F18 worlds artikel nog 2 weken te gaan.....

Hierbij een artikel over het komende WK, waarin ook aangegeven wordt tegen welke Pro's wel het op zullen moeten nemen. De laatste keer dat we gezeild hebben is drie maanden geleden. Echter met onze kantoor handjes gaan we zeker ons best doen !!!


New boats and pros

With their World Championship fast approaching we revisit the F18 class
In a little under two weeks time the F18 World Championship will begin for the first time in Australia. Over 80 boats have already entered the event, but more than the number of sailors participating, the quality of sailors shows how this fleet has grown to become one of the most competitive classes to sail.
The World Championship this year will be the first time the event has been held outside of Europe so the 80 boat entry is extremely pleasing, despite 150+ boats attending last year in Hyeres. “It is a remarkable entry list - it really is a Who’s Who of top cat sailing,” explains F18 Secretary General, Don Findlay. “Without being unkind, we have lost a lot of the European amateur, club sailors who would normally have gone to these events if they had qualified for their country, because it is such a long way to travel.” So the list is composed almost exclusively of people who are extremely serious about their sailing, particularly those making the long, expensive journey with their boats from Europe around the world to Yeppoon, Queensland. A quick glance at the entry list (below) shows a number of big names attending: Listed in the line-up are top Tornado Olympians, such as Darren Bundock and Glen Ashby, Fernando Echavari and Anton Paz, Mitch Booth and Pim Nieuwenhuis as well as many other top cat sailors from around the globe, including 2006 F18 World Championsh, the Sach brothers and 2003 World Champions, the Boulogne brothers among others.For those not fully familiar with the class, F18 cats are built to a box rule tightly defining their physical characteristics (length, sail area, weight, etc). In theory a purpose-built one off could clean up in the class, but in practice the class is populated almost entirely by strong production boats such as the popular Hobie Tiger and more recent additions such as the French-built Cirrus 18 (Worlds winner in 2003) or the Australian-built Dreadnought-bowed Capricorn (Worlds winner in 2006, below).While this adds some pleasant diversity to the fleet, and gives the consumer choice over the boat they buy, in practice the relative performances of the different designs tends to be outweighed by the skill of the crew sailing them. . Obviously like many rules, be it for a one designs or boats like the F18 some adjustment is occasionally required. This year there were a number of new developments to the rule planned, though they have been pushed back to come into effect after the World Championships. “As of March you will be allowed to have a fully battened jib,” explains Findlay. “Also, there is a limitation coming in on the width of the mainsail heads. To some extent fat heads are fat heads but they were just getting obscene. They were becoming the wrong shape altogether so there is a limit coming in now of a 1000mm on the head, plus a measurement further down to stop the roaches becoming ridiculous.” Beyond these modifications the main development in the class is its continued phenomenal expansion around the globe. The forthcoming World Championship in Australia is testament to the class’ increase in size down under in recent years. Canada has now had an amicable split from the North American class due to their becoming big enough now to have their own association. In addition to this Lithuania have recently applied to the class’ World Council to have an association. The UK has been rather slow compared to many other countries in taking up F18 sailing but even here the class is now seeing significant growth. “We seem to be terribly slow in catching on in the UK,” admits Findlay. “I am still getting calls from people in this country saying, ‘what is this new F18 all about?’ It is getting better though and it is really starting to move in the UK at the moment because there are three manufacturers all pushing the same market.” Findlay says typically in Britain if there is a cat open meeting you will see the Dart sailors all talking together in one part of the bar, Prindle sailors in another and Hobie sailors in another. This tribal nature of UK cat sailors has been one of the main causes of the market being so slow in this country. Even with more people sailing F18s the UK fleet is still very small in comparison to those found in other European countries. “In the UK we have about 38 teams who do enough events in a year to be on the National Rankings. If you go to Holland and look at their ranking system they have about 181 that have done enough events to qualify,” states Findlay. The size of the fleet in Holland is not just an anomaly either. “Our estimates at the moment - and they are estimates – as Secretary General I am trying to get everything onto one database currently but we don’t know exact numbers until that is done – show something in the region of 500 - 600 new F18s going out worldwide a year, which is colossal.”. As well as new countries applying to join the F18 class and some countries increasing their fleet size, other nations are going about the process more directly and designing their own boats. “There is a new boat coming from Brazil,” Findlay says. “The department of aeronautics at one of the universities there have been designing and building one. They have been asking a lot of questions about rule interpretations and the like.” There is also a new boat coming from Argentina, called the Race Cat that is already being raced as well as a new boat being designed and built in Chile.Though these new boats are exciting they all come from manufacturers with little or no experience designing and building modern high performance catamarans. Last year, however, a new boat was introduced by well know cat builders Nacra - the Nacra Infusion (above). The World Championships this year will be the first big test of the boat at an international event. Flying the flag for Nacra is former Olympian Hugh Styles, who recently got his hands on his new craft for the first time. Perhaps best know for his Tornado career it looks as though Styles will be making a name for himself in the F18 class in the near future. “This year I will be racing all through the year on the Nacra, doing the Worlds, the Europeans and all the high profile events like Texel and Eurocat as well as the UK Nationals and maybe some of the long distance events that go on in the UK and around Europe. The plan is to race a lot of events to get the boat a good result base,” he explains. Styles will be sailing with his now regular Tornado crew Tom Peel and the team are aiming to be in the top ten at the Worlds in two weeks time but believe top five would be possible if they sail very well. Certainly a good result will push away the bad memories of their disastrous 32nd place at the recent Tornado World Championship in Argentina. Though Styles has only sailed the Infusion once he seems more than happy with what it should be capable of. “The hull shape is pretty different and is using pretty cutting edge technology - basically it is a wave pierce, planning hull shape,” he explains. This should in theory allow the boat to get up onto the plane when other cats cannot, allowing a higher speed potential. “The boat’s performance downwind is a lot more tolerant so it basically means it will not nosedive as much as some of the other boats out there. This should mean we are able to push it harder downwind. Also, upwind we are able to get a lot better high end boat speed out of the Infusion, thanks to its hull shape.”Certainly this seems a boat that can talk the talk but with it being an unproven design, (even though it is from proven designers) the question is will it walk the walk at the Worlds? For the answer to this question we will have to wait and see but so far the boat has been performing well. “This weekend just gone we were sailing out of Weston in quite a light, shifty, offshore breeze and we won the event against some Tornados and two Capricorns,” continues Styles. “We won four races and were first overall; it was the first time I had actually been in the boat so I am just getting into sailing it.”With more and more pro sailors turning to the F18 class and the boat being used as an Olympic trainer by some Olympic squads - Skandia Team GBR for example - there is question of how far down the pro sailing route the class will end up. “There is a big problem in the void between the professionals and the amateurs. Increasingly all the pros are turning up to all the big events. We are even now seeing some of the top pro monohull sailors, such as the Greenhalghs, coming to events because of the level of competition,” concludes Findlay. Still, if having too many pros turning up to your events is the biggest problem you have to deal with then it seems life is probably okay.