Boating, biking & boarding – in Southeast Asia

By: boatsbikesboards

Aug 16 2008

Tags: blade catamaran, blade f16, blade sailing, formula 16

Category: Cat sailing

1 Comment

We just had a sail on the Hybrid Blade. It’s a Hybrid because the only original Blade components are the hulls and daggerboards but even the hulls have undergone extensive re-working.

The decks have been removed and a sub-deck added into the bow area. Additional bulkheads have been added in strategic places but most importantly, the beam landings have been completely re-worked to accept bigger beams.

The new landings will accept Viper beams and there’s a new Viper rig and rudders replacing the stock items. You might say, it’s Viper from beams up and Blade from beams down – even the trampoline is custom although is a modified Viper design. 

All this work addresses what I think was the problem with the original.

The beams for starters drop the hull deflection by about 75% and as we found out from playing with Agent Orange – most of this is a reflection of the rear beam! So we’ve made the hulls more rigid, changed the beams for more stiffness, dropped on the most advanced F16 rig. Simply increasing the hull stiffness has a good impact on speed but more importantly handling!

How did it go?
We were lucky and sailed in about 15-18 knots of breeze.

Pushing off beach, everything worked as intended but it feels a lot lower to the water than the Viper. There’s definitely more buoyancy than the Taipan and definitely less than the Viper.

We sailed in the company of an original Blade and on the first upwind leg our speed was good but the pointing ability not quite there! A quick fix… remove the strop from between the lower mainsheet block and the traveller. The extra 5cm added a lot more leech load. The next upwind showed a big improvement with the pointing ability about 3-5 degrees better and above the other Blade.

Sailing impressions. 

• The huge beam setup has dramatically improved the boat. It was clearly evident the amount of deflection on the Original but almost none on the Hybrid.
• The other thing which hits you first is how wet the Blade is! It’s a lot wetter than the Viper but not as quite as wet as the Taipan – predictable due to the bow configuration i.e. raked v’s plumb.
• We found we had to bias the crew weight quite far aft to prevent the bow from tripping.
   

 So upwind out of the box the Hybrid could easily match the original. Downwind well, that was a lot more interesting. We sailed in quite choppy waters and I think the rather full transom of the Blade forces the platform into a more bow-down attitude.

The very first gust (approx 15-18 knots) with the kite up just saw the leeward bow disappear under water with the bow buried up to the front beam. It didn’t pitchpole but slowed down rather rapidly! I strapped my 78kgs into the rear footstrap on the transom and had Alice the crew sit on the large rear beam in a more central spot. This was better as it does take a lot of weight on the transom to be able to get it into the water to allow the bow to ride up higher.

I’ll get another cat sailor to try it out but my overall impression is that you really need to carry the crew weight quiet far aft to allow the bow to surface and accelerate rather than bite and dive. Having said that. the new rig we have installed seems to generate a lot more power than the old. We’re also running the latest state of tune for this rig and I’m going to try a small degree more mast rake to see if we can promote more bow lift.

We have a few tweaks to go yet. 
 Most notably is the tow-n/out of the rudders. It was steering in a pretty wooden fashion so I tried it with the windward rudder kicked up and that returned it to better feeling. That’s an easy fix on the tiller crossbar. I’m pretty sure once we’ve got that right steering will be improved dramatically. Over the next few weekends, we’ll have time to sort out the rudders and just get her up to speed. 

What I’m really looking forward to is racing the Hybrid against the Taipans and Vipers… that’s going to be good fun. So far, its been good but we didn’t have a Viper on the water to get a measure of the Blades true pointing ability.

I can remember from sailing Agent Orange against the Taipans that when we had both hulls in the water, the Taipans would pull away from us and, point higher. Once we could break the hull out of the water well it was as if the Taipans were bearing away. The effect of having the Blade’s bow transition from symmetrical to asymmetrica – really worked! But the Viper has those tacking daggerboards and a bow section that really generates a lot of lift. 

If I compare the Viper in the same conditions, we trapeze with the crew ahead of the side stay and myself right in line with the side stay. On the Blade, my rear foot was up against the forward side of the rear beam and the crew just forward of me.

We’re in for some interesting racing… coming right up!

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