Feeling pretty good
Xoxoxooxoxoxox
Øyvind Bordal reckons that he now has one of the lightest rigs on any cruising boat ever, when measured by weight versus sail area. Which seems appropriate for what could also be the lightest cruising boat ever, when measured by weight versus waterline length
I just wanted to change the mast. Put in a new one. Doesn’t sound so hard, does it? Well, in reality, project ‘new rig for Chi’ turned out to last more than two years. It included countless days and nights of calcu- lations, ideas, drawings, thoughts on how things could be done, along with countless conversations, emails and phone calls with people who knew more than myself about various aspects of the subject. Also, logistics, which through Covid
turned into a huge challenge, literally hundreds of items needed to be sourced, ordered, delivered – and, last but not least, paid for. Because, even though I had a lot of help from good people, this turned out to be a very expensive adventure. Which is the main reason why it took so long. Your writer having to make the money to pay for everything…
The boat that capsized In Denmark Chi is ‘the boat formerly known as PI-14’. The prototype that cap- sized on its first test sail. A funny story, but also tragic, because
what could have become a very interesting and different production boat died right there, due to fatal mistakes and warnings that were not listened to. This happened in 2014. Four years later
I took on the project, fully aware of the major job that was ahead of me before this very peculiar vessel could be reborn as the amazing sailing boat I could see inside my optimistic mind. Today Chi has (among a lot of other
things) a rebuilt transom, new rudders and a new keel. And now a new rig. A heavier keel and a lighter rig were simply necessary, not only for performance but also for safety. Chi is built in vacuum-infused carbon
fibre with 25mm Divinycell core. Every- thing, including the interior, is built that
A rarely tapped source of robust cruising spars: the author checks the spreader ends on the secondhand Class40 rig that he modified for his very light cruising yacht Chi – which he took over after it capsized embarrassingly on its maiden sail. Class40 spars come in single and two-spreader configuration, the latter a little more forgiving during a crash gybe. A standard 20° spreader rake is also ideal for cruising applications. Note the extra diagonals added between the top spreaders and masthead for tube stability
way. There’s a lifting keel and an electric engine. The boat is narrow, 3.3m on a length of 14m, and displacement is amaz- ingly low at four tons. A hull like that does not have much
inherent stability. On top of that, the original owner decided to install an absurdly heavy aluminium mast with an air draft of 21m. The 1,000kg lead tor- pedo, even though sitting 3m below the surface, never stood a chance. Selling off this rig was not easy, even
though it looked brand new, was practi- cally never used and represented the value of a Tesla car straight from the dealer. In the end I succeeded, passing it on to a friend with a 20-tonne steel boat with a deckhouse… a perfect match. He also gave me his old aluminium boom, which fitted right into my new rig project.
A long and winding road So now I didn’t have a sailboat any more,
just an impotent floating condo. And I knew the road would be long and winding before the day came when a new rig was up. I already knew what I wanted: a light-
weight carbon mast with standing rigging in Dyneema, set up for offshore short- handed sailing. This would be ridiculously expensive and way out of my financial reach. But somehow I thought it would happen anyway, since I had decided to do it. It usually works that way. After some intense research I landed on
the solution of adapting a Class40 rig. The Class40 rig ticked all my boxes: with a height of 17.5m from the deck up, it would give me a shorter mast by 1.5m. Also, I would have a weight-optimised and strong rig, designed for easy singlehanded handling offshore. It even had the same boom length as my boat, and chainplates for the V1s with the same spreader angle. And last, but definitely not least: the other- wise prohibitively expensive sails would be
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