New Sails...
I mentioned a while back that I felt the drifter was too small. Also, you may recollect that Maxim who charters some Tiki's in Thailand made a suggestion concerning a spinnaker which he attaches to the stem of each hull.
I passed this info on to the boat builder Davie Norris and he referred me to Rodney Keenan of Evolution sails in Auckland. I met up with Rodney as he happened to be in Fiji at the same time as me. Rodney designs and makes many of the America's cup yacht sails including Oracles. He also supplies sails for many of the round the world race yachts.
Bottom line...he designed both a spinnaker and another large downwind sail so that I could improve downwind performance a lot more. He flew down to Christchurch last week to spend a day with me on the boat to learn how to get the best out of the sails. I was delighted with the results. The breeze was very light but we got 5 knots in 8 knots of breeze.
I have now commissioned him to build another sail to improve upwind performance. Also, he is redesigning the jib which he confident will improve performance more.
During December I will be doing a lot of testing and documenting the performance of different sails in varying conditions which will be logged into a computer program which will in turn link into the routing/weather software to help improve passage making.
Sunday, October 2, 2011 at 01:18AM
Reader Comments (2)
It would be great to hear about your sail development.
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