Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-2018 i Yachting World

Over the last years, production boatbuilders have steadily gravitated towards larger yachts. Almost every major manufacturer has angled for the luxury market, sometimes to the detriment of development in the 30-50ft size. Development of mid-range yachts – and demand for them – has stagnated. But these bigger builds are also much more complex and draw in exponentially larger quantities of business resources, money and focus. Now we are seeing builders such as Oyster and Bavaria, both under new ownership after financial troubles, return their attention to the family cruisers that made their names. The world’s largest yacht builder, Groupe Beneteau, is also refreshing its range of smaller yachts. It recently bought a majority shareholding in Slovenian Seascape, which makes sporty weekenders and pocket family cruisers of 14-27ft, while its Jeanneau…

Schooner heaven A new International Schooner Association is being set up by Tomas de Vargas Machuca, owner of two of these vintage craft, including Puritan. Original schooner designs and replicas face a challenge in racing and rating against other classic yachts, and this new association aims to run events exclusively for classic schooners. Cleaning up ocean plastic A £30 million plan is afoot to build a 71m catamaran to collect plastic debris at sea. Named Ocean Saviour, the project has the backing of TheYachtMarket.com founders Richard Roberts and Simon White. The hope is that by harnessing the expertise of leading naval architects and environmental experts, a ship can be build that would clear up to 1,800 tonnes of plastic at sea each year. Pen Duick restoration A €650,000 refit aims…

A Hampshire couple have come up with an ingenious self-funding way of cleaning up beaches along the south-west coasts of Britain. They clean plastic from some of the most beautiful beaches along the coast, then take photos of it and sell the prints. Joe Lawson and his fiancée, Caroline McDermid, started up Drone Overview in 2017. They survey beaches in Cornwall and Dorset by drone, collecting data and helping to create 3D maps of beaches. They then provide that data to university researchers and an organisation called the The Plastic Tide, which is making an open source map of plastic around Britain’s coast. This helps The Plastic Tide develop an algorithm that can spot plastic items, recognising them by shape and colour. The survey allows Lawson and McDermid to locate…

‘VOYAGING THROUGH THE SOUTHERN OCEAN RAISES THE BAR’ It doesn’t require a sailing-to-climb expedition like the one I finished in October to realise how the raw forces of nature can lay waste to well made plans. The same can happen on a planned weekend crossing of the English Channel where dinner in St Malo had to be cancelled due to a raging south-westerly in the Western Approaches. Granted, voyaging to South Georgia through the Southern Ocean does raise the bar of vulnerability, no doubt about it. And once you are there, what can be accomplished in the mountains is a gamble in the truest sense of the word. If totted up, our mountaineering failures over three decades far outweigh the successes. But we are not masochists, and the successes, when…

Whether you’re on land or at sea, keeping yourself cosy is paramount to enjoying any kind of outdoor activity, especially now the winter weather has well and truly set in. But instead of packing on the bulk – which can be cumbersome when moving around on deck – most sailors know it’s better to keep yourself insulated with an innovative under layer that retains natural body heat by sitting close to the skin. Enter UNIQLO’s HEATTECH range. Produced using revolutionary heat-retaining fabric, the HEATTECH innerwear busts the myth that you need lots of layers to keep warm. Expertly designed to give warmth without weight, garments are as thin as 0.55mm, making them perfect for wearing underneath a waterproof or sailing jacket without restricting movement. Available in three levels of warmth…

Finot-Conq started designing swing keels during the early 1990s for 8m/26ft daysailers and is now using them on boats up to 31m/100ft long. When down, the keel on Nica is 3.75m, giving optimum righting moment and performance. The lifted keel has a 1.65m draught, which should allow access to most harbours. The keel pivots around an axis on the back of the keel head, with a ram that pushes the top of the keel head forward to swing the keel down, and pulls it back to lift. There is a fail-safe system when the keel is down, which means if the ram is put under a sudden significant load, it will immediately let go and the keel will swing up. This should eliminate the risk of damage to the keel…

JÉRÉMIE BEYOU is skipper of the new foiling IMOCA 60 Charal – a boat he hopes will power him to victory in the next Vendée Globe. A three-time winner of the Solitaire du Figaro circuit, the 42-year-old Frenchman was part of the victorious Volvo Ocean Race team, Dongfeng, earlier this year ANDY RICE talks to IMOCA 60 sailor JÉRÉMIE BEYOU It’s all very well refining every detail of your boat – re-cutting sails, longboarding your hull – but what is the point of any of that attention to detail if you don’t spend as least as much effort on yourself? Nearly every offshore sailor has a story about when they fell asleep at the wrong moment in a race, or became so tired that they started hallucinating. Multiple Figaro winner…

Bavaria’s lurch into receivership in early 2018 was a shock – and perhaps a pleasant surprise to its competitors. Now its return to the market under the ownership of Berlin-based CMP has the makings of a successful comeback, writes Peter Poland. The switched-on new team understand build disciplines and quality control, according to Richard Hewett of UK dealer Clipper Marine. Investing in production capacity and an excellent price-performance ratio sounds pretty obvious. So what went wrong? How could a company that had grown to a massive size thanks to its slick production methods and logical assessment of its market suddenly come a cropper? As an erstwhile production boatbuilder I often watched others go under. Invariably it seemed that ambition outgrew reality. The desire for bigger and better lured them into…

A helping hand I heartily recommend wind self-steering gear as crew on board – they never complain or sleep on their watch, and they are very easy to provision for! Yes, they have their quirks. I sympathised with the author of your article ‘Vane attempts’ (November issue), who had teething problems setting up his Hebridean vane. His experience rang true. I have sailed more than 30,000 miles with a Hydrovane. It never let me down. The sight of the vane itself moving at times had a human quality, rather like a hand writing its signature or conducting the music of your movement. That’s how I thought of it. Setting it up just right and making the operation of a wind vane system instinctive takes a bit of getting used to…

‘WE WERE ON AN UNSTOPPABLE, WILD TRAIN RIDE’ “Even a Morris Minor will do 100mph if you push it off a cliff!” joked John Chittenden, the winning skipper of Chay Blyth’s British Steel Challenge in 1992/3. “ Approaching Cape Horn, there was a palpable change of mood aboard my boat, Group 4. The Challenge Race, like the Clipper Race today, was crewed by amateur sailors from all walks of life and, being the first event of its kind, there were many unknowns. We were pioneers, racing westabout across the Southern Ocean against the prevailing winds and currents. In the building 50+ knot storm we pressed our 40 tonne Challenge 67 harder than ever, carving a deep groove through the ocean. Sailing on starboard gybe, with a poled out yankee, a…

Nigel Calder’s works on the technicalities of boat systems are accepted worldwide as Bibles, but he doesn’t generally trumpet his vast cruising experience. He is a modest man, so when we find he has written a book about his early years, we know it is going to be an interesting read. In fact, Shakedown Cruise (published by Adlard Coles) is a lot more than that. As Calder describes the building and sailing of his first cruiser, the Atkin-designed Nada, with a variety of shipmates, there’s a laugh to be found on many of its pages. Calder and his wife, Terrie, learn the ropes the hard and by far the best way – from their own mistakes. Their plan to sail far into the Pacific doesn’t come to pass at this…

RÁN VII is a latest generation Fast 40+ designed by Shaun Carkeek for renowned owner-driver Niklas Zennström Some boats are the sum of their parts, but Rán VII is really the sum of the parts that aren’t there. It is characterised by a focus on reduction – less weight, less volume, less windage – which has given it a distinctive cut-out profile. The result is an intimidating design that has been ruthlessly successful on the racecourse. The Fast 40+ fleet is still in its infancy. It was launched in 2016 to fill a gap for really high quality racing in the Solent, UK, where there hadn’t been a serious fleet of matched big boats racing regularly since the Farr 45 revival a decade ago. But the launch of several new…

There are two factors to consider when it comes to racing and anchors. One is whether you might find yourself kedging to avoid getting swept back against a foul tide, and so need to deploy the anchor quickly. But to balance that you want to avoid carrying your heaviest anchor in the bow, which accentuates pitching and kills your speed. Rules are quite clear about the need for anchors in racing, depending on the Special Regulations category of the race. Substituting a lighter anchor is fine as long as it is ‘fit for purpose’. You might argue that one test could be: would it keep the vessel off a lee shore if the yacht were dismasted and had engine failure? There is no doubt that getting the weight out of…

A preliminary Notice of Race for what can best be described as The Race Formerly Known As the Volvo Ocean Race has been published, providing more opportunities for female and youth sailors. Entries for the event, which is officially using the working title Fully Crewed Around the World Race 2021-22, open on 11 December this year. As yet without an official title or sponsor, the round the world race is scheduled to start in Alicante in autumn 2021 and finish in Europe in 2022. It will have nine legs. There is no detailed information on stopovers as host port agreements are under negotiation, although the USA, South America, Australia/New Zealand, Asia, and Europe have been broadly confirmed. There will be two classes: the IMOCA 60; and one-design VO65. The IMOCA…

Artemis Technologies is a new company formed from the Swedish America’s Cup challenge Artemis Racing, and one of their key projects will be to develop a wingsail passenger ferry. Artemis Technologies is led by double Olympic gold medallist Iain Percy and has retained many of the design and R&D staff from the America’s Cup squad to work on new projects. They include creating the control systems for the new F50 foiling catamarans and a full-scale training simulator (see page 32). Artemis Technologies also plans to develop a zero-emissions 45m passenger catamaran that will require no fossil fuels to operate, have unlimited range, and a cruising speed of 30 knots with a potential top speed of 50 knots. Known as an Autonomous Sailing Vessel or ASV, the passenger vessel is being developed…

‘SAILSENSE KNOWS WHEN A SAIL IS OUT OF THE BAG AND HOW MUCH IT FLOGGED’ For sale: No 1 genoa, one season’s use, very good condition’, reads the ad. But unless you went to inspect the sail – and even then – how could you tell how much the sail had actually been used? Indeed, when it comes to your own sails, do you know how many hours you used your genoa this season? How many tacks did you do? How much has the sail been exposed to sunlight and when is it due for a service? You might take a guess, but I bet you couldn’t tell me with any real degree of accuracy, unless you work for a professional racing team. Knowing and assessing the life of our…

£4,000 approx What is it? An integrated load measurement, data logging and analytics system, with output to instrument systems, smartphones and the cloud. Who is it for? Anyone interested in maximising performance from a rig It has long been known that better measurement of the loads on the structure and rig of yachts would benefit the sailing world. When he raced with Alex Thomson on Hugo Boss in the 2008 Round the Island Race, for instance, Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton was surprised that the boat wasn’t ‘covered in sensors’. Vincent Geake, a former Whitbread round the world race navigator and founder of Cambridge, UK-based Cyclops Marine, believes the industry is ready for a step change. “Load cells used in the marine world haven’t moved on much since the 1990s,”…

Sail changes in the dark require good understanding from all crew about what might go wrong, and a high level of teamwork to identify and sort out problems before they escalate. Here are some of my recommended techniques for successful sail changes at night: Before dark As routine, discuss what sail changes may be required overnight then set up as much as possible before dark. This helps minimise snags and should include checking sheets are correctly run, sails are well packed and ready to come on deck, spinnaker halyards are not tangled and on the correct side of the forestay for the next hoist. When working with multiple halyards I often separate them before dark by attaching the higher one at the base of the shrouds and the lower at…