Salt water,

>>This is very good news.

It was about time too stealth launch in januari 2002 and that is nearly 2 years ago.


>>I know i've seen that shape before :-)
>>See attachment


You would think that indeed, however looks can be deceiving. I don't know the Capricorn that well, I do know the flyers FX-ones etc better, but the similarities are the raked back bow/narrow deck (not a design choice !) and the sloping deck. Than the designs start to diverge. The raked back bow is actually a direct result of having a deck that is more narrow than the hull at midheight. You can't have a deck that is more narrow without having a raked back bow. The named new designs all have reduced deck surfaces and therefor all look alike with respect to their bows. The sloping deck is a design choice (to some extend). Point is that these hulls can be as different from eachother as old style hulls despite that fact they all look the same because of that visually dominant raked back bow. An example : There are big differences in the shape of the sterns. A-cat flyer type hulls have relatively high sterns for the width at that point the almost, The FX-one has a more square like stern with straight sides ; a U shape with rounded edges. The Blade has a much larger rounded bottom without straight sides; The curve continues in the sides and there they even falls in to a deck that is narrower. Some wavepiercer copies have reduced their bouyancy in their sterns the blade hasn't, same with the bows despite the similar shape. I had the same impression; the Blade does look alot like the Capricorn; however they are not designed by the same team (Capricorn is designed by Martin Fisher) nor are they copies of eachother as far as I can tell.


>>Would AHPC be the builder?

For Europe, no. For Australia and other regions maybe; this dependents on what the designers want with the Blade.


>>Looking foward to more details. I'd like to see higher aspect daggerboards than what the drawing shows.


Actually; there is some development work going on in this area and I must say that the designers have entrusted me with their results for which I'm very grateful. Tests like these are extremely interesting to advance ones understanding of how catamarans work. Of course this part is confindential. But I can say that one can't always estimate the upwind performance accurately by just looking at the boards aspect ratio. Both the Stealth and Blade designers have made comments were lower aspects boards appeared to have equal or superior performance over considerable speed ranges. Some results were totally unexpected indeed but were confirmed again and again. Still, my guess is that we'll see the Blade be fitted with boards that have an aspect ratio comparable to the other modern designs, with a maximum ratio of 4. Beyond 4 the long boards tend to slow a design down and make it "nervous" especially when singlehanding. The drawing itself is of early 2003 and I'm not too sure that the depicted boards are more than a general idea of how they should look.

I will push the design team for as much extra details as I can.

Ofcourse it is a pure F16 so most of the details are known, they are stated in the F16 rules.

Currently they are working at making some video footage that can be showed to you guys. Like I said in my other post they tried to do it without a tripod last week but one has to have a pretty stable hand to get some smooth video footage. To bad really the wind was howing at 20-25 knots.

I will keep you guys and gals updated.

Wouter