the MAT 1180) with a new design in development. Production cruiser-racers continue to dominate inshore under IRC, particularly in tide or current where an old-fashioned (there, we said it) spinnaker is often an advantage, but offshore the pendulum has swung to the more modern boats from designers like JPK, Bernard Nivelt and Daniel Andrieu, whose Sunfast 3200 again scored well in the recent Transquadra shorthanded transatlantic classic. As important as the increasing IRC competitiveness is of the new, lighter boats offshore, of more significance is that particularly on long legs they are just a lot more fun to sail. The current Nivelt 39, one of which won the last Fastnet, will power-reach literally 3-4kt faster than the best IRC 40-footers of two or three years ago. And as more of these boats hit the water so the sailors are becoming better at getting all-round performance. The fundamental transition to faster boats will begin in breeze, but light boats, if they are well sailed and well set up, go pretty quickly in the light as well… And remember the new boats are not hauling draggy, pitchy bulbs through the water. Traditional designs are still favoured but now it is only a matter of time. For the good of offshore racing itself as much as for yacht design it’s crucial that the rating authorities do not over-react


COVER: Cigdem Yurtsever INSET: Herreshoff/MIT


36 Oops! The opening night of the Caribbean 600 did not go entirely according to plan for the team on the mighty Fujin. PAUL BIEKER and JONATHAN MCKEE


38Master designer – Part I Surely you didn’t think we’d rush this one… JOHN ROUSMANIERE


42 Easier than ever? Almost certainly not… argues BRIAN HANCOCK


45 Never a dull moment CARLOS PICH sits down with our favourite maverick designer JUAN KOUYOUMDJIAN


50 Happy birthday SAM DAVIES is no longer casting around to find backing for her third Vendée Globe programme


REGULARS


6 Commodore’s letter STEVEN ANDERSON


9 Editorial ANDREW HURST


10 Update The lady doth protest too much, a different kind of Cup ‘challenge’, painful lessons to learn and how


to keep your chin up in Miami. Plus ‘those’ scows. BLUE ROBINSON, JACK GRIFFIN, CHARLIE ENRIGHT, MALCOLM PAGE, CAROL CRONIN, TERRY HUTCHINSON


18World news Imoca never sleeps, not even in Monaco… and Vendée 2020 is go, a (very) special kind of Kiwi, foil debate or head-burying… and confronting the issue. PATRICE CARPENTIER, BLUE ROBINSON, DOBBS DAVIS, IVOR WILKINS


28 Paul Cayard – True champion Sir Durward Knowles – his boat’s in good hands


34 IRC – Tangy prospect Scrabbling around to find the right ‘big boat’ to race… JAMES DADD has an interesting proposal


54 Design – Clever stuff going on


Everyone’s foiling… well, not at all actually. But virtually everyone who is


foiling today is relying on the same basic mechanics –which PHIL SMITH and JOHN ILETT argue are now well past their use-by date


58 TechStreet Sailors can (quite rightly) be a very demanding lot


69 RORC news For some it was simply too much of a good thing EDDIE WARDEN-OWEN


70Seahorse regatta calendar


72Seahorsebuild table – At it again JO RICHARDS and GUY WHITEHOUSE can be relied upon to think up ‘interesting’ solutions


97 Sailor of the Month Love sailing, love racing, it’s all the same really


The world’s most expensive and probably highest-tech spinnaker pole… ever. Two-time America’s Cup winning 12 Metre Intrepid’s ‘special’ pole was recently discovered in storage at the Herreshoff Museum. Reconditioned by Hall Spars (issue 453), it was engineered at Grumman Corporation in 1970 using carbon-boron composites over an aircraft- grade aluminium honeycomb core with a complex double taper. Estimated to have cost at least $200,000 in 1970s money, the pole weighs 31lb compared with its aluminium counterpart at 85lb. Intrepid also used a beryllium topmast section and over the Cup summer experimented with pultruded boron and magnesium shrouds with titanium end fittings…


HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRISTIAN


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