You can take away all the bathrooms


Actually, under the class rules you can’t. But there are still plenty of other ways to speed up your outwardly luxurious WallyCento. Blue Robinson catches up with Magic Carpet3 skipper Danny Gallichan


Seahorse Magazine: At the end of the 2017 season what did you decide to improve on your already successful craft? Danny Gallichan: Our prime concern was weight. We looked for things we could remove and improve on, ending up focus- ing on the rig. Talking to Lindsay [Owen- Jones] about new rigging materials and the growing popularity of aerofoil and elliptical rigging, he said, ‘If you can make that much gain in the rigging component, what about looking at the entire rig package?’ SH:What options were there? DG: The boat had Southern Spars E6 carbon rigging which is good, reliable, robust and serviceable, and the obvious alternative was Carbo-Link. Their numbers were very good and the aero stuff was extremely impressive. In the end, however, we are a fully North programme with Tom Whidden racing with us, and as it had worked well with Southern before I didn’t see much reason to go elsewhere and so decided on their Aero 6 rigging to work with a new Southern Spars rig. SH:How quickly did the concept of going for a complete new rig emerge? DG: Pretty quickly… We brought in Steve Wilson (Southern Spars’ co-founder and now consultant) and he was convinced we could make good gains from the six years since our existing rig. We then had our own performance team meeting where what started out as a weight discussion quickly turned into a conversation on stiffness – everyone favoured increased stiffness. But with that stiffness we did not want to be heavier (Lindsay has always been very weight conscious, going back to his car racing days). The clincher on increasing stiff- ness was when we discovered we had a sig- nificant stiffness deficit to our competitors… SH:What sort of rig height parameters were you able to play with? DG:With the old rig we were at rule mini- mum BAS (boom above sheer) for reasons of VCG, but now we decided to go to maximum BAS, pushing the sail plan up into the air a little more. Most people thought that was a good move and the other two WallyCentos were already there. But I did have reservations as we have


always been working on our weight, and putting the rig up has implications for the


The beast at play… Magic Carpet3


racing with her new rig at the Maxi Worlds in Sardinia where she finished third in the Wally class – won by Terry Hui’s ‘pocket’ Wally 78 Lyra


bulb weight to maintain righting moment. SH:Who was in charge at Southern? DG: Kevin Batten was project manager, plus Dave Barnaby who was in France and had been sailing with us for a couple of years before moving back to New Zealand. SH:What sort of modulus carbon are you talking about for the tube? DG: There is no limit in our fleet, but I don’t think there is much of a gain going to high or ultra-high modulus. Talking to Steve Wilson even today it is much more about lay-up and how you configure that. SH: And one less set of spreaders? DG: Again that came through Steve’s work. The build slot was booked and there was still a lot of toing and froing with different ideas, then Steve looked at gains on the aero side and the rig section, plus we had a big conversation on chord length and that had to be validated. So once we committed there was quite a lot to think about. SH: Considerable understatement… DG: Sure. We were going from four spreaders to three, but we had to race the first half of the season with a four-spreader rig. Obviously a big thing was the D1s and their angle through the deck; we had tubes through the deck and over the winter of 2017/18 we had to dig those tubes out, then reset them in a position where they would work well for both rigs. No small


task. So we got in Sean Riley’s team from North Composites; they built the boat and did our switch from twin to single rudder and a lot of other structural work onboard. SH:How long to deliver the rig from NZ? DG: It takes six weeks and is still a serious logistical exercise. We had a working rig in the boat, which we had to take out and put somewhere. But being mid-season, if there was an issue we needed access to this rig to put it back in, probably in a hurry. The ideal place was La Ciotat, France, the old Southern Spars base with room for two 50m rigs at the same time, plus the boat, and where we could barge the new rig in. SH: And how long to build a 50m mast? DG: The build started in mid-November and it left the factory in New Zealand on 16 May. After that everything worked to plan – even the shipping dates! We got to La Ciotat at the end of July, and it took two weeks basically. Kevin from Southern ran the re-rig. We know all about taking rigs in and out but this was a new set-up, and we were very much the test bed. SH: The key differences from your previous rigging? DG: It was pretty much the same but now elliptical. There are small technical differ- ences to how it connects to the rig… but everything fitted! At the same time we were switching over to 3Di RAW sails fore and 


SEAHORSE 65


CARLO BORLENGHI


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124