Above: Not everyone wants ‘all’ of the excitement of a foiler Moth and as a result there is a steady stream of designs appearing – many great, some pretty awful – which aim to share the foiling experience more widely (if the success of foiling depended upon Moths and America’s Cup boats it would be a pretty marginal activity). Perhaps the simplest to enjoy of these mainstream foilers, the UFO (opposite) is like most good pieces of design a simple-looking result of a complex and thorough process of development
By sticking to these guidelines you get a
pleasant little toy that rigs in about 15 to 30 minutes, sails out of half-metre deep shallows without trying to murder you and will then take off and foil into the great beyond in a steady force 3. You get simplicity and fun. You get spoiled rotten. I’ll never go back. What’s eerie is not how the boat per-
forms at this point, but how broadly and simply it works. It’s not the first fast fun boat to come out of my dad’s barn at Point Farm. There have been countless toys that we’ve put together over the years that have been fun to us and made sense for us. We’re all ardent perverts over here in our little design community. If it’s fast we’ll forgive any other glaring flaw. What’s unique is that this is the first time
we’ve put something together that flies 12- year-olds and 70-year-olds during demos. It’s the first boat to come out of the barn and force the creation of a whole factory to meet the demand for it. What was different this time? It comes down to nothing more than the core configuration and the core concept. The battleplan for the design and development process, if you will; where you will place the pieces and how you will react to threats and opportunities.
When you build a flat-bottomed small
catamaran (less than 10ft) you’ve made a dinghy by nearly every definition. Most cats don’t ever stray below 14ft in length and thus never get much under 300lb. They’re often limousines. You’d never build a catamaran as small
as the UFO because their performance is largely a function of waterline hullspeed and the reduction of wavemaking drag. You’d be shooting yourself in the foot to make it short. Right? One word: hydrofoils. While the dramatic component of foils,
which has just broken into popularity, is the ‘flying’ part, the benefits you get out of foils kick in far before take-off. When they’re moving they’re lifting.
The faster they move the more they lift. So about 4kt of boatspeed before take-off, the boat is already planing thanks to the extra lift from the foils. So before you even take off the foils help you, taking an unthink- ably beamy and roll-stable idiot-proof dinghy and making it plane like mad. Far more significantly, though, the
vertical push from the foils is located in the front and back of the boat, which makes it drastically more pitch stable than one would ever expect from such a stumpy craft. This is especially so as the main foil
is placed slightly forward of the mast, which makes it better suited to counteract unwanted forward pitching at low speeds. If it weren’t for the foils such a small cat
with such a tall rig would be a veritable haunted house of pitchpoles. As it is, the foils utterly erase that problem. As a matter of fact, if you’re not looking to foil yet, you can set the foils to push no further than the planing waterline of the boat and simply skitter about in this mode for months, getting ample jollies. If you want to push into the new
frontier, though, buckle up because the toy has some serious firepower to unleash. On take-off both hulls break contact with the surface. All the frictional drag from them vanishes. As you climb the drag continues to decrease as both the main foil and rudder foil uprights pull free of the surface. Things get intense. Very intense. Now roll it to weather a few degrees. The horizontal foils take over the job of generating side- force, so the struts are now doing no work at all, making nearly zero drag. Further, the boat is hanging to weather
of the lift off the foils, as if the hull itself is hiking for you. It’s like putting an edge in on a ski. The boat turns into a f*%^ing missile.
SEAHORSE 55 w
THIERRY MARTINEZ
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