Friday, July 18, 2014

Getting close with Evolution

Still here in Premantura, Croatia.
The wind is ok, up to 8 or 10 knots everyday, the wave is unnoticable.
The conditions are ideal for A-rigg. Thiis are the conditios that f5g boats love.
Since these are very light boats with lots of sail-area they don't really like waves and riggs have to be change quickly.
But I desing and build my boats to suit in these prevailing conditions here on the croatian an slovene coast.
After three days of focusing on sail trimm Evolution handles like Fila only better. It has slight weather helm and points high, just like Fila. Unlike fila it's cg is far, hydrodinamicaly too far back.
Meaning that the bow likes to clear the waves, the cg position combined with a short distance between the rudder and the keel finn makes the boat happy to tack, and lively and very fun to sail.
It really feels almost skiff-like. The funnest(most fun) rc sailboat i have sailed so far!
The force from the sails seems to put the boat on the predicted waterlines as soon as there is some wind. I light airs this boat Will be probably slow, because the stern is about 7mm under when the boat is static. -as soon as you can feel the wind on your neck and the boat heels it sails beautifully.
It seems that cg far aft is a helpful tool when dealing with a boat whos' waterline is short and caries lots of sails.
to the pictures..
this is the max reasonable heel angle for this boat, above that the deck gets flooded.
That must be more than 30deg, lots of heel for such a wide-ass boat to sail normally

it points really high, with less nose down than fila!

but the wave crest is quite high, this boat definatelly won't exceed the hullspeed by much when saing upwind

the max "resonable" heel angle again, the rudder is getting some air, which offcourse is not good, but even worse the keel is already starting to show. No bubbles seem to travel down the foil..so no ventilation it seems...
the waterline is very narrow and the hull is pretty deep when sailing like this


the boat reaches speeds of up to 5km/h in such conditions with no wave, this seems to be a limit.
the rudder foil keeps the stern down, but if you look closely there is very little water unnderneath it

in a gust it just keeps going, if i don't pull the sheet in the main sail trimm goes shit, like here

too much heel, the back 15cm of the deck is getting washed.. this is a common site on most rc sailboats

when really powered up and pointing high the top of the jb depowers and interestingly the square top of the main starts fluttering so you can hear it.

bearing away...

..foil kicks in when the speed is up, and bow goes up in the next moment
 out

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