An extraordinary piece of kit. Armel Le Cléac’h’s ‘reward’ for winning the Vendée Globe after twice finishing as runner-up went afloat two months ago, flew on its first outing and days later headed to Guadeloupe – and back – completing the out-leg in six days and flying whenever conditions were right (six days, taking it gently). The detailing on this immensely complex 32m machine is flawless, note the delicate endplate below the boom (left) and the tiny tip-foil on the centreboard to tidy up waterflow. The main rudder is fixed while those on the floats (top) can be adjusted in height and trim to control the boat’s pitch. The level of finish (above) was plentiful payback for a slight launch delay
Zealand ‘Big Boat’ KZ-1? Some type of planing hull to get up to lift- off speed quickly? How do you deal with coming off the foils then getting back up on them quickly? Touch and go training, anyone? And what about the airfoils? ETNZ have said they want to avoid
the logistical headache of wings. The New York Yacht Club chal- lenger’s head of design, Marcelino Botín, has shown drawings of a double-luffed mainsail set on a D-spar. Will twist and shape be controlled with internal arms and inflatable battens? A return to controlling twist with a mainsheet seems unlikely. Are there any conditions when you’ll be foiling with the Code 0 up? Probably not. Except in very light air, the apparent wind will be well forward. Remem- ber that in 2013, after four days of racing, Oracle fitted a shorter bowsprit on their AC72 and only used the longer bowsprit and Code 0 on two of the remaining nine race days. Say goodbye, too, to self-tacking jibs. Casting off and sheeting on the jib are in keeping with the desire for more crew work.
Learning to sail, learning to race The Protocol does not allow the teams to take the red pill and leave the comfort of the simulator until 31 March 2019. They will then have five months to learn to sail the AC75 in the real world before the first AC World Series event in Naples. During the five ACWS events and the 2020 Christmas Regatta the teams will continue to develop their boats and move to learning to race them. As Kenneth Grahame wrote in TheWind in the Willows, ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half
so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ There will be plenty of messing about in boats over the next three years but there will be nothing simple about it.
USE WHAT WE HAVE – Scott Dickson Early in 2016 I was in a committee meeting at the Long Beach Yacht Club when we identified the need to build a fleet of ‘intermediate’ sized boats at our yacht club. LBYC in California is well known for the Congressional Cup international match race regatta raced by a fleet of 11 matched Catalina 37s. It is a crew-intensive boat and only the very top match race teams make it look easy to sail it efficiently with a team of just six. Normally for a fleet race they can have up to 12 people onboard. For this proposed new intermediate fleet various designs of
21-30ft were being kicked around with some pretty big dollar signs attached to them. Some of the objectives being discussed were: l A boat larger than youth boats to help keep those sailors engaged beyond the junior programme l Easy to sail with two or three people to appeal to a larger base of the club membership l Heavier displacement to develop match racing skills While big budgets were being thrown around it was also identified
that a sailing school 40 miles up the road were looking to retire their small fleet of Solings. The club already owned two Solings which we had acquired seven years earlier for match race training.
SEAHORSE 13 w
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