FoilTown

The boat finally went to the shippers on Thursday and is on it’s way to Dubai as I write this. Unfortunately this means no moth sailing for the time being. Luckily the Invictus team were down again with the C-Class for the weekend. I had an interesting day on Saturday looking at how the wing works in a bit more detail and we managed to borrow a rib for a while so we could follow the boat around and took some video for them.

Then today I got to have a go at sailing the boat. The only multihull experience I’ve had has been on a SeaCart; the first time was again sailing with Paul and can be seen here. I was quickly given the helm of the C-Class before leaving the harbour at the Acadamy and we were quickly able to get the boat up and flew the hull in a gentle breeze. With only one slightly hairy moment sailing through moorings when a gust hit but I didn’t have room to luff up to bring the hull down and we got some good air. Paul then took the helm to demonstrate the downwind technique. I would trapeze to leeward and walk forward along the hull so as to be able to hold the forestay to stop me swinging backwards. Then Paul came down to leeward as well to make it as easy as possible to keep the windward hull out of the water.

I was then given the helm again. We were now easily able to twin upwind. Sailing downwind was really interesting. The aim seems to be to keep the boat balancing on one hull with Paul trapezing off the leeward bow again. Not being used to sailing a multihull I was a little nervous when the windward hull stated to rise up a bit much. Capsizing with a wing rig would never be a good look. The other interesting thing was the tell tales on the leading edge of the wing. These take a bit of getting used to but seem to work very well. They consist of a group of 4 wind vanes mounted just in front of the wing. The aim with these is to trim the wing so that the air flow on the leeward three is round the back of the rig with the windward one flowing over the windward side of the wing.

The control over the shape of the wing is very interesting. Like the wing on BMW Oracle the camber can be controlled by adjusting the angle of the flap relative to the front element; then the flap can be twisted as well. Although this is all achieved in different ways on the two wings, the wing on the C-Class has a few gadgets then Oracle didn’t have. The trailing edge of the leading element is flexible. This flexible section is often referred to as the second element however it isn’t really another element. As the camber is increased this section gets bent limiting the size of the slot at larger cambers. The other control available on the C is the ability to twist the front element of the wing as well as the flap.