Update
Rod Davis looks understandably happy after his long OK Worlds programme, building three boats, a heap of rig development plus getting on intimate terms with a lot of Kiwi gym bunnies culminated in a ninth overall in the 110-boat fleet and a Masters world title
The Figaro 3 arrives with a box of ropes and blocks and an ‘IKEA
Flatpack’ manual on how to put everything together. Assembly is much the same process: at first it seems to take for ever and be extremely complicated, and nothing quite seems to fit; but as soon as you’ve done it once everything suddenly goes together fine and it’s easy. After a week in the shed I managed to get the boat into a sailable condition and ready to put into the water. Now into the second week of sailing and I can safely say that
all the boat work has paid off. For the first week we rarely had less than 20kt of wind and the boat absolutely loved it, straight out of the box (some of it literally of course). Off the wind we were soon averaging speeds in the high teens. The helm is light and the boat stays easy to steer, always feeling in control while the big high volume bow keeps it nicely out of the waves. The class rules dictate that we can have two upwind sails and
three downwind sails onboard, including a gennaker reaching sail. The addition of the gennaker makes shorthanded sailing much easier. It is a furling sail that is very easy to put up and down. At reaching angles it will make the boat not only faster, but also easier to control under autopilot. In the first few days of training we have already seen the sail
starting to be used as a light wind upwind jib too. The thing that will determine which sail to use in these conditions will be how many tacks you’ll need to do with it, since the gennaker requires re-furling and then re-deploying through each tack. This year I was fortunate to have been selected to join Le Pôle
Finistère Course au Large for training in the Figaro 3, based out of Brittany. The training group for the season ahead is a little daunting, including 15 of the most consistently successful Figaro competitors of the last few seasons (it’s also a training school that operates entirely in French so following the complex discussions about minute details on the boat can sometimes be challenging!). However, unlike in the Figaro 2, where many of the sailors had
over 10 years’ experience sailing the boat, the Figaro 3 is a new game entirely; the playing field really does start out level this year with nobody having sailed more than a few hours on the boat before January 2019.
14 SEAHORSE
Not out of focus but a 1971 preview of the AC75 twin-mainsails. Steve Dashew’s C-Class rig on Beowulf IV was an alternative to the heavier wing rigs that were gaining momentum in the class. The mast is a chemically milled 8in alloy tube with two sail tracks riveted on tangentially, each carrying its own mainsail. The clews attach to a small lateral bar so that the weather sail is flattened automatically while the leeward sail gained fullness. The very light design was built of a single skin of 6oz glass over 1/4in balsa. Beowulf IV showed dramatic bursts of speed – but she was harder to keep in the groove than her solid-wing rivals…
ROBERT DEAVES
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