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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final prep for team race broadcast

This afternoon we went through the final checks to make sure we are not going to make a mess of the saturday event, I even did a small voice over for the promo video that will be released in 24 hours or so. Keep an eye out on Sailing Anarchy for the live feed of the event.

Thanks again to the Nuguru guys and Mischa de Munck for today.

First race of 2011

We have been sorting the M20 out over the past few weeks, and i'm pretty happy with its current state, Its funny how a few changes here and there can have a compound effect on the performance. Add in more time on the boat in a variety of conditions and the total gain is considerable.

I really didn't spend much time on the M20 in 2010 due to my work with Nacra, but now I can do much more sailing on it, so whenever I get the chance we will have the big beast out there!

Last week we shot a small video for Zwisterleven in preparation for the round Texel race, the boat will be essentially as you see it here in the video, except for a small change which will be revealed just prior to the race... I am sailing a Wildcat at texel, so Herbie and Bulkas will be piloting the weapon. http://www.vimeo.com/22052067

Enjoy the Vid, and keep an eye out for the stealthy black carbon RIB as well, it will be the commentator boat for the upcoming team racing event on Saturday, broadcast live on Sailing Anarchy.

results fromt he racing are here: http://www.roerkoning.nl/2011/vjb11.htm

The next step

A lot of you will be aware that we are hosting a team racing event on the 16th April here in NED, the basic concept is simple enough: Team racing in F18's with a solid focus on bringing it to the public.

The tricky part is how do you get the action out there? beyond those who attend the even in person.... Sure we have photo's and reports, but nothing beats TV, and imagine if you could put cameras on F18's and broadcast live? add in GPS tracking and you have a super cool package.

up until very recently all this was costing mega bucks and actually it was too big and certainly not waterproof enough, but as technology evolves these options become more and more feasible. With modified Gopro cameras and some geek engineering this is all going to happen next weekend.

For me though, the seriously cool thing is the plane.... Yep a remote control plane with a Gopro on the nose and it sends live video up to 40km!!!

You have a cool set of video googles to watch it all like a pilot, its seriously spooky to view the world like this, but addictive all the same!

So, next weekend we will see the next step in sailing viewing, sounds a lot like the next AC TV plans..


Big thanks to the boys at

2 posts in one day!

Rumors abound that I am sailing a Hobie in 2011, well its not exactly fresh news really is it?

These photos were taken in 2009, and clearly show me sailing a Hobie :)

But seriously: I am sailing a Hobie in 2011 and went for my first training session yesterday, borrowed boat (thanks mini Mischa) and new crew, Cas (Ex John Casey slave) . We were very happy with our first session. Upwind speed was really good and downwind we are happy too. we had a pretty good boat to measure against (until a small technical detail took them out for the afternoon)

More Wildcat training in the coming weeks in preparation fro Carnac, hopefully my new boat arrives in time for the customary Macca tuning session.

What the hell??

This is what I have been working on recently, its for sure not a pretty thing! but its functional and surprisingly quick. The end use will become clear in a few months, but its safe to say that its not class legal and will not be granted a texel rating anytime soon!

ISAF, final chance...

I am in Athens now for the ISAF conference, my first visit to such a gathering and from all I have heard from experienced campaigners is that I may be a little frustrated with the process...

I see it as a pretty simple thing though: Either ISAF have the guts to make the right call for sailing (not individual classes) or sailing and the Olympics will part ways in the near future.

We, as sailors know that the time for old designs, old categories and substandard equipment are over, but the crazy thing is that we are not really able to influence the old boys and girls who have demonstrated that they like living in the past and if they continue down the current path they can remain in the past along with olympic sailing.

I hope to be proven wrong, but i'm not confident...

Still busy

In the past few weeks I have been all over the place: First I was stuck in Dubai with the Volcanic Ash cloud issue... I managed to get myself into Hospital there, not the best way to spend your time in Dubai!

Then I flew to Vienna, where Roman picked me up and we drove the Golf (rabbit powered..) to Salzburg so we could do a couple of days work on the X40, I flew from there to London to pick up my new car, An Audi Allroad, very nice. I drove it back to Holland via the ferry at Harwich. The next day I drove to Carnac in Arijen's Tundra (I love these trucks!) we sailed our new Nacra there and broke it on a rock in the long distance race, so we drove home again on the Sunday. Boats all fixed now and ready for the next event.

Tuesday last week I flew to San Fran for one week, and tomorrow I drive to Sweden in the Black Tundra :) to sort out the Red M20..

Then next week I go to Vienna again to get the Red Bull boat to Sete for the first race of the season.

more miles for me...

Busy week ahead

Long time, no posts!

Summary of the situation: I am in Amsterdam again (was in Sydney for a few weeks) I sailed the new Nacra F20 last week, Amazing boat and you should all go and buy one!!

Full report is below, but I though I should give you an idea of my schedule for the next week...

Monday I am trying to fit in another sail on the 20, its just too much fun!! Then in the afternoon I fly to Southampton, maybe look at a car to buy and then off to Cowes for the OC Events Extreme 40 series team briefing on Tuesday.

Fly back to Amsterdam Tuesday evening. Then Thursday I fly to Dubai for a race on the good ship Yo!! (IRC 50') Its a long day race but I still fly back to the UK on Friday night so I can go sailing in Holland on the weekend!

Busy times, but all good stuff.

Here is my impression of the new Nacra F20:- Photos to come...



Holland in March is usually not the best place to go sailing, as an Aussie I have a natural dislike to any weather that requires the use of a drysuit!
John Forbes said it best: If you need a drysuit, we don't go! But as the years I spend in Euroland go by I find myself less reluctant to drysuit weather and was even tempted to sail the new Nacra F20 in February. but sanity prevailed when there was a good coverage of ice in the harbour.



So finally the weather came good, I arrived back Holland earlier this week and after a visit to Nacra HQ we arranged to go for a test sail on Wednesday. The forecast was great, Unseasonal warm weather and 12 kts breeze sounded pretty good for a first sail on the new creation.



You have all seen photos of the boat and discussed the boat at length so I won't bore you with any more detail stuff unless someone has a specific question, but suffice it to say that the boat is what you expect from Nacra, the layout is clean and simple just like the Infusion. The build quality and finishing (on this pre production boat) was excellent, a few extra bolt holes and fittings here and there but as you would expect from the first boat out of the moulds.



The breeze was a lot stronger than the forecast and as we sailed out of the harbour and as soon as we exited the sea wall it was clearly more than 20kts. So this would be an interesting session!



First up, Peter Vink and I sailed upwind for a couple of miles, just getting a feeling for the boat and trying a few different settings for mast rotation and board height (more on the board height later) essentially the boat sails like an Infusion, same systems and Nacra DNA helps with the familiar feeling and there are very few things anyone would want to change. You can feel the foils working to lift the leeward hull even as you go upwind. The boat feels fast as you come out of a tack but then as you both get on the wire and it winds up to full speed you get a funny feeling through the boat that it's all gone a bit light, essentially it has gone light! There is clearly less boat in the water..



Pete and I then cruised downwind (no trapezing so we could chat) getting a feel for the boat under kite and seeing what happens when you push the bows under a wave (not much, just pops out again). The breeze by now was solid mid 20's so we were giving it some loads to deal with, At the bottom of our run we parked up and had a chat about a few things we noticed and then Pete jumped on the coach boat to check it from a different point of view and Adam Beattie joined me on the 20.



Upwind again, this time Adam and I were pushing as hard as we could and tried the boards in different heights as well as different heel angles for the boat, both of these are related to the behaviour of the boat and both make a huge difference. If you have the boards fully down and fly the hull high you get a lot of lift from the foil, this is fun but not the fastest way to go upwind. We tried some silly things like big hull flying and then rounding up sharply.. The boat flies on the foil (leeward hull out of the water until the board case) then it settles back down in the water and carries on upwind. Its all very manageable and aside from the ability to make the foils lift the boat its pretty normal sailing.



Then we set the kite and left the boards fully down and Adam jumped on the wire, you feel instantly that the boat is lifting on the foils. Its very easy to get the whole boat out! We did this a few times and couldn't stop laughing! It's seriously the most fun you will ever have on a beach cat. For sure the full boards down option is not the fastest in the conditions we had (25kts by this stage) but it's a crazy amount of fun and very addictive..
Anyhow, sanity prevailed and we lifted the boards 30cm and tried again: This is the quickest I have ever been on a beach cat downwind. Pete was only just keeping up in the coach boat at full throttle. The slightly higher board setting still gives lift and the boat is semi foiling the whole time. You can feel that the steering becomes super sensitive and your speed increases as you keep the boat in the groove. It was around this time that I said to
Adam: "this is the future of catsailing" It's a whole new dimension to the sport, The added speed and feeling the boat gives you is something I want to do again and again. I would have stayed out all day if it was possible!



So, we could see some seriously bad weather coming in and as it was already 20kts plus we decided to call it a day, Here is the "funny" part. The heading back to the harbour was a square reach and being silly (bloody
Aussies!) we thought it would be interesting to see what happens with a full noise reach and full boards down. We started out pretty well, the boat was semi foiling and going quick. I think we would have been quicker with the boards up a bit more though. But we were still heading a bit high for the harbour entrance, so we tried to sail a bit lower angle and initially we were fine, then we had a huge line of breeze come through and we got it all a bit wrong.. With the full boards down the boat started to get out of the water and we were standing too far aft which then lifted the bows and then the boat really came out of the water, lost grip and took a big step to leeward, this would have been ok if I was still attached to the boat!
Suffice it to say that we did some swimming in the North Sea J



The good news is that the boat was super easy to get back upright again, the lesson for the day was: don't try to fly too high!! Its no problem upwind (the boat never fully flies upwind) and downwind is ok because the boat doesn't make the big sideways step as it come out, but reaching is where the side loads are big and the boat wants to go to leeward once it comes free of the water.



The boat is the most fun I have had on a small cat for a very long time and I can't wait for the next sail on it (maybe Monday..) I would happily swap my F18 for the 20 and for a lot of the bigger teams I think it's a great option. There are already solid orders that ensure there will be a class in Europe this year and as more people get to try the boat I am sure the momentum will increase.



Steal one if you have to, but make sure you get out there and try this boat!!

Oman wrap up

Finally back in sunny (not very) Amsterdam and starting to get back into the normal groove of things here.

The last day of the Oman regatta was not the best for our team, although as always you learns something everytime you it the water so it wasn't a complete loss.

With Roman out of action it was up to me to take on the steering job, but with the boat still in a bit of a state after being on its side for quite a while the previous day we had our work cut out for us!

We were a little late getting to the starting area because the mainsail halyard lock was playing up so that threw us a little and it was quite windy so we had to reef anyway but pretty much as soon as the racing started the breeze started to drop quite a lot and in the end we had less than 2kts.

The first race was a paired speed trial, we managed to be OCS... in the first lap which was not so good, but we nailed the second start and things felt good. As we were the last boat to take a run at the speed trial we were also the last ones to start shaking out the reef, and to my amazement the RC went into a sequence very quickly, even while we had our mainsail on the deck still... I asked for more time and was refused so we missed the start by a minute which in these races is like locking in a last place no matter what. Then the next start we had a nice one at the windward end of the line, tacked off to port and were 3rd at the layline, but seconds after we tacked back onto stb the whole mainsail came crashing down because the main halyard shackle wasn't attached correctly in the mad rush to make the previous start. So we DNF that race... then we had to rush yet again to get the main back up as the RC were not waiting around for us again. So we had a another shitty start and result, the last race was super light and we managed to hold of Shirley and the Spanish (UK) team on Andalucia to save ourselves the embarrassment of a last place in the regatta.

A very tough day on the water for us and I was not happy at all with the way the racing was run over the last 2 days of the regatta. Consider this: the only time in the entire Asian series that there were more than 6 races run was the day that Red Bull capsized in the 5th race of the day. so we DNF the 5th, DNC races 6,7 and 8 which means we went from winning the regatta to 4th. And guess which boats went into 1st and 2nd places after all the extra races on that day? I'll give you one hint it starts with an "O" and ends with an "N"

Add in the seemingly biased actions of the Race controller on the final day and you can see why I was pissed off.

Regardless of how I feel from my point of view, I was approached by other teams who thought it was very strange to have so many races on the penultimate day and for the RC to rush the racing though when it was clear that not enough time had been allocated to us to unreef.

Next on the agenda for the X40 is some odd jobs to get the boat ready for the European season and maybe setup the travelling gear so its better suited for the regattas.

I am off to Dubai on the 23rd Feb for the Maktoum cup then back to Sydney for some family time before the return to Euroland..

Day 4 Oman... Ooops!

A short update tonight, we have a lot of work to do still after the boys managed to turn the boat upside down in race 5 today. Roman was hurt quite badly but is now not looking to rough (more than normal!) but the boat needed some love and we had to crane out tonight to fix a bit of damage to the hull from one of the rescue ribs hitting us.

An early start tomorrow and we will be back on the water in time for racing, If Roman is ok he will be back on the boat, otherwise... Macca is on the helm! So look out all!

Ok, back to work for us!