Meet the new Mistress

We speak to Linton Jenkins and Adam May about their new pimped foiling Moth

With its bright red paintwork and BMW M3 badge the new Mistress III design foiling International Moth, on display recently at the London Dinghy Sailing Show, definitely seemed to be a case of co-designers Linton Jenkins and Adam May having ‘pimped their ride’.

We say that the Mistress III is co-designed by May and Jenkins this is in fact not entirely the case. The latest Mistress is an evolution of the Adam May-designed Mistress I and II designs Jenkins has effectively tweaked to go faster and be a neater package.

Among the innovations on this new Moth there is one particular thing sticking out most obviously as you look at the boat - the wand for automatically adjusting the pitch of the T-foil on the centreboard. Instead of dangling off the starboard side of the bow, as is standard with the Fastacraft package and previous Mistresses, on the new boat it is positioned in the centre of the underside of the hull. This makes the foil adjustment more symmetrical from tack to tack and makes the boat neater, all without sacrificing any weight.



“I don’t think people realised just how different the old way is from tack to tack,” comments Jenkins. “When you consider upwind, the wand has to move an extra foot down on one tack you realise it is a big difference. This way means you have a shorter wand and also it is operating at something more like 45 degrees so which should make it smoother in waves.” The system looks like it could create extra drag when the boat is not foiling as it tucks up into a recess underneath the hull. Jenkins argues that this shouldn’t be the case; “when the boat comes off the foils, previously there was a lot of stuff dragging in the water, this way it flips up into the hull and is much neater and smoother.”

As you move round to the side of the boat there is not a great deal that is immediately striking about the wings but a closer inspection reveals some useful little modifications. The first thing of note here is the wing bars at the back of the boat actually angle forward. “We never sit right on the back corner of the wings so [Jenkins] has just made them angle forward a little bit more, mostly as a weight saving exercise,” explains May. Also not obvious at first glance but noticeable when compared to previous Moths is a rather neat little kick bar arrangement. Jenkins realised that people needed a kick bar but did not want to add anything that was not completely necessary, so he came up with a characteristically neat solution. “I thought ‘hang on why don’t we just use the gunwale of the boat’,” he explains. “So we have done an ultra neat quick assembly job on the tramps and they sit just below the gunwale of the hull and that provides a kick bar,”.

Many of the modifications Jenkins has made to the boat are to make it simpler and lighter there have also been some modifications to the hull shape. “I liked the Mistress II design and was not intending to make too many changes but as I did this boat and the more that I faired the hard chine in the more I liked it so I just kept fairing and fairing and fairing. The hard chine was meant to stop around the daggerboard case but the more I did it the more I though that this was going to work a lot better so then we ended up with a hard chine all the way up to the bow.”

The idea behind having this chine and the flatter transom arrangement was explained to us by May: “When you come off the foils, the conventional hull shape would dip and you would get water all around the hull and it would take a while for the boat to pop up again. With a hard chine and flatter transom the boats skims over the water a little more. So that is why I played with the hard chine and added a little more volume in the transom and Linton just took it that little stage further.”

Jenkins has also been experimenting with elliptical rather than conventional rectangular T-foils, but says their development has been trickier than he thought. The main problem with the elliptical foils is a tendency to break. The reason for this is the shape - there is a significant increase in load on certain parts of the foil and they have been regularly breaking in a single place. So far this problem has been sorted for the centre plate foils, but the rudder foils are as yet unchanged, although Jenkins does have some new moulds on the way.



The reason Jenkins wanted to go to the elliptical foil is simple - they are significantly more efficient. “I used the elliptical foil at Garda for the first time and found that it worked really well so we have moved them into production. It is half the thickness on the end than the old one and so is a little lighter. I was genuinely surprised by how much more efficient the elliptical foils were over the square ones,” he says.

On the Mistress III one system that should make life for the sailor easier is a new rudder gantry set up. This consists of a fully adjustable gantry on a pin system making it extremely quick to adjust. The whole system can cant back and forth by around four degrees either way from the central position. “When it goes really light it is good to be able to cant the whole rudder forward so you can sit back and get a little more lift out of the foils,” explains Jenkins

The centre plate foil is slightly different to previous designs as well. The whole centre plate is raked forward by about seven degrees, Jenkins explains: “I wanted to rake the centre plate forward purely to get as much foil separation as possible; this should give the boat more fore and aft balance.” With this in mind we asked why he had not gone for the same approach Rohan Veal used on his Europeans boat last year when he moved the centre plate further forward in its entirety. “If you go too far forward the problem is it becomes too stable for and aft. When you go into a gybe you have to move so far back that when you come out you have far too much lift and the boat skips out from under you. You also need the ability to get over the front foil down waves,” he comments of the lessons learned by Veal last year.

One of the primary concerns for Jenkins while building the boat was to keep it as light, neat and strong as possible. “I have gone for pre-preg carbon to keep all the weight down but then have put a load of weight back in with the strengthening. The boat will still be the lightest Moth in the world. The hull is just over 10kg, painted and that is with all the wing bars as well. All we care about really is the overall package needs to be as light as possible. The overall package is about 35kg. I think people over the last few years have guessed at what weights they have been sailing around in. The foils are pretty much bulletproof and add a lot of weight to the whole thing,” he explains.

Rig wise the class is waiting for a British sail manufacturer to start getting involved. Pinnell and Bax are said to be interested as are a few other companies, but for the moment nothing looks set to come out in the near future.

Jenkins has a number of Moths in production at the moment and it seems all the media attention surrounding the boats has increased demand dramatically. He has ten boats on order while Fastacraft have a similar number. The problem now is that they only ever get about ten on order at a time because someone will ring up and find that they are not able to get one for a year, so they don’t bother.

“Really what people should do is jump in the cue as quick as they can because it is always going to be around the ten boat mark. When people hear the time it will take then they look elsewhere. For that reason I don’t think that you will ever get to the stage where the builders have 50 or 60 on order,” explains May.

Meanwhile Jenkins is gearing up for better, quicker production; he has the mould ready to go for the Mistress III. While the hull itself is minimal, the problem is all the little fiddly things take a great deal of time to make,. Having the moulds will save some time but currently the waiting list for a new boat remains about a year.

Interestingly while there is still variation going on with the foils the Moth class feels like it is beginning to settle down a little. Speaking to Jenkins much of what he says about the boat concerns refinement and small tweaks. This often happens when a development class has gone through a very sudden, significant change, giving the rest of the class a chance to catch up. The new Mistress III certainly looked beautiful but more than that it looked like a boat that was designed from the outset to go foiling. It looked like a boat that was not so scary after all.

Next week we will be speaking to Jenkins about what other projects, thoughts and ideas he has away from the Moth fleet. We don’t want to spoil it but we will say, foiling and trapezing and this year.

Tomorrow Linton Jenkins talks about his other projects including foiling RSes