Friday 4 July 2014

The new era

Foiling is the new sailing. We saw it happen Round Texel, in the America's Cup, with the Flying Moths, the flying Laser, the Flying Phantom.
Many projects and still much to learn. Although the flying Nacra won line honours at Texel the non-foiling boats were still quite close at the finish.
The older boats show consistent speeds and the foilers mix moments of speed excellence with slow modes. Only Glenn was always fast ;-)
That conventional boats are stll close sometimes does not mean that it does not work, it only shows that it takes effort to get all performance out of it.
If people practice more their performance will increase dramatically and we will see that even upwind foiling can be put to work on the smaller beach cats.

It was also suprising to see how far the foil assisted Nacra 17's finished in front of the best F18's.

Some people tell me that we still need floating classes for the clubracers. I disagree. The foiling boats can be sailed by the clubracers too especially because cartwheeling and nose dives are a thing of the past.

The Nacra 20 and the Flying Phantom are big boats, too big maybe for the clubracer, but an open F18 with J-boards and elevators will be an allround boat and a thrill to sail.

It is not likely that the F18 class will open the rules, which leaves the room for a new class. A typical case of creative destruction and a proof of the validity of true box rule classes.

A factory class such as the FP is just a solution for the short term. It would be better that more types race in the same class; F16 and F18 style. One designs get obsolete too quickly , see what is happening with the X40 which is a yesterday's superboat.

The Vink review on catssailingnews is great, his smiles match the bog the smiles of the foiling A-cat sailors.

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