Boating, biking & boarding – in Southeast Asia

We were lucky to have Greg Goodall pass through our Club last week and I was able to catch an hour with him to talk about some of the finer points of the F16 Viper. 

The ‘NEW’ mast setup
Recently we ran a mini-experiment using Kuang’s F16 Viper “Squeaks” and Pro-Sail’s “Yeahbaby”. Yeahbaby ran on her ‘original’ mast setting while we changed “Squeaks” to Greg’s new experimental settings. 

“I’ve been sailing in a few light-air regattas and just thought some more power in the lighter stuff would be nice. I considered playing with the luff round in the cut of the mainsail but settled for trying to straighten the mast up a little. What I did was reduce the spreader rake and increase the diamond wire tension. I got down to about 30 mm of spreader rake and almost 400 lbs of tension on the diamond wires and it felt better in the light winds i.e. we powered up earlier and were able to use the trapeze at an earlier stage.

But because the mast is still pre-bent we are still able to flex it aft when the breeze gets stronger. This means we’ve increased the light/medium performance of the Viper without making it over powered in heavy airs. 

We also found that the added beam on the Viper in comparison to the Taipan, creates a lot more leverage and correspondingly induces more more load onto the rig. This plus the fact that the Viper carries a 16:1 downhaul means you’ll still be able to de-power it easily in big breeze.”

So the new settings are better because now we have more power in the light stuff and still the same delicate control in high winds – wicked!

Tacking daggerboards
I bet you didn’t even know your Viper had these! 

When sailing “Yeahbaby” I’ve noticed that when I get the foils ‘loaded’ she really trucks upwind – like higher than any cat I’ve been on before and this conversation helped me understand this bit about the Viper. Tacking foils mean better windward ability… when I asked Greg about the tacking foils he said that he’d experimented with the prototype Viper ti get it dialed in.

“Basically what it means is that you daggerboards always have a positive angle of attack i.e. they point upwind and not parallel to your direction of travel.

You’ll sometimes hear the boards rattling in their cases with no load on. But once your moving the boards will take up a positive angle of attack and the interesting thing is that the leeward (labouring foil) takes up .5 of a degree more angle of attack than the windward one. The reason behind this is simply that the leeward hull is immersed in water and introduces end-plate effect whereas the windward hull is surfacing and with too much angle of attack, it would draw too much air in from the waters surface.”

Championship
With half of the world’s supply of Viper F16’s in Changi Sailing Club, we can truly say that we have the most modern fleet in all the world! Greg agreed.

“That with more than the 40 F16’s you have at CSC you could have a really good F16 event and the number of participants that you’d have on the water would probably be more than at the Global Challenge!”  

We already have a rather fun Monsoon Cup every year and for our next (Jan 2009) we’ll make it bigger than before. The next event will see the Vipers take on the Blades and Taipans that we have in our fleet. Traditionally there are 7 races over the weekend and each day starts with a passage race out to the race area in the Johore River of Malaysia. Short course races are then the order of the day. To accommodate any overseas sailors that we might have would just be a matter of splitting the races over a few more days and finding them a platform – no biggie then! 

Lets do it!

Future
It’s interesting to note that the Taipan 4.9 is pretty much the boat around which much of the F16 Class was designed. The Viper continues this ‘crystal balling’ by being a fully optimised F16 as well as fitting perfectly into the F104 Class!

How did you do that Greg?

“In both cases its been pretty much luck as we launched a design and then later, a Class was formed. It might look like we ‘crystal-balled’ it but in the case of the Taipan it was unpredictable as we launched the design 20 years before anyone dreamed up the Class – that’s just good luck. In the case of the Viper well, it was still a bit lucky but my take on the situation is that for a Class to really grow, you need to have as many manufacturers involved as possible. It’s part of the reason why F18 has been so successful – all the big manufacturers can make boats to that platform weight.

In F16, there are comparatively fewer companies that can produce a platform to 105 kgs, where they can, it becomes a fairly expensive exercise. The Viper was penned as an optimised and simply the larger hull volume in comparison to the Taipan simply meant it would weigh a bit more. As it turned out, the French came up with the 104 Class which probably has the better potential to attract more manufacturers into the fold.

Oddly enough, by adding a corrector weight to the Viper we can achieve the 104 perfectly. Without the corrector eight the Viper gets a 1.036 in the 104 Class and sits perfectly well in the F16 Class – so it looks like we designed a boat for both camps. 

Subscribe to boats, bikes & boards – in Southeast Asia by Email