pic of the boat sailing on its first day

edit, doesn't work to upload from work account, will have to do later

OK, here we go, pics now working

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The boat looks great! What was she like to sail?

The wind was pretty light but some gusts up to 12kts so we were able to test the boat out pretty well. It is very powerful but easily transforms that into forward motion, we didn't use the downhaul all day which was interesting. All the systems worked perfectly which we were happy about considering we had spent so long working on them to make it all streamlined.
Upwind the boat is very well balanced and feels like a light Tornado, there is no noise at all (even less than a Tornado) and the acceleration out of gusts is a bit disconcerting at first, we took a few steps back each time until we got used to it..
Downwind we had a few lee helm issues which are bit shitty to steer with but we are working on that this weekend, I suspect that the rudders are not perfectly alligned which is creating the lee helm downwind (upwind there is no real load but no real feel which indicates that there is a small alignment issue). It is hard to butts the rudder alignment due to the canted hulls..
I am sailing again on Sunday so will have mor einfo next week.

Het Macca, learn how to link the pics in to the posts themselfs, mate !

To bad this baby can't be at Texel. Would be the best proof that selective use of carbon and proper use of plain glass and aluminium will also produce a real line honours boat.

Wouter

Great concept Macca. Something like this should have happened years ago to the T5.7 It is good to see that a private owner has the guts to just give it a try.

Congrats and I wish you all the best !

Wouter

The only trouble with embedding the pics into the post Wouter, is that they don't re-size automatically to fit the browser window and they then screw up the forum page formatting. Much better to leave them as attachments in my opinion, unless they are already the right size for a 1024x768 display!

Great looking boat Macca! Hopefully some of the other T5.7 guys in Oz will follow suit.

Phil

Macca,
Did you do anything to adjust the Ackerman angle on those AHPC rudder heads?

Mike.

P.S. Great job! Nice to see the creative juices are still flowing down under

One additional issue is that folks with modems get clobbered when they open the link if it's full of in-line photos. Attaching gives them a choice to see the pic or not.

Mike.

That is such a photogenic machine Macca! You're going to get more than a few envious looks as a result

I'm already starting to go green myself .....

Here's a drink to your new baby

Maaca,
One you get everything tweaked on the Super Taipan is there any chance of you doing a head-to-head comparason with a stock 5.7? I would be very interested to see how it fares against them and the Capricorn as well. I thought it very interesting that the Capricorns pretty much stomped the 5.7's in the Aus Worlds even though the Capricorn is about 80lbs heavier. It will be interesting to see if the weight savings and wider beam will help or hurt overall performance and under what conditions the benefits will show.
Good Luck,

Your super-Taipan 5.7 looks terrific, Macca. We all look forward reports of comparisons with other boat classes. Being a proud owner of a Taipan 5.7 in Norway, a country with no race classes of Taipans, F18s or other high-tech cats, we are looking at modications of the boat. (I am also the proud father of JIMI).
My question is: Have any of you Taipan owners considered deep high-aspect daggerboards? It seems that AHPC (like Julian Bethwaite) used to prefer rectangular wide/short daggerboards for their boats. The trend during the last 5 years has been to long high-aspect boards and everyone seems to maintain that these are much more effective. Hence, the Capricorn has a foil shape which is very different from that of the Tapipans.
Of course, avoiding contact with the sea bottom is nice, but upwind effciency is king.