Ah so the paparatzi have outed my little project. I had hoped to have it Datchet this weekend and even bought the trailer home to take it to the pond for its first sail but alas I'm still a few hours away.

For a bit more detail, its a all carbon foam carbon/kevlar pretty standard design, perhaps a little dated in its amount of rocker but as it was started about 3 1/2 years ago, that was the currency of the time and what the A class design that we had obtained the moulds for, had. Actually I'm quite happy to have the extra rocker in at my stage of sailing as I feel it makes a more forgiving and manouverable boat than some of the more flatter designs of the recent A class's. Hulls are on par at about 24 kgs.

Why the central beam, the design I wanted always was for the central beam to take all the loadings including the forestay, but due to not knowing enough about how to transfer loadings to carbon fibre layup I wimped out. The Y beam that we are now seeing in the AC was in my mind some years ago ( and yes it had been tried long before that )when I first started to build the hulls and by consequence I have relatively smaller diameter main beams. Mind you its as stiff as my Stealth so still happy. The central beam also allows the snuffer pole to go lower down and become self supporting which means I hope I have cut down on nearly all the aerodynamic windage associated with the snuffer and spinny pole. What you see in the photo is the complete boat. I do hate to see some of the F18's and F16's that have a weavers loom on the front.

The gantry at the back is probably OTT and in leverage terms pretty miniscule but as a consequence of wanting to move the rear beam and sail plan back in the hulls, the size of the F16 sail was starting to hang right past the rear beam meaning much higher upward loadings on the beam from the main sheet which would have been much further foward on the boom than I was comfortable with. It simply meant upping everything at the back of the boat in size to cope and that would have put a lot of weight just where I didn't want it. The downside was it played havoc with the steering bars, they were as short as a porn stars d*** and thats really no use in sailing terms. I was also toying with the idea of gantries as there is some advantage to have the rudders further back particularly as I angled the daggerboards at the maximum 6 degrees allowed, I hope the lift from the boards together with the T foils will allow the rear of the boat to raise rather than sit down at speed as the amount of rocker would dictate. The hull length foward of the front beam and the T foils should stabilize this with the spinny up ( well in theory )

Lots of other niceties in the build and I hope it will sail as planned. But for all those budding homebuilders out there, it seems to take forever when you can only spend a few hours each week but it is very satisfying when it all come together.