Just to keep everyone in the loop, F-16 things are slowly happening in Southeast Asia.

First off, here's the first photo of the 2 locally built F-16's side by side at Changi Sailing Club, Singapore.

Maybe it's just the colours, but the boats do attract a fair bit of attention each time they're out.

The big squarehead sails are turning out to be amazing and soon we'll try one on a standard Taipan. Not only does the big head power up the boat, but with just a little tweak on the rotation and downhaul it is very easy to twist off. Speed and handling are vastly improved over the standard head. We have a set of Goodalls and Ashby big-heads but have not tried these back to back yet. I'd expect both sets of sails to perform admirably well as the shapes have been honed on the F-18's and passed down to the F-16.

Watching the Blade go through the water is a real pleasure and the new-generation shape i.e. flat forward/rounded rear really works. The bows can easily be encouraged to ride up on the water surface by just moving the crew weight aft a little.

This is something that also happens on the Taipan but not quite to the same degree. The added volume of the 'new' shape also means the load carrying capacity is increased. I'd hazard a guess and say that these 'hi-volume' design F-16's will take a few of the smaller crews away from the F-18's in a matter of time.

It seems that there is a fair bit of interest locally in the 'new' Formula 16 scene - or maybe its just the colours! We will be having a 60nmile race at the peak of our sailing season (Feb' 06) dubbed the F-16 Challenge. On top of that it looks like there will be a big Monsoon Cup in Malaysia, early December and we are trying to get the F-16's to be a part of the show. Soon enough we might have a bit of a circuit in Southeast Asia for the F-16's.

We are still planning to ship at least 1 -2 F-16's to Europe for next years summer season as we'd like some of our sailors to compete over there. Like wise we have a year-round summer here but, the peak of our sailing season is December-March. This coming season will see some very good local F-16 events happening.

cheers n happy F-sailing


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look very nice, these unequal twins! should have the power to beat the other couple confidence and athena quite easily!

Is this a photo of your club? I used Google Earth to find it and then zoomed WAY in to look at the boats. I guess the database photos are pre-Taipan because I could not see any cats. Looks like a great place to sail!

That is indeed Changi Sailing Club. Have a look at www.csc.org.sg for more info and better photos (and some video footage too...)

CSC is not a bad place to sail. In the NE Monsoon season (December - March) wind peaks at about 24knots but because Singapore is protected on all sides by Malaysia and Indonesia - we have flat water! Water temp is 24 degrees year-round and the beer is 10 degrees!

If you visit http://www.csc.org.sg/water/race.htm over the next day or so, you'll see photos/video clips of the weekends race when the plywood cats took line honours.

That "rhino" grey is sharp! That's the color I want to use, though I'm going to use a two color paint scheme. Is "Rhino Grey" a Blade or a Taipan? I ask because I'm curious as to the squared up bow.

Clay

Matching red rigging lines: boat builders conspiracy?

Hey there Clay
Rhino Grey is a Taipan, which explains the bow I guess! We just built it to F-16 spec's which has vastly improved the boat in a lot of way's and she is now 'current', again! The Grey makes the boat stand out from all the white kevlar Taipans we have. But the Grey is nicely offset by the black composite spars - and that makes it look the business! Attached is another view of Grey.

Cheers

Boat builders conspiracy?
Nice one, and I never thought of it that way. Of course, beauty is in the eye of...but never mind, the Twins do look nice in full colour as opposed to the normal 'mono chrome' hulls and multi hued lines.

Face it, an F-16 has a lot of little strings onbaord, if each one is a different colour it just gets a little hard on the eye! The only 'non-coded' strings might be the Dyneema trapeze 'strings' that replace the wires. But at 3mm, they're hardly an eye-sore. They did save a bit of weight aloft though as 4 Dyneemas weigh as much as 1 wire trapeze! Well worth it!

Agent Orange looks really good as the sheets match the hull colour. On Grey the orange sheet stands out nicely. Attached is another shot from the weekend with the 'twins' on the water together. Sorry the shot is pretty grainy!

There will be more shots/video up on the aforementioned CSC website any time now.

seemed to have been a more rainy than windy event?
looking at the results your race times seemed to be very short between 15 - 30 minutes...? and looking at the videos it seemed you run starboard mark courses?

just curious,

dirk

I just assumed with a user ID like SkunkWORX there must be some kind of top secret conspiracy going on, I've used the ID monkeyworx before, it doesn't imply the same mystery.

It looked like a Taipan but you just can't be sure from a picture. I thought maybe someone got a little creative, though it did look like "rhino grey" had the less pronounced Taipan bow volume down low. Do either of you plan to incorperate the AHPC system to raise the dagger boards? I plan on building the Blade through the winter here in the Northeastern US, I am wondering if it would be worth my time to incorperate this, though I guess it would be easy enough to add later.

Great race photos by the way! I have a friend who's father is in Thailand, though I don't know where. I guess he could be close to you and then again maybe not, he is on the water somewhere though. I would love to make it out there sometime.

Clay

I would make all the preparation for such a raising system when building the hulls. Then as you say it can easily be added later.

I race most doublehanded and I find that I nearly always keep my boards down. It seems that with the Taipan boards you can get away with that; all the way up to where the winds gets really honking. I for now am making the trade-off that leaving them down speeds up our transitions and keeps the decks clear while the negative effects are pretty minor. Not to mention that hitting a board with your elbow or something is a real pain. I think the negative effect is that the boat is a little bit more nervous on the downwind but that doesn't seem to bother us much (my crew and I). We compensate for it with other skills.

I do solo sailing quite often recreationally and here the system would be a nice to have, but the final eyes haven't made it too my boat yet even though I have them laying around. Probably next year.

Wouter

THe dogs never show up! - It used to be called the Cat & Dinghy series - do I still need to clarify who the dogs are?

The races were really short, the last wind because the wind suddenly came up with a 45degree shift, pulled the race time down to 13 minutes - no chance for anything.

We ran a starboard course because of the limits of the racing area on the day. Next outing will be a port course. We are restricted between a land mass and a shipping channel so we were forced to squeeze the course in between all that.

As for the rainy weather. We are in our Southeast Monsoon period which means our northern Changi side of the island is a bit sheltered. Also the unstable weather pattern means that it can change. We had 3 races in 3 different wind strengths. By the end of the year the wind swings to Northeast and then we move to another racing area which is a big river mouth - flat water, 20+ knots!

But on the day in question, the 1st to races were dry R1 in okay wind, R2 in light wind, R3 started just as a passing squal opened up with rain drops as big as...and as is normal around here, after the rain there is no wind!

It'd be good if you can comw down for our Monsoon Cat Cup and F-16 Challenge in Jan/Feb next year. Then we do have good racing weather.

cheers

No conspiracy, really. Just liked the whole Skunk Works concept that build all that top secret military aircraft!

As for the daggerboard system. No will leave it plain-Jane 1. one less string across the deck 2. we leave the boards fully down al the time, except for beaching!

Leaving the boards down gives the boat more bite. The hull will fly earlier and you shake of the drag quicker so your boat speed goes up. Especially downwind, with the boards down I find you can control the whole match so much easier. THe modern F-16 has so many other controls to make your hi-speed life easier that the boards can almost be forgotten.

With the string system, if your moving along quickly there will be side load on the boards and you can't pull then up with the string anyway. Better not to have the string then!? Put it in by all means and try it out, If you don't like it, just take it off.

When you finally get around to sailing your Blade you will want to do anything to make the hull fly earlier. When that hull comes up the dynamics really take over and she will really climb to windward at a great rate of knots.

We just got the opportunity to 'test' Agent Orange against some of our Taipans. In light no hull flying winds, speed and angles are a match. As the Taipan crews slowly edge out to the wire, they hold a slight advantage. The Blade is full width F-16 in comparison so hull lift-off will be a bit later. But there is a big benefit to 'sitting in' longer on the Blade. Once the hull lifts the bow section really comes into play and the speed jumps up as the boat climbs to windward. It is as if the boat ahead just bears away! It was pretty amazing to see it happen even though it sounded like a story to me!

Thailand's not far away about an hour in a jet. If he's sailing, there are a couple of places with some good set ups and nice water.

cheers