scott.projectsomewhere

I’ll have to start by thanking James for offering me a go on the
skiff this weekend. It was appreciated and I did learn a
lot…

A while back I wrote about James Francis’ new
Moth-inspired 12 foot skiff. The quote I used at the time was
the usual non-committal “It’ll be interesting to see how this one
handles…”

Well I found out first hand at the Squaddy’s
Brass Monkey regatta yesterday.

As you can probably work out, it wasn’t the easiest boat in the
World. Character building was one way to put it.

The weather was warm for this time of year, but the morning
westerly quickly faded and didn’t fill in again. That should have
been good for us, since James only extended a borrowed rudder to
use on the boat the day before and any strength of breeze would’ve
probably broken it.

But it was survival conditions for us.

We navigated out through the moored-boat trash that clutters up
Kirribilli, and got to the startline under spinnaker without a
capsize. From then on, it was a matter of keeping the rig in the
air… if we could get around the course without capsizing, we’d do
ok.

The fleets started in almost no wind, and we crossed the startline
in reasonable time. But then we tried to tack and capsized twice
within 10m of the line. We got the boat up and continued on upwind
(still infront of 90% of the fleet), making it most of the way
without swimming again (by that stage with 95% of the fleet infront
of us).

The problem was that we were putting in so much effort just keeping
the thing up, that no bit of breeze could attach to the rig, and we
floundered around getting more and more tired.

And as we got more and more tired… it got harder and harder to
sail.

The boat-extension that James had sticky-taped on that morning
started to part company, effectively putting on the underwater
handbrake. Then the rig started to fill with plenty of water after
our numerous capsizes in the non-existant breeze. It wasn’t getting
easier to sail.

Luckily the tide was running out, and we made it back to the bottom
marks eventually… we sailed/swam our way around and started off
again upwind… which was now downwind given the 180 degree wind
shift.

Some 15 capsizes later we limped back into the club…

In all we’d estimated we swam well over 30 times. The breeze never
got above 5 knots. I have no idea how James and Rob got the boat
around the course in any condition at the 12′ skiff
Nationals.

So yes, it was character building. Not particularly fun, but
character building.

In short, James has to be commended for going out on a limb to
design his own boat, albeit the most difficult boat to sail in
history.

And I’ve sailed some tricky boats, trust me.

After we recovered on shore with the obligatory beers, we started
discussing what to do to make it easier to sail. The modificiations
are going to involve more than a bit of bog, time to get out the
chainsaw.

Here’s a bit of a list of what I think from my few hours of
swimming…
- Chainsaw off the bottom and take out probably 40% of the
freeboard. The centre of gravity is just way too high.
- Andrew Stevo thought the volume was too far forward, which looked
to be the case. I’d probably move the max width back to about 60%
from it’s current 40%.
- I’d straighten out the lines from there so the stern is
Axeman-Moth style, not Hungry Tiger-Moth style. In it’s current
form the crew needs to sit in front of the mast to keep the thing
level, so the stern needs a bit more volume maybe.
- The foils are very small in the water, perhaps a bit more size on
the rudder will help steer the enourmous rig.
- The layout could be tweaked, like adding turning blocks at the
chainplates for the kite sheets so the crew can gybe facing
forwards and making the spinnaker throat much larger and taking all
the friction out of the halyard system.
- Maybe something could be done about the effect of the
huge-fully-battened roach in the mainsail. It seems to have such a
huge impact on steering the boat. Maybe a flatter (even negative
seam-shape) head like the KA Moth sails to lower the centre of
effort in the rig.
- Plus plenty more I’m sure…

Interesting…

Though the 12 footer thinking seems to want to solve the speed
problem by throwing more power at it. It’s not an efficiency game
like the Moth is.

If only the (development) class didn’t outlaw hydrofoils, then a
12′ single-handed hydrofoiled 9sqm Moth clone could’ve wiped the
floor with the current dishy, brute-force 12′ beasts.

But then if they didn’t outlaw them, there would probably be none
left.

Last year’s Brass Monkey reports can be found here and here as
well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Sailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.