My perfect Boat Spec Evolves Yet Again!!!

After a pretty fantastic weekend with sun, wind and good racing amongst a wide range of sailors in the Melges SW Fleet meet at Farsund.
The grin factor was big when we were planing and the competition was tight, and we had the pleasure of taking second place out of seven boats in the light of not actually having sailed at all this year, the boat dipping its keel in for the first time this year herself!

I was tidying up down below in the M24 and letting the main down after sailing on the saturday, having a little eye strain and sun burn from the splitting bright light we get here in early summer. I was looking at the bow section and thinkiing I could just about stretch my 6'2" out , put my head on my lifevest and have a bit of peace. Also save a thousand krone on the Hotel......

So that got me re-specifying my perfect boat, probably because my taste has once again returned to one-design and travelling to events rather than the last decade and a bit which has been blighted by handicap sailing, with the main plus side being some of the best passage racing to be had off Oban, Bergen and down Oslo Fjord in the Faerder'n.

Now I have the OD bug again, I have displaced much of the nice/to/have's from my MOSCOW project purchasing approach I now have some new must haves for the boat

1)  Trailer Trash!  The boat is going to have to be a trailer sailor. The benefits outweigh any hassle, and trailer sailing has been the key to many of the fleets of M24s and of course the explosion of the SB3>SB20 in the UK. Being an EU street legal trailer sailer means so many benefits for mobility in racing venues but also practical for storage and not least delivery and re-sale.

Having sailed the melges in a 2/3 m steep sea light handed and the keel did start to bang around a bit with some nasty thumping noises. So a better bolting / wedging/ extractor bolt set up for the keel on my , did I not say, 28 foot boat.

The beauty of  keeping the boat at 28/29 ft LOA is that you can still do 2.49 m wide with a reasonable all up weight, and some visibility in the rear view mirrors.

2) Sleeps its crew.  The crew should really be 4-5 with a limit of around 475kg, a man or a lot of lard more than an M24. Weight aside the aim is to reduce hotel bills at those far flung venues and allow a place for cadavres to sleep off longer days with a power nap at 4pm. This also means the boat has a cabin which can be used for briefing, getting scran and avoiding exposure. These two then lend themselves to spartan cruising, kind of camper sailing.

The boat is NO cruiser racer or even racer-cruiser, it is a racer-sleeper.

3) Is lighter and faster than the current crop of racer-sleeper in the 25-30 foot range
This probably means a carbon mast, a carbon rudder bearing, carbon keel, carbon rudder , and a carbon reinforcement in the hull and possibly bow.

This is where the cost of the Melges 24 came to penalise the boat's rise in the UK, France and Germany. However the M24 is locked into a fair few on costs and builder/designer/melges gross margin.  Carbon masts are coming down in price, and especially smaller carbon sections such as rudder bearing stocks, box section stiffening features etc are getting a lot more affordable with more competition based on the smaller ovens and penetration into the aerospace and military markets.  

The compromises can be made in the keel and rudder which can be of a composite design but using an aluminium extrusion as a partial load bearing shell, as with the 29er/59er.

The mast design then has to be something along the lines of what happened with the Mumm aka Farr 30 which "pinched" a mast from the Melges 30 (remember those??)
The mast can be relatively shorter, with the ethos being OD upwind slight underpower even, in return for blistering off wind performance. The M24 is basically oeverpowered completely upwind in the best conditions for offwind planing!

Light weight also comes from dispensing with all the cruising pretentions and opting for an inshore category, with the ability to upgrade to by having some places to drill and fill for nav lights etc.

One thing I would spec is a generator with electric drive,  possibly with a retracting box TP52 style infront of the rudder to allow the boat to get out of trouble from a sqaull aor big running sea in the English Channel or the South of France.

However a tail end hang on el motor would do for inshore venues and the types of sailors who can handle themselves and a sports boat.

Like I say, faster does not need to mean a very much bigger white sail area and the payload is only 20% more than the M24.

4) Tips a cap and dons lower cloth for HC Racing

One benefit of a relatively shorter mast is the IRC and other ratings. Coupled to a reduced foresail and spinnaker area this could tip a cap to HC racing and not render the boat useless on most systems, as so many sports boats especially the M24 are.

5) Has a Superior  and safer equipment and deck layout to the M24

The M24 has a major drawback in the low boom and the very tight passage for the helm between mainsail block and tiller end. I would look at having an aft strop system with a more powerful kicker rather than a traveller to really open up the cockpit for all points of sail.

Also it would need winches for the spinnaker- I feel the M24 is on the edge of what pure friction in the blocks and the gloves with two person sheeting being the norm for many boats with over 20 knts wind.



The Rub with all this is of course, back to where the M24 failed in the UK, on the price issue > really you have to ask yourself what type of sailing you want to do, and also how the re-sale value will go.   The boat is going to have to cost some wonga comparable to a 32 foot cruiser. The choice is to buy into a boat which will give more excitement while also making for affordable traveller and major regatta participation.  People always worry about the expense of a new class, but not the expense of a new house which is seen as an investment. There is a lot of patronising crying on about how cheap a class has to be, and how cheap regatta entry has to be, but the big regattas with proffessional race management and on shore entertainment have all survived the recession and will go on to thrive. Why not the mid sized traveller and nationals?

Especially this type of boat would attract syndicates of sailors from OD sporties which do not sleep their crew, looking for that cost advantage. Secondly the other type of sailor will be the serious syndicate who are perhaps moving pro, or using the boat as a team builder for moving on to bigger circuits as crew. Individual owners would be those with the cash to splash outright and those who are fed up with either finding beds for crew on shore or punting around at under 10 knts in IRC boats which never actually get cruised.  So you are looking at cannibalising several different groups in a way, not in the least the m24 or any other SB and reaching into the area of disaffected low performance IRC owners or those with bigger OD boats which have fallen out of having a good fleet., such  as the X332.

Now there are actually a range of racers with crusing potential which have all tried to capture the imagination, locally the Life 7.5 in teak deck format, and all are struggeling to reach a OD nationally let alone internationally. People loved the M24, it took over the reins from so many other boats which were ageing and spawned the new world of performance assymetric keel boats in the wake of the 18FS, the I14 and the AC developments. There have actually come more numbers of inferior, toned down and cheaper sportsboats since the m24, and some very good sports-yachts with symmetrical spinnakers. Most of the offerings over 26 feet have been over-priced relative to their actual performance and most have stod shy of sleeping their rail-meat.

In the post recession we are also set across Europe to see a new type of entrepreneur, who are those dissaffected with the corporate slavery system , who would rather build companies themselves and build for larger financial rewards and capital gains.
 Many others who did start companies in the mid 00s will now be able to see turnover rise, while other highly skilled workers will enter a wage war for better wages and yet others will down-size from the metropolis. This is a new phase for the middle class to buy back their leisure time and have disposable income.

What boats will come to shine is another question, but a trailerable racer - sleeper will have a niche to form a front on and then develop from.