Maiden voyage

Invictus Challenge, the British C-Class cat goes for her first sail - the day before going racing

Taking a small but highly complex custom boat on its maiden voyage the day before its first major regatta is never the recipe for success, but this alas is the situation that Britain's C-Class campaign, Invictus Challenge, found themselves in yesterday.

Due to delays in the build process, the team were unable to sail the boat before it was due to be shipped to the US for today's start of the International C-Class Catamaran Championship. On arriving in the US it was further held up in Customs only reaching Bristol, RI at 7am on Tuesday morning. However by 1am Wednesday the boat was complete with the wing fully 'skinned up' - ie the heat shrink plastic covering up her intricate innards had been fitted on both sides.

Wednesday afternoon the boat was launched and went on its maiden voyage here in Bristol Harbour. On the positive side, conditions were perfect, the boat didn't break and it returned to the dock with the mast still standing and her hulls intact. She tacked and gybed and other boat-like things and at one brief point she even flew a hull.

On the negative side, her crew John Downey on the helm and Paul Larsen reported that the sail controls to induce camber into the rig and twist had effectively failed to operate and they had thus been unable to effectively 'sheet on'. Part of the problem is that the high mileage of Vectran cord used inside the wing to operate its movement is stretching considerably more than the 1% stated by the manufacturers.

"We need to go over all the mechanisms, because with all the mini-control runs in there, I think there are a couple that are block to block and because they cascade once one is block to block it affects the whole system," described Paul Larsen on their return to shore.

"The boat felt very dead, it felt it was hard to attach flow because we weren’t getting the camber and we certainly couldn’t get the flaps open. Little things were popping off which weren’t critical. It got to the stage where we could have tweaked it forever, the race is tomorrow and we had to get out there and actually sail it."

In comparison they are up against Cogito a team with the benefit of more than seven previous Little America's Cup campaigns under their belt and almost four decades worth of experience...

"It is quite deceptive with these boats how light the wind is but it didn’t feel like how I remember a C-Class should be," continued Larsen. "There is no shape in the sail, there is in a little section down low but that might be where the control run starts to foul and you are pulling on things and then an individual block loads up - so we popped one of the little micro blocks and we’ve just got to go through and tweak it - so no flap action." (Been hanging out too long with Gavin Colby, Paul)

"For the first sail it was perfect conditions for us. Five maybe six or seven knots, but it never seemed to power up. I was thinking 'if we bear away she’ll pop up' and then we found we’re on a beam reach – and then it was ‘okay, that’s it. Something’s up’. I even thought with the stiff wing it would attach at some point and lift up, but it hasn’t yet. The tweak - it is all about the tweak and the structure standing up. There are a few ominous little creaking noises in there at the moment."

Last night the team were diving into the rig attempting to find out where the problem lay, however this is not easy as the transparent cover to her wing has been glued and heat shrunk on to the internal frame and must be cut away if alterations are to be made.

"We are going to be changing pulley runs and stuff but if you can’t get into the wing to adjust this stuff all the time - it is going to be a lot of cover on cover off, hole in the cover - it’s going to look like Grandma’s quilt by the time we finish this thing. But these are all little lessons you have got to learn with these things. Maybe the answer is not to have 72 micro blocks in there..."

Despite being so late Larsen doesn't seem overly perturbed: "There is no pressure on us now, we are so far behind. The window shut on us pretty early when we had to stop messing around with the design and finish building what was designed and come here, or you don’t come here. It shut on us a long time ago to expect us to get here and expect to be competitive out of the box. However it is a perfect test bed to go against all these other concepts and designs to see how they do it. You couldn’t come to a better C-Class symposium than here. If we can get through and not break too much and can keep the rig standing until the end of the regatta then that would be incredible. She does look good."

The regatta is likely to be spent keeping the boat in one piece and trying to assess whether the concept is one worth continuing with.

Last night the Invictus Challenge team were also having to contend with measurement issues - their rig is too big for the C-Class catamaran rules by 0.685cuft and they were expecting to have to cut a small section off the bottom of the wing.

More photos on the following pages...