The Lightwind-Beast development

I get many emails on how to make catamarans more effective for lighter winds. We can see many sails which is not so efficient. It has power, but cannot go forward fast. I have seen several cases on different regattas that the boat is flying a hull in really low wind, , but was very very slow. It means it has too much drag.

This whole light wind passion started several years ago, when we bought our Tornado. We have lots of light wind days on Lake Balaton. I have started to think how to pimp her. Now let's see what was done in the last two years.

Chupacabra XL

For the 2008 Olympic Games some Tornado class teams developed a gennaker which could be used sailing upwind in very light breeze. This sail and the mystery around it made a huge storm within the class, and a South-American sailor started to call the sail Chupacabra.

This sail is a slightly bigger version for a different boat, but using the famous Chupacabra development.

Europa 30 Johanna - the mainsail

The Europa 30 class is a really Hungarian class, it contains really different boats so the class rules use the KLR formula to make the class more unified. Our sails are quite successful in this class. The first set was made in 2012 for the boat called "Fétis" ( HUN 16) and the second generation came in 2014-15.

Johanna with the old sails

F16 Optimization - The Mainsail

In the last post of optimization I talked about the jib.  Let's see now the main motor, the mainsail.

Everything has started with this sail modification. A team from France asked me to make a more powerful sail for the Europeans. I was thinking a lot which direction to take as I was pretty happy with our first mainsail design. It had a 6 batten.

4th February - 1D Loft 2 - intro

This post is a little bit different, as we have our birthday. It happened exactly one year ago that the One Design Sails brand reborned after several decades of rest.

I have started to work with sails - I can say- a long time ago. There was a point, when everything had a turn into a much higher state. This point was 4th February 2012. On this day, I met with Pablo Soldano to make more deeper our work together. 

It was a really great meeting and something started to change.

F16 Optimization - CHP2k16 Jib

Our F16 sail optimization started around late May, early June 2015 for the Europeans. I have started to write another post about this project it turned out to have different posts to the different sail types.

Let's start it with the jib. The reason I have chosen this sail to start with is very simple. The last version got finished just right before Xmas and headed straightly to France and participating on the Martinique Cata Raid. It was a quite quick project for this sail, the time was far too short for the right and full analysis, we had to built the jib in an absolutely short time.

By the way, the guys, Emmanuel Le Chapier and Théo Constance won the F16 class and got 4th overall, fighting against the F18s.