New Production Dinghy from France

Romain, "Earwigoagin's" European correspondent, emailed a heads up about Group Finot's new production dinghy, a 4.3 meter, 14 footer called the "Albatros". Looking at the Albatros website, it definitely sports a wide wedge shape hull. The "Albatros" appears to be the first production sailing dinghy to try to leverage the Transat monohull hull shape into a smaller size. According to the website the "Albatros" is targeted as a two man lightweight sailing dinghy for families and young people.

Here is a side view I lifted from the website..........

The specs on the "Albatros" are as follows.....

• Hull length 4.3 m 
• Hull width 1.95 m 
• Hull weight 72 kg 
• Ballast in swinging CB 30 kg 
• Total hull and CB weight 118 kg 
• Max load 240 kg 
• Mainsail area 10.2 m2 
• Jib area 4.4 m2 
• Assymetric Area 17 m2 

Besides the really wide, wide stern, some of the other design features that seem interesting or odd (take your pick) are.....

• Hull is formed thermoplastic out of a recyclable plastic called Evolite by Technyl. The hull uses 3 pieces glued together.
• Carbon mast is standard and from the video, looks like the mainsail zips onto the mast like a windsurfer.
• The weighted centerboard doesn't swing up into the hull but remains outside the hull when raised.
• The blades, including the weighted centerboard, are made of the thermoplastic, which must be an engineering feat in itself to make them stiff enough.
• There is a bow insert at the stem which will take most of the abuse of running into the docks.
• And the price is an eye-popping low, low 6000 Euros (7620 USD at todays exchange rate). That doesn't include the assymetric kit.

Here is a video showing the rigging and sailing of the "Albatros".....

Group Finot's website makes no bones that there is a definite intent to market the "Albatros" worldwide.

For the American market, I see several problems, the main one being, the "Albatros" may be trying to cover too many market segments. To be a lightweight boat, it has low freeboard, which means this is a sit on boat. American families who daysail like higher freeboard and sit in bench seats. The transom sheeting for the mainsail is a non-starter; there is no American dinghy that uses transom sheeting. Americans like to tie their dinghies to the dock. I'm not sure how docile the Albatros is going to be tied to the dock with a full battened mainsail that isn't easily lowered unless you take the mast down.

Update: Romain adds a comment to say Group Finot have already addressed the issues I've listed above:

"According to one of the articles, the "transom sheeting" is supposed to evolve to a block centered in the boat. Also the mainsail will slide up the mast in a groove, the rudder will be reduced in size and the jib will have a furler...
This will modify a bit the boat from the prototype shown."

I do look forward to test sailing the "Albatros" when it arrives on American shores.

We did have one US class that explored the wide transom, scow hull with normal bow and that is the Johnson 18. Roger Martin, who had done some Transat designs, designed the Johnson 18 in 1994. Over a hundred were built until 1998 when the Johnson boatbuilding company folded. There is a small fleet at SSA and I intend to get a sail on one someday.

Why Sailors Don't Like to Race

Let's face it, most sailors don't race, they like sailing as a lower stress sport. Ask those who prefer to daysail or putter about why they don't race and you get, "I don't know the rules", and "There's too much yelling" and "I'm afraid I'm going to hit someone".

Well what about some racing in traditional sail boats. Surely that's got to be more genteel. Like this video of the traditional Salcombe Yawls of England.



Wow, utter mayhem! The yelling is so loud you can hear it a couple hundred meters away, against the wind. Add a major dose of the wince factor as we watch the entire fleet try to criss cross each other, short tacking inshore, against the current. There is another video of the always interesting Salcombe Yawls buried back in the archives of this blog.

Top Insect Sailing Blog of 2011

Shucks Folks, I'm Speechless!

Tillerman once anointed me as the Internet #1 Sailing Dork.

And now, out of the blue, he went and did this.

When the Grand Poobah of sailing blogs; the prolific, witty, erudite, authoritative Tillerman gives you a thumbs up.......Wow!

I'm deeply honored. A Tip of the Hat to Tillerman, the older-than-I, but still young, coot of a Laser sailor.

Header Photo; Barnegat A-Cats

I "borrowed" this photo from Baydog (he's also added a photo of three Barnegat A-Cats to the title block of his blog ). Baydog (I think he's crewed on them) and even Tillerman know more about this traditional class than I do. From what I was able to garner from a quick trip around the Internet.....

• The class traces their origins all the way back to the 1871 Toms River Cup, at that time, a run-what-you-brung regatta featuring the local workboats.
• The wide, minimum draft catboat type is ideal for racing on the shallow Barnegat Bay and by 1896 the workboats had been eclipsed by purpose built racing craft.
• The class as it is raced today is based around a 1922 Charles Mower design, the 28 footer "Mary Ann". The designer of the Star, Francis Sweisguth, also designed an A-cat in 1923 and today the fleet is a mix of original restorations and reproductions of these two designs.
• The Barnegat A-cat has got one huge, bad-ass mainsail and they have lots of crew.
• They look to have a very active fleet.

It dawned on me while looking at the bow shape of the Barnegat A-cat and reading about the Charles Mower heritage, that there is a strong connection with our local West River traditional design, the Chesapeake 20, but more on that for a later post.

Oh, and the Barnegat A-cat is also featured as the title photo over on the blog green Boats.

US Olympic Team Announced

I see the American Olympic Sailing Team for the Weymouth Olympic Games this summer has been announced after the results of the Perth ISAF regatta. (Correction from Tillerman; the US Women's Match Racing team is still to be selected...) All this is somewhat confusing to a old cuss like me who remembers the winner-take-all Olympic Trials being held in the U.S over a one or two week period, but professional sailing moves forward increasingly into their own universe. Anyway, congrats to the winners who will represent the red, white, and blue this summer.

To commemorate our Olympians, I have a medley of videos featuring three Olympic dinghy classes; the 49er, the 470 and the Finn.

First video features the crashes and spills that is the hallmark of sailing a 49er. I also like the Ompah music.......



The second video features the suitably blond, congenial Swedish women's 470 skipper giving a video tour of the 470 dinghy.


Perth 2011 World Championships Live VT from Alex Palmer on Vimeo.

And for our Finn video we feature the air rowing introduced to Finn racing over the last couple of years, as explained by the newly crowned John McEnroe of sailing (English Olympic champion Ben Ainslie who had a dust-up with a photographer at the Perth regatta). I agree with Ben on this one, freeing up the pumping rules for the Finn certainly does make a physical dinghy even more physical - which fits the Olympic ideal.

The models of Bob

I mentioned somewhere back in Earwigoagin that my temporary job as a sailmaker for the Naval Academy went away in July. In the midst of being a somewhat older gent looking for a job in a down economy, my friend Bob Blomquist mentioned he needed someone to drive his extra vehicle down to Sarasota Florida, as he had taken the plunge and retired full time to Florida. Bob is the boatbuilder, Chesapeake 20 sailor, and the sailor I camped out with at the Mid Atlantic Small Craft Festival.

The car delivery was, more or less, a hammer down dash to Florida (with a break at Charlestown SC with Mothist Mark Saunders) and a quick turnaround flight back, but I did get to stay overnight at Bob's new digs. Being a Florida dwelling, Bob's new home is more airy and light filled than his previous house in Baltimore and I got an opportunity to take some pics of the large sailing models Bob has scattered about his living room.

First is the modified Bolger Chebacco daysailor/cruiser that Bob intends to build. (I'm not sure when, as Bob has immediately become a partner in an E-scow and has joined the local Sarasota fleet of hand me down E-scows that race every Wednesday during the Florida winter season.)

Bob's previous racing class was the traditional Chesapeake 20 class out of West River Sailing Club, situated about 18 miles south of Annapolis MD. Bob built his own Chesapeake 20 but, before commencing construction, he did a study model to work out the decking details. The undecked Chesapeake 20 model is shown below. Above the model is a photo of a Whitehall skiff that Bob and Mark Hasslinger built in the early to mid 1980's.

And finally the most mesmerizing one of the lot; a Crotch Island Pinky. Bob didn't build this one. His Chesapeake 20 crew, Jim Reuter found this model in the attic of a house he had just purchased. It was stored next to Howard Chapelle's book "American Small Sailing Craft". The scribbles and calculations of this unknown model maker filled the page where Chapelle documented the Crotch Island Pinky hull shape. Bob added the mast, sails and stand to the still roughly finished hull.

What an absolutely stunning, curvaceous hull this Crotch Island Pinky has. I love all manners and shapes of sailboats but this model arrests my attention anytime I'm in the same room.

Navigating this blog

I've been meaning to write about how to navigate through this blog for a while but a comment from one of my good friends, Bill Parkes (I'm just tweaking on Bill, he really is a good friend) spurred me to finally write this post. Bill commented on my post: "Another Big Guy Singlehander: The Finn Dinghy"

"Rod, You have ignored the Finn.........."

Well, not really. Lets see how to determine how many Finn posts I have done, and other ways to find what you're looking for;

1. Search Box: With some typing you will find that I have 9 posts referencing the Finn, with 5 of them directly featuring the Finn. How did I do that? Well, Google Blogger utilizes the same Google search engine. "Where is it?", you say. The search box for this blog is on the left of the top menu pane, right above the Title photo.  Type in the word "Finn" in the box, hit enter and wala!, Blogger returns all posts that have the word Finn in them.
2. Blog Archive: A vast majority of readers visit this blog irregularly. To get an idea of what has been posted since you've been gone, just redirect your gaze over to the right menu pane and "Blog Archive" where Blogger will show you an index of all the posts I've done in the current month. If you want to see an index of the previous months posts, click on the right arrow next to that month to open up that index.
3.  Labels: Finally, I've tagged all posts into general categories which you'll find under "Labels", lower down on the right hand menu. You will see, surprise! surprise! that I have 39 posts on the "Laser", click on the Laser Label to see all 39 posts. I've tried to keep the Label list from becoming too unwieldy, which is a struggle.

Hmm! Lets play stump Earwigoagin;

• Search word "Flying Dutchman", aha! no posts found.
• Search word "Lightning", bunch of posts with maybe three or four related to the American "Lightning" dinghy and several others to the lightning as in "thunder and.....".