Hi, my name is Berny and I'm very interested in F14. My involvement with 14ftrs (4.3m here) goes back some 14yrs when I bought a 14ft Maricat, a Hobie 14 inspired Oz 14ftr. A nicer boat to sail than a Hobie but I digress. I campaigned my little boat for aprox. 8yrs winning the club championship in '98 and state and national titles in '96, '97, '98. I decided that the 14ftr was a unique class in as much as it could be sailed easily single handed, was easy to trail, rig, launch and retrieve, and was overdue for an update. I designed and built a boat I called the 430. It's uni rigged and styled after the A class. Builder:
Peter Skews Shipwright Services (lay-up)
Designer:
Bern Leslie (me)
Length:
14ft nom. / 4.3m [LWL]
Beam:
7ft.10in / 2.4m (max. Aus)
Displacement:
107lbs / 75kg
Sail area:
main: 145sqft / 13.5sqm
Spinnaker: TBA
Mast Height:
24ft 7ins. / 7.5m
Construction materials:
Hull; Hand laid moulded Epoxy / ‘E’glass / carbon foam sandwich.
Mast and front beam; 50x120mm chemically milled alum. Sail; Mylar.
It's a great boat. It's just a gem to sail and it's the fastest 14ft cat in Australia by a street and is quicker than some 15 and 16ftrs. It actually runs with slower H16's and I have occasionally knocked off the odd TheMightyHobie18 though more from sailing skills than actual boat speed. It seems to have no real hang-ups and, in all the time I've raced it, I've never 'put it in'.
I developed a set of one design rules and raced the boat in three states over two years in mixed 14ft uni and sloop fleets and if I finished (and mostly I did) I won. NO-one here was interested! I tried to put a 14ft GP circuit together and no-one was interested.
Sale price was in the range $A11,000. depending on hardware. I lost interest, parked the boat under cover and went bike riding for three years.
This season I'm back and there's a second boat being built. I am at present 185lbs and the boat was designed for a crew of around 170lbs but it still kicks @r$. I'm looking at a spinnaker but frankly at 62yrs I've got about as much as I can handle with what's already there.
I see F14 as the way to go to get people interested in 14ftrs again and possibly a vehicle to get the 430 (or soon to be F14) into production.
