Now, about that other Cherub I've been
promising to tell you about. Before I do though, the one that I talked about a
few weeks ago has been put through her paces in some windy weather at Draycote
Water Sailing Club, and to judge by the videos of the boat that are available
to see on YouTube.com, the Daemon Cherub is a flying machine. There is some
fantastic footage of the boat charging downwind at 20 knots-plus, until a
spectacular pitchpole brings the sleigh ride to an abrupt end. Just go to www.youtube.com and keyword search for
Daemon Cherub.
However, as the Daemon's champion and
promoter Richard Taylor points out, the crew had never sailed a Cherub before
(and probably dumped the kite sheet before the moment of no-return), but more
importantly the boat had yet to be fitted with its T-foil rudder. In my
experience of attempting to sail the Bieker 4 International 14 without a T-foil
rudder, you might as well forget it in anything more than 12 knots of breeze.
The T-foil is a massive get-out-of-jail-free card. Any time a wave rears up to
bite you, the T-foil stops you nosediving. It gets you out of all sorts of
trouble. So once the Daemon is up and running with winged rudder, I've no doubt
they will be able to drive it much harder downwind. Not that 21.6 knots is too
shabby.
Right, back to that other Cherub, the
soon-to-be-launched GT60 being developed by Dave Chisholm and his Ipswich-based
company Carbonology. Dave, it should be warned, can talk the hind legs off a
donkey and it was probably that trait that led to the GT60 being conceived in
the first place. "I was driving back from the Cherub Nationals last year with
my crew Andy Prince," explains Dave, "and it was a nine-hour drive. You can
talk a lot of rubbish in that time, and we got to talking about how it would be
nice to design and build our own Cherub."
The 2006 Cherub National Championships in
Largo Bay on the Firth of Forth was Dave and Andy's first experience of the
boat, and they had their moments of glory, including leading a race in 25 knots
of breeze. Then the centreboard snapped, the boat spun out of control, and Andy
went piling through the jib. All in all, Dave loved sailing the 12-footer
twin-trapeze machine, but wasn't entirely impressed with the design or
construction of the boat.
During their nine-hour brainstorm back down
south from Scotland, Dave and Andy discussed what they'd like to see on a
Cherub. Being International 14 sailors, they wondered about scaling down a
Bieker 5, the hull design which has won the last two 14 World Championships.
Paul Bieker from Seattle is the man who came up with the concept of the T-foil
rudder for the 14 back in the late 90s, and whose revolutionary rudders helped
power two different American teams to world championships victories before the
penny finally dropped with the Brits, Aussies and other 14 fleets around the
world that this was must-have technology. It makes you point higher and go
faster upwind, and it stops you nosediving downwind. Not much to argue with
there then.
Paul Bieker has since become a man in great
demand, and he has been a key part of the BMW Oracle Racing design team for the
past five or six years. Dave approached Paul to ask if he could take the Bieker
5 design for the International 14 and scale it down to a 12-footer. Paul agreed
and sold Dave some drawings from which to build a Cherub-sized International
14. Actually he went one better than that: "What we've got from Paul is
basically an 85.7% scale model of his International 14 design," explains Dave.
"But then Paul said he reckoned there were a few tweaks and areas where he
could tidy up the design, because there are a few restrictions in the 14 rule
that don't exist for Cherubs. So for a few hours more work Paul modified the 14
design to make the best design he could within the Cherub rules, although
everything aft of the front 5% is still pretty much the same as a Bieker 5
International 14."
Then ISAF announced the trial for a new
Olympic skiff for women, which led Dave and Paul to have a further discussion
about what might be possible. "When we looked at the ISAF trial, we said,
‘We're not constrained by the Cherub rule, so let's just make the best 12-foot
boat we can,'" says Dave. Neither Paul nor Dave liked the restrictions in the
Cherub rule about how to deal with the bow stem, so they gave themselves free
rein to come up with the best bow shape they could.
This makes the boat out of class as a
Cherub, but here is the next part of Dave's cunning plan. "We're really only talking
about the front three or four inches of the boat being different between the
GT60 and the Cherub, so both boats come from the same basic mould but we've got
two bow moulds for the two designs. So say the GT60 wins the Olympic berth, and
after a couple of years some girls want to sell their boats and trade up to new
GT60s; a Cherub sailor could buy a secondhand GT60 and take off the bow and put
a Cherub-legal bow on instead."
Dave hopes that maybe the Cherub class might even modify the class rules to
allow the GT60 to measure as a Cherub, but he's not too bothered if that
doesn't happen. He claims it is a simple mod to switch between the two bow
profiles. Why the name GT60, you might be wondering? "Well, GT makes you think
of a sports car, and the all-up weight will be 60kg, so it's the GT60," Dave
explains. This is 5kg lighter than the epoxy/carbon version of the Cherub
Daemon, but then the expected retail price for the GT60 is £9,250 - by no means
an unreasonable price by modern standards - but a fair step on from the £6,995
being asked for the Daemon.
This still brings the GT60 well inside the
maximum price of 14,500 Euros specified in the criteria for the ISAF trials in
mid-April, so presumably the price difference between these two Cherub designs
will not be a significant factor. The biggest thing standing in the way of the
GT60 is a lack of time. As I write this edition of Roll Tacks there's less than
a month to go to the trials in the South of France, and construction of the
boat has yet to be completed. It would be a shame if Dave manages to build a
great boat that is let down by being so last-minute. Like the Daemon, the GT60
will also be sporting a T-foil rudder which is a technically difficult piece of
kit to get right, although at least Dave can call on Paul Bieker's help on the
phone.
If the GT60 doesn't win selection, then
Dave is philosophical about it, and returns to his original plan of simply
producing a Cherub that he believes will be a significant step forwards from
the boats that he saw at last year's Nationals. One way or another, the Cherub
class is set to profit immensely from these skiff trials in Hyeres, regardless
of the outcome.
International 14
Meanwhile south-coast 14 sailor Louise
Hickey has been working hard on putting together a credible proposal for the
International 14. There will be two big objections to adopting the 14 as a
women's Olympic class, one of cost and the other of two much power for two
women of target weight range 120-140kg to be able to handle. The problem for
the 14 class is that currently it is hard to find an example of a boat that
meets the 14,500 Euro price target. Speedwave in Germany produce a beautiful
Bieker 5 package for just under £15,000, but of course that is still some way
off the criteria. It would be interesting to know what a boatbuilder like
Hartley Laminates could do with a 14. After all, if they can turn out a
beautifully finished epoxy Cherub for £6,995, how much more could a boat that's
two feet longer really need to cost?
The second objection, of too much power, is
much easier to address. For a start, International 14s are quite narrow boats
relative to their rig size, and a very simple modification would be to make
wider racks and fit them on an existing hull to increase the boat's righting
moment. Also, most rigs are optimised around crews weighing an average 160kg,
because that's what two average-sized blokes tend to weigh. There's no inherent
reason why a 14-foot boat should be too powerful for women. After all, the
RS800 is quite a bit longer. Rather it's a matter of tuning the equipment to a
different crew weight, and that is exactly what Louise has been doing recently
in Chichester Harbour. With Louise crewing for Andy Penman (OK, he's not a lady
but he will have to do), they have been sailing the 14 with a combined crew
weight of 135kg, handling 20 knots of breeze quite happily by using a short
daggerboard and a flat mainsail.
Louise knows she faces an uphill struggle
to get the 14 considered ahead of even the Cherubs, let along what must rank as
the trial favourites, the RS800 and the two versions of the 29er. But she is
keen to see the 14 put through its paces, and believes women are capable of
handling high-powered boats as well as the men. Tina Baylis, who used to
campaign 49ers at the highest level with her husband Trevor, feels the same
way. Tina and Trevor finished runners-up in the 14 Worlds last year, and she
has strong views about what a women's Olympic skiff should be. "ISAF is very
interested in a boat that has really low initial costs, which unfortunately
disqualifies the 14 and all other fully adjustable high performance boats.
"The 29erXX, which looks like it fits most
of their criteria best, is a fine boat, but is a great step down from the 14
and 49er in its performance over a wide wind range. It is just too short to
sail well in lighter airs, since it has no glide. Though women are generally
smaller than men, we don't like drifting around any more than they do. I wonder
why they have set such a low entry cost, when running costs are what really
matters for an Olympic campaign, as well as for regional fleet building. Build
a boat that will have a longer competitive life, and you have dramatically
reduced the cost of racing it."
All valid points, but at least we have a
trial for a new women's skiff, even if none of them quite matches up to what
sailors like Tina would want. Considering that boatbuilders have had just a few
months' notice to respond to this trial, it's impressive that we have six
credible entries vying for selection. Whichever one wins, women's Olympic
sailing can only be better for it - provided of course that ISAF follow through
and actually nominate the trials winner as bone fide class for Weymouth 2012.
