Next boat...

I recently found again an interesting article that I’d originally seen online written by Mike Lennon describing the dilemma of sailing a development class boat. Do you continue to develop your current boat hoping to gain through gradual refinement, and knowing your boat well or do you opt for the latest design features out there? With the pace of development in the Moth class, this is perhaps even trickier than in the 14 class Mike was originally referring to.

I’ve been pondering this question for much of the season. I’ve done a number of changes to ‘Envy’, and all I think have been successful, but the 09 generation are fast... We are all learning so much about these boats all the time.

With a likely windy Worlds, and the real strength of my current foils being the lighter more marginal stuff, I ordered a set of Mach 2 foils a while back. I figured Amac would have learnt a lot from the Bladerider, and as everybody was still trying to catch up with that, he’d probably be a generation ahead again. I had ideas on what I’d do, with lots of sketches and CAD files, but no time to do it, so I thought a set of these would be a good option.

Things didn’t go quite according to plan though with complete Mach 2’s proving to be very popular, individual foil order delivery times got longer and longer... In the end I bit the bullet and converted my foil payment into a boat deposit, and so now I’m the proud owner of a Mach 2. Their pace has been impressive, and although I had another Velociraptor hull pencilled in with Sam Pascoe (who has access to the moulds now that Simon Hiscocks has them), and Mike Cooke has recently made new boat decisions a lot trickier, the raw pace of the Mach 2 and the level of control won me over. And I know that with identical kit I can race Simon pretty hard! ;-)

As for preparation time before the Worlds, ah that is another story..