Vertigo

The first question everyone asks about the boat when seeing it, including us, is "What have we done??". Well, we've taken a standard Magic 25 sportsboat and added wings, a 30% bigger sail plan, a 40% longer bow pole and a 20% larger rudder.

The boat now has a beam from wing to wing of 4m, working sail area of around 40sqm and spinnaker of nearly 70sqm. The complete wing structure added about 120kgs to the boat's empty weight bringing it to 960kgs (which also includes about 40kgs for all of the other add-ons such as winch post to take the kite loads and a modified hatch, bilge pump and nav lights/battery for Category 4/5 qualification)

The second question we're asked is "Why?". We had been sailing the Magic for a few years and had a great time when it blew but felt it was a little tame in moderate conditions, so we wanted to add extra power, without spending tons of money on a new boat. I had looked at the Thompson 830 but even second hand it was pretty overpriced compared to what we could do with the Magic for similar performance.

Another factor is rating. To get any racing in Singapore or around Asia, you have to race IRC which doesn't allow the use of trapezes. There are a couple of Sportsboat regattas but they too do not allow trapezes. To compensate for this on the standard Magic, we had to have around 450kgs hiking on the rail to manage the boat upwind, only to find us sink when the breeze dropped out downwind. The angles we needed to sail to keep her moving killed us. This meant we needed some extra leverage without wires to get the real performance out of the boat.

After posing the problem to Andy Dovell, he came with a sail plan and wing design that he believed would add the needed power. Sadly, his beautiful carbon wing design was way too expensive to justify, so we huddled and came up with a alloy version that loses in aesthetics but is more practical in many ways including impact resistance. The final wings (alloy alone) are removable and weigh only 16 kgs each, but the strengthening inside the hull to take the leveraged point loads of a 350kg crew through waves added a further 50kgs.

North Sails Sydney put the sailplan together, with Kevlar main and jib and Airex 600 kite. They too had felt the Magic a bit tame and we agreed to use my boat as a bit of a test case. The mainsail now has a massive roach, more similar to a 12ft skiff than an 18 footer, and the jib has grown along the foot and features a bigger roach to give max power for lighter breeze. The spinnaker is cut along the 18 footer lines and is up nearly 37% from the old one, a big jump and very hard on the sheet hand when it loads up.

All of the building work was done by Admiralty Yachts in Singapore, who did a brilliant job dealing with all of the unexpected problems that come up when you try to retrofit a difficult design into a small boat. I pity the guys who had to crawl up under the cockpit to glass in the wing tubes. No air, no light and no room. The Admiralty team have worked around the clock to get the boat in the water in time, met the deadlines with quality work and then followed us around the course on test sails to take photos for our analysis on computer when we got back to shore. This service helped us sort out the rig and many issues overnight, when it would normally take days.

So how does it go?

If you judge by the rating that IRC have given our little 25 foot boat, you would think it goes faster than a F16. Our current IRC rating with the big rig is TCC=1.123 which puts us just below the BH41 "Jenny III" (past King's Cup winner but now lame dog) at 1.145 and just above Asia's top Sydney 38 "Stella Minter Ellison" (winner of the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy as best boat in Asia this year) which rates 1.119. A tough marker for us to beat but one which we believe we can make more reasonable given time to experiment. With the small sail plan, we should rate around 1.07x, which would make us extremely competitive in anything over 15 knots. We'll have to see if we can get the required performance out of the big sail plan in lighter airs to make the 1.123 rating workable.

We sailed the Singapore Straits Regatta last week without success. Having just managed to get the boat in the water for one hour on the day before the regatta, we found we had a lot to do and learn. Our rating had us in Division A against boats such as "Hollywood Boulevard", "Yo!", "HiFidelity", Karakoa" and "Stella Minter Ellison" which made it a little bit scary at the start line (see photo).

The main cause of the poor results sits with me but we also had some extenuating factors that made it just a little more difficult than it needed to be. Most notable was my determination to use the big sails no matter what conditions prevailed. This was my biggest mistake as it was woefully unbalanced, with massive weather helm that we only eradicated on the last day. With the new big rudder, it was like driving with the handbrake on all day.

Trying to sail a big skiff upwind in 2-5ft washing-machine slop and with a massive roach main was difficult enough, but splitting our big kite (our rated kite) on the first hoist in the first windward-leeward race really sent our chances reeling. It went up cleanly, cracked once and then split across the head, diagonally across as many panels as possible and then down the tapes. On later inspection there was a very small nick in the head which set off the dominos. We had to race the rest of the regatta with 300sq ft less downwind sail area. This really hurt and made it difficult to plane with the 385kg crew weight needed to stay upright upwind.

Not surpisingly, we had a pathetic regatta results-wise, only managing to stay close to the big boats in the first passage race across to Indonesia from Singapore, the one race with the big kite. But we had the best rides and the best fun, even with the small kite, with enough glimpses of real speed to make us feel that there is a lot of unrealised potential to be extracted and a ton of fun to be had.

Some highlights of the boats performance:

• Upwind in flat water and 15 knots true, boatspeed sits around 7.2-7.4knts and tacking angles seem to be around 60-65 degrees. In a seaway, these blow out to 78 degrees to keep speed on.
• Close reaching (60 degree AWA) in 15 knots true, we average high 9s and hit 12.5knts occasionally without planing, slightly faster than the 36 footers
• Beam-to-broad reaching in 18 knots true, we managed to haul two miles out of the Sydney 36 and Titan 36 on a 4nm leg, averaging around 15 knots with regular bursts over 16knts, whilst not really working too hard (except our trimmer who flaked on the deck afterwards)
• Surfing past the Sydney 36s and BH 41 downwind on our way towards Stella in the last race until the breeze abruptly stopped and we became the little 25 ft displacement boat with the big rating again, the only boat having to gybe downwind to keep moving.

The boat is very wet and very busy but a blast to sail for geriatrics like our goodselves. We are looking forward to a year of tweaking the rating and becomoing more and more competitive. Our first step will be to shave about 70kgs off the keel bulb, which should make it really lively, and then to manage our sailplan around a lower crew weight of 300kgs to get the best rig for expected breeze conditions. This should make us faster upwind and downwind and more competitive rating-wise.

We hope to do as many regattas as we can this year. If we get good results, great. If not, we'll still be living up to our slogan of "Get High. Stay High".

Either way it was a worthwhile experiment.

Will update you when we have something to crow about.

Cheers

Andrew