News Around the World Meanwhile, designer Rob Shaw has a somewhat more sophis-
ticated project on his drawing board. Shaw has attracted inter - national attention for his high-performance sportboat designs and for grunty 9-12m canting-keelers that have caused some embar- rassment to much larger boats in offshore events. He has noticed an interesting trend from European yachtsmen. ‘As their winter begins to bite down, about November/December, my email starts to light up with enquiries and discussions. It is obvious the guys in northern Europe are now dreaming about summer sailing.’ This new project is the result of one such discussion with German
Ralph Schatz, an experienced campaigner who was one of the leading lights in the development of the SL33 catamarans which Emirates Team New Zealand adopted as trial boats leading up to the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco. Schatz, who does much of his sailing on Lake Constance, is keen
to promote a new class of one-design yachts that could be easily transported for a series of lake-based contests. Although he has been involved in projects that ended up aligned with foiling America’s Cup campaigns, that was not envisaged in the new concept. ‘Any foiling aspect was ruled out very early,’ says Shaw. ‘Foiling
can become quite a distraction that takes up a huge amount of time and energy. It is really best left to pro teams. ‘People who are essentially weekend racing cannot devote the
Unexpected With eight new prospective America’s Cup challengers bursting out of the woodwork within the final minutes of the late entry deadline, the 2021 regatta has been presented with a problem. A nice problem, but a problem nonetheless. Original infrastructure plans were to accommodate six challenger
teams. Base sites have been allocated to Luna Rossa, American Magic and Ineos Team UK. The Malta Altus Challenge and a second US-based challenge have scrutinised and accepted bases, leaving only one more site. Nobody expects all six of the remaining late bids to make it to the startline, but organisers and funders clearly need to start making provisional plans – suggesting the Christmas break might be rather busier than originally intended. Ivor Wilkins
The dramatic concave aft rocker of the Andrieu/Verdier Sun Fast 3300 is extreme but not unprecedented. However, the reverse rocker forward of the keel is not something you see every day…
kind of full-on effort that a foiling programme demands. They want a boat they can jump on and get to maximum performance in a relatively short time.’ With the focus firmly aimed at light-air performance, the concept
is for a 12m monohull that will be fully powered up in 6kt of windspeed. Main features are light pre-preg carbon/Nomex hull construction with a big rig and a steel keel fin and bulb on a single ram canting and lifting system. These are quite simple boats. The hydraulics for controlling the
keel operate off a small bank of lithium batteries while, being lake boats, a small electric drive system is also perfectly adequate for propulsion. The boats will be stripped out, although there is provision for four pipe cots forward, so some of the anticipated eight-person crew could sleep onboard at regattas to save money. ‘We did look at trapezes and outriggers but decided to stick with
simplicity. These boats will spend so much time in light air that it was better to set the design parameters right at that end of the scale and develop a boat that is sensible and fun to sail in those conditions.’ Performance modelling indicates 8.2kt upwind; down- wind, the targets in 6kt of breeze and above are to deliver boatspeed of 2kt above windspeed at 145 TWA. With the concept drawings complete, the client is now working
with two yards, one in Europe and one in New Zealand, on a build package to take to the market.
24 SEAHORSE
AUSTRALIA Consistently good It is the small things for Glenn Ashby. The last thing he does before launching his A-Class catamaran at the World Championships here in Queensland is wet-rub his foils. ‘Sanding’ is really too industrial a term for what he is doing here, as he searches for a nicely worn bit of 2000-grade wet and dry in the bucket next to his van. Having done that he places the curved foils on the boat so they don’t get contaminated – ‘touched’ in normal language. And he’s quite specific here: he doesn’t want a fingerprint on the foil, particularly close to the leading edge, as that makes a difference. And when I look him in the eye I can tell he is not kidding. Seahorse: Options after Bermuda? Glenn Ashby: There were certainly options after the Cup win but what was really important to me was to have time to reflect. I didn’t want to lock anything in straightaway. I really needed quite a bit of time, maybe more than some of the other crew, to reflect and make the right choices. Without doubt I feel I have made the correct deci- sion, and I really enjoy working with the people around me at ETNZ. As a group I think we created something special in the journey to Bermuda and so to walk away from that would not have been right. SH: You were the only person onboard in Bermuda who was also on the boat back in San Francisco in 2013. GA: I was… and even now I can’t quite work out how San Francisco unfolded. My faith in karma wobbled for a while after that. And so to come from that to where we ended up in Bermuda on a pretty cool boat, after all the highs and extreme lows, and to be successful was a real cleansing feeling. It restored my faith in a lot of things. SH: That was cleansing for a nation too. Tom Whidden has said it takes just as much out of you winning or losing the America’s Cup… GA: I agree 100 per cent. It really didn’t sink in for any of us until we got to New Zealand, with the homecoming parades – we were blown away by all of them. Then I flew back to Melbourne where all my family and friends met me at the airport – those homecomings were incredible. We may never experience that again, because there is almost an expectation in New Zealand for us to retain it now. SH: All Blacks syndrome… GA: Absolutely. And so we have to raise the bar. Concerning the next Cup, myself and the rest of the sailing team were mainly involved in the new class, going through the concepts and broad range of ideas that we looked at – from the Maxi72-style big boat to fully foiling, with everything in between. The sailors were extremely keen on high performance and raising the bar, not going backwards, with something that was really good for match racing, something very manoeuvrable… and very exciting to sail. I think we have that! SH:We lost a lot of the epic pre-start battles when the Cup moved to multihulls. GA: Looking ahead I think the pre-starts will be more interesting than we saw in Bermuda, because it looks like we are going ahead with the upwind start and this will bring back a lot of the old match race skills. Plus boats that are as manoeuvrable and accelerate as quickly as the new 75s will really open up the playbook with situations changing really quickly; so the key will be to develop that playbook on what you can and cannot do in different conditions.
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