LA fun in the sun

We arrived for the F18 worlds here in long beach a couple of days ago. Oli, Shannen and I put the 2 boats together pretty fast and went for a sail in the local regatta on the Saturday. Was great breeze and nice waves, a good way to get in the groove again.
Shannen is going great on the front of the boat and we are working through the setup for our weight (just under 150kg) so we need to change a few things to suit our light weight for the bigger breeze. We have all week to work out a solution and I'm happy with the base setup so I think we will be fine.




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Location:Locust Ave,Long Beach,United States

Olympic Boats

So the deals are done, The Nacra 17 and the 49erFX are the new classes. I am really happy that the voices of the sailors were the defining factors in the selection. We have seen to many times in the past with ISAF that the politics interfered with the best solutions. Some strange things still exist in the Olympic sailing arena... Now we have 4 dinghys (2 x 470 and 2 x 49er) and only 1 cat, no keel boats at all!! Its a pretty sorry representation of the sport as a worldwide presence, but its what we have for the next 4 years so i hope it works. The Cat selection is where most of my thoughts lie... I really think the best solution for cat sailing in general would have been to select the F18 class, let everyone go sailing for 3.5 years and then by tender you select the supplied boats for the games and notify the athletes 6 months out from the games. Then you are simply building the already strong F18 fleet and you have ready made high level racing available in many countries... Sure there would be bugs in the system and controls would be hard to manage, but nothing that was impossible. Anyhow, we have the Nacra 17, its the best solution from the boats presented for sure. We decided to not send the flying Phantom about 6 weeks prior to the event because we considered the specs and the expectations from the boats and we were pretty sure it was too big a leap for ISAF to take. We will have the boat out in public soon and it will get heads turning, just check out the daggerboard!

Anyhow, back to the Nacra 17. It looks like a nice boat and when they have the mast sorted out it should be a very reliable product with a long competitive life. There are always issues with SMOD gear for the games and aside from the mast I can see that the sail shape variance will be an area of focus. Funnily enough it would be easier to make identical mainsails if they were crosscut, much like the now outlawed Sail-Innovation 2 cloth mainsails from the F18 class. It is just reducing the areas for human error and thats what we need for Olympic level gear. I certainly hope there is some investigation on that area by Pete V. Whilst the Nacra Infusion sails are generally quite good, we did have fast ones and not so fast ones from the same pattern.. Good luck to the Nacra guys, they have a lot of work ahead and by my reckoning, not a massive profit margin when all things are accounted for..

Boat Preparation Phantom style

Some Photos from last weekend, The Zebra boat is amazing and will be freaking people out at Eurocat! The first team boats arrived last week and it was a mad weekend to get them all sorted out ready for the season. Now we have customer boats being delivered and shipped all over the world. With an Initial plan to build 25 boats in 2012, we are now revising that to meet demand.. Olivier and I had a great session on the boat and I don't think I will ever get tired of the feeling you get from a truly stiff boat. It reminds me of the feeling you get on a marstrom tornado. It feels like its made from one piece and every tiny bit of energy is transformed into forward motion. With the class rule compliant "maintenance" we have some great paint styles on the boats and more are available on request. check it out here:- Phantom hull designs Looking forward to a big season on the soon to be built OC&C Phantom

Phantom menace

Three black Phantom's getting pimped!



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Location:Place de Ponthual,Saint-Lunaire,France

What will the F18 class do now?

http://www.sailing.org/tools/documents/F182012INT170212-[12114].pdf If you read the document carefully you will see that all F18's are now illegal unless you have painted the hulls in the course of maintenance.... So, after many months of fighting over something as stupid as paint V's gelcoat we now have a totally messed up situation where 99% of the fleet is now illegal. If we could apply common sense i'm sure this can be solved, but that has been lacking so far... Stay tuned for more action in the coming weeks.

Where have I been and what am I doing?

So, after a long break.. Sorry!! I am back and will certainly try to keep more frequent updates happening here. During 2011 I was kind of in between projects, frustrating for someone like me who is always keen to take something on and get involved. But in every situation there are positives. I really enjoyed working with the Hobie crew and I have made some great friends over the season, F18 continues to be a very strong class around the world and although there have been some issues of late with rules and uninformed stakeholders creating storms in teacups, The class is still a great place to be. Over the months October - January I was all over the southern hemisphere, I went to NZ to check a few things for a project. It was nice to catch some of the Oracle boys and have a sneak peak at the AC45's they are building. Then I spent a few weeks in Singapore with my good friends Alice and Scott from prosail Asia. They had some Corsair Dash 750's coming in for customers so I helped out and put them together with Scott. The Dash is a really great little boat and I was really impressed with its sailing manners and performance balance for such a comfortable family fun boat.

I even travelled to the Corsair factory in Vietnam with Alice and Scott to work through some future requirements and tweaks. This was my first trip to Vietnam and it certainly wont be the last. I really loved the place and I can highly recommend it. After this job was done I headed to Perth where my girlfriend was training for the ISAF worlds in Match racing. I have done a few days with the girls before and aside from having a pretty good crash in my first ever match race on an Elliot 6 I really enjoy the program. The level of work that goes into an Olympic campaign these days is substantially higher than the good old days... but the results are also impressive. We did a week of work with various camera systems including video glasses, masthead cams, stern cams and handhelds and each day I would compile the instances of note and integrate them into the debrief. Micke the coach and the girls Mandy, Merel and Top along with the training partners Lieske, Maike and Shannen all worked their asses off to prepare for the worlds and the result of 7th was exactly what they required. They qualified the country for the 2012 games, so now the real work begins! After the Perth training session I managed to spend some time at home with the family before Xmas where Merel and I had a great time in Bali, truly fantastic little resort we found. La Joya. email me if you want info on a holiday in a peaceful, well sorted, quiet resort with a great surf beach out the front. So, onto 2012!! I had spent a lot of time last year working on an X40 project for an owner. We went quite a long way with the work and I even checked out a couple of boats to buy before we came to the conclusion that the cost/return balance with the X40 was just not reasonable for an owner, it sort of works for sponsored teams but certainly there are better ways for an owner to spend his/her money to go fast multihull sailing. So, this year I am going to realise that project. We have built a set of requirements and we are going to deliver something that is clearly missing and desired. We have a very good team assembled already and as soon as we can divulge more details I am sure we will impress with what we have planned. I will still do some F18 sailing and after testing the Phantom earlier this week in chilly Quiberon I can honestly say that it is a very impressive product. The Phantom is a race boat, well thought out, very well built and to top it off it simply looks awesome! The demand for the boat is such that I may have to wait a bit for one, but its worth it. Check out the upfucker system that works so well it is embarrassing that we all spent so much time trying to get our Nacra/Hobie/AHPC ones to work even half as good as this system does. I could adjust both board heighta whilst twin trapping, and it was easy! On the race course its details like this that make your day so much nicer.

What is it?

Spent most of the day sanding and prepping a pair of these. Tomorrow they get clear coated and finished off.

Another 2 sets are being done in time for my return to euroland. Let me know if you want a set of solid carbon boards for your f18.

Same size as a wildcat board so they fit all current boats with some packing of cases which is easy to do. And they are 150mm or so longer than a standard wildcat foil.


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How do you take a photo like that?

Check out the banner photo above, how is it possible to do it??

My good mate Christope Launay is the master of onboard photo's for small boats, check out his work here :- http://www.sealaunay.com/

if you ever need a top photo dude and want it to look like it is for us as sailors then Christope is your man.

A total pleasure to work with and I am proud to call him my mate (even if he is french!)

Right now I am in the southern hemisphere again, arrived on Friday and had a good look at a couple of new builds and projects that are moving along very well (not ready for public consumption yet) as well as having a look at some very nice foils that will be available in Europe in the next few weeks. I will bring a couple of sets back with me.

More meetings next week for me and then back to euroland for the next events on the F18.

M20 is fast!!

Check the results here: http://roerkoning.nl/2011/vjb11.htm#r4grote_cats

pretty much untouchable in 7-12kts breeze.

will try to get more detail pics next week, the boat is in the shed now getting some love.

I have been super busy the past few days getting the new Wildcat sorted out, should be sailing Sunday before we head to Carnac. More photos of that little regatta will be posted too.

Cheers

New trapeze lines

Spent a few hours sorting out the time consuming parts of a new boat buildup, we can now have dyneema trap lines on the f18. Not sure of the reason, but it has been touted as a safety issue but I'm stuffed if I can see it being any different in practice.

Anyhow, I like to tweak my boat so it suits me to have the freedom to make this stuff.

I used some 3mm sk75 in yellow because it looks cool! But later on I will receive my new 2.5mm highly pre stretched sk78 from alpha ropes. So I will make another set of lines then.

These first ones came out really nicely and the cool carbon handles really fit well and work even better.

Boat arrives on Monday, so it's going to be a busy week, have to get the wildcat sorted and we have a heavy weather test scheduled for the motor cat.

Oh, keep an eye out for the motor cat this Saturday, it's being used as a jury boat for the team racing event. We will do some video of it during the event.


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