Design
One design fleet racing in a trailable Cat A 30-footer with a cruising interior and sportsboat performance? Only the L30 can offer all that
Resurgent H
ow many yachts can you think of that combine 20-knot plus performance and one design racing in decent-sized fleets
with Category A offshore certification and weekend accommodation for four people, but can also be trailed behind an average car? And how many of those can be rigged and launched by two people in a couple of hours, without needing a crane? When Rodion Luka went looking for a boat which could do all that, he couldn’t find anything suitable in production. There was a gap in the market, which he decided to fill and thus the L30 was born. You may have heard about the L30 in
2019, when it was selected by World Sailing for the double-handed mixed offshore world championships and widely assumed to be a shoe-in for the (subsequently abandoned) offshore event at the 2024 Paris Olympics. But there’s a lot more to this nine-metre Swiss Army knife of a boat than that. Despite being eminently suitable for two- handed racing, the L30 has the size of cockpit you’d expect to find on a 40-footer and for inshore windward-leeward racing
74 SEAHORSE
There may not be an offshore medal on the menu at Paris 2024 but one of the favourites to be selected as the platform for the next Olympic Regatta has dusted itself down and is now steaming back into international prominence
it’s ideal for five or even six crew. Despite being built in glassfibre, not carbon fibre, it’s a ton lighter than almost any comparable boat on the market. It’s nimble enough for match racing too, with easily removable stanchions and a full 360° turning circle in just one and a half boat lengths. It’s also forgiving enough, with its runners lashed to the shrouds, to work well as a sailing school boat for novices. It took three years to design and refine,’
Luka says. ‘Every detail has been very carefully thought out. The idea is not just to race but to sail for pleasure also. It must be easily trailable and it needs to have some accommodation inside because if you build a pure racing boat, no matter how successful it is, in three, five or seven years’ time the class will die anyway.’ Looking to the future, the L30 was developed from the outset with three stages of life in mind. First, as a high- performance one design class offering fleet racing and international competition for teams of amateur sailors. Second, as a teaching platform for sailing schools and also as a club racer on a local level. And then, third, as a lively but easy-to-handle
family cruising yacht for private and charter use. On Russell Coutts’ recommendation
Luka commissioned the naval architect Andrej Justin, who designed the RC44, to develop his concept and design the L30. ‘A minivan that must perform like a GT car and fit in a motorbike shed’ is how Justin describes the end result. ‘A project with many contradictory requests ended up with a great sailing boat – a family yacht suitable for one design racing and corporate sailing.’
Practical performance The L30 is a very different boat to the RC44, of course, but they do have some design features in common and their key parameters are strongly informed by practical considerations. They’re both notably slender with vertical topsides, a flat bottom and a tight turn of the bilge, but while the RC44 is shaped to fit snugly in a 40ft shipping container, the L30’s 2.54m (8ft4in) beam is dictated by European road trailer regulations. They both have a very high ballast ratio – 43.4 for the L30 – rather than relying on form
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