Mach 2: The latest production Moth

We speak to Andrew McDougall and Simon Payne, the men behind the Mach 2 Moth

Looking back on it, the rise of the International Moth over the last six years has been simply phenomenal. Since the Moth adopted hydrofoils it has gone from being a back garden class for the slightly quirky sailor with relatively few members, to achieving a huge international presence with large scale production of boats. Given its present scale one wonders how much room there is left in the market now there are five major manufacturers in a variety of countries, but Bladerider designer and owner of Ka sails, Andrew McDougall and ex-Moth World Champion, Simon Payne feel there is room for at least one more as the pair recently unveiled a new venture, the ‘Mach 2’ production International Moth.

The project was only unveiled to public at the start of September, with McDougall and Payne choosing to reveal the concept virally through Payne’s sailing blog ( here) and by speaking to a few other key players in the Moth World.

Before going into too much detail about the new boat it is necessary to have a quick recap of the recent geneology in the Moth class. As stated, McDougall penned the Bladerider hull shape and was deeply involved in that project, the first production foiling Moth. However, as Bladerider grew into the giant production entity it is today, McDougall moved back to his Ka Sails business - Ka being the sail of choice in the Moth fleet, as well as manufacturing windsurfing sails. Meanwhile Bladerider continued to manufacture Moths on a huge scale with hulls being produced in large numbers from McConaghy’s factory in China.

At the most recent Moth World Championships in Weymouth, during a designers meeting (see details here) two announcements were made that are directly relevant to this project. In the first McDougall stated he would be building foils which would be available in the future for anyone wanting to purchase them. The second announcement concerned Bladerider no longer manufacturing their hulls at the McConaghy factory in China. Even at this stage, McDougall says he still had no solid plans to make a boat. “Everyone has a wrong impression of all this because I, of course, have floated the idea in my brain [of doing a boat] but it had got no further than that. For a long time I had been saying to myself ‘don’t go there: it takes too much time, it is too much work, it is stupid’. So I just looked at doing the bits that are easy and stuff I can do myself like the foils and the sails. But I was doing so much work on my own foils with my Bladerider and they kept getting faster and faster that I thought ‘well, this looks like it is worth doing’.”

Below: Pressure analysis of Mach 2 foils


However, with the dissolution of the Bladerider/McConaghy partnership, McDougall was presented with the possibility of doing his own boat. “I was basically going to China to deal with the windsurfing sails and visit four or five manufacturers that I thought might be capable of building foils,” McDougall continues. “Then McConaghy and Bladerider ruptured and the day after they ruptured I got a call saying, ‘do you want to do a boat with us’.”

Following this discussion things moved along at a shocking pace and McDougall admits it may seem too quick for some. Essentially McDougall flew straight out to Sydney and signed the contract with McConaghy, flew to China a week later and designed the boat then and there. Although this may seem like a very fast time-frame McDougall says since designing the Bladerider there have always been bits and pieces he has been improving in his mind as he sailed it so it was really only a matter of pulling together all those ideas and committing them to an actual design. “I sail the thing so much I am constantly thinking about all the different scenarios as it is lifting out and low riding, where you need the stability, what will make it easier to tack, what will make it easier to gybe? All those things have been spinning round my head,” he explains. Once the design was being modelled on a computer McDougall went through a number of different iterations before eventually getting the final design finished just in time for the mould to be milled. “By the third one, they had almost said we are going to mill it today so I said ‘oh shit, give me a day’. I spent a day just looking again at all the numbers and just going over it trying to find something I wanted to change, but I could not. That is very unusual for me because I am always trying to change this bit here or that bit there going fatter or skinnier…”

While McDougall had done the design of the boat and McConaghy were setting up to build it, the newest Moth needed someone to come in and take care of the publicity side of things. Simon Payne had been working alongside McDougall as his European reseller for Ka Sails and seemed like the perfect choice. “I was not really involved in the creation of this idea,” says Payne of this partnership. “It was not collaborative. It is really something Andrew had in the back of his mind and we saw a fit with what I was doing and with what Andrew wanted to do with the boat. I will do the Global sales marketing and Andrew does the designing and managing the manufacture and quality aspects.”

It would seem McDougall and Payne have the perfect partner in McConghys and have been lucky Bladerider and the builder split leaving them a ready and raring builder who already have experience Moth building at their factory. However, it does not take much to realise they have been left with a far from steady legacy. Specifically there was a great deal of criticism levelled at Bladerider early on about build issues. This means the Mach 2 might well have a lot of early prejudice about it right from the off. Payne says firstly the problems that dogged the Bladerider early on are now effectively solved and the company has had very few issues recently. Secondly he adds most of the issues they did have early on were to do with the foils breaking and McConaghy were only contracted to build the hulls not the foils, something many people do not know.

In terms of build quality, McDougall – who experienced the Bladerider and McConaghy relationship in the early stages first hand – says things will be very different this time. Specifically he comments that when McConaghy were brought in to build the Bladerider, three prototypes had already been made and the people at McConoghy’s were very much building somebody else’s design. This time around, he explains, the relationship is significantly different, specifically with McConaghy being involved in the project as well as being a financial backer.

Perhaps, then, what the company faces is more of an exercise in convincing potential buyers that the boats will be fine. “There is a wider issue about the assurance of quality because many people have been burned and have not had a great purchasing experience,” Payne states. “That is obviously very important to us. The first thing we are doing on that level is the relationship is different as McConaghy are not only financially but also emotionally involved in this project. The other thing is we are stating we're not producing customer boats until we are absolutely sure the two prototype boats are road tested so all the bugs are ironed out. There will be no testing on the customer.” These first prototype boats will be sailed extensively by Payne in the Northern Hemisphere and McDougall in the south, culminating in the Australian titles at the end of the year. Due to this there will not be any boats coming out of the McConaghy factory until at least January ’09.



Despite McDougall penning the Bladerider design and that being a natural starting point for the boat in his mind the actual look of the Mach 2 will be quite different. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the boat will be her ‘Dreadnaught’ bow, unlike most of the other plumb bows in the fleet. “Fore and aft is actually a big issue and pulling away from the wind and putting the nose down is a problem,” says McDougall “We have got quite a lot less boat in the front but one of the issues that causes a nosedive to be irretrievable is the amount drag there, specifically, the drag near the deck is quite critical in recovering from a nosedive. If you put something like an A-Class cat into the drink nose first, it will come out quite well. So I have spoken a lot to the A-Class designers about what they are doing and why they are doing it. I have tried to make sure that even though we are a very different boat and doing very different things we are utilising much that has been learned in that class.”

While buoyancy at the front of the boat is a concern it is also buoyancy in the transom that McDougall is aware of as he designs Moths. Essentially one of the areas McDougall identified as a problem back when he designed the Bladerider – and he notes this is a problem he designed out of the Bladerider too – is the habit of the boat sinking by the transom as it goes through a tack. This is a particular problem, he says, for those who are not great at tacking the boat or that lack some agility. “A lot of the stern shape was about getting the volume up enough that it would make tacking, when you are not amazing, work without too much issue.” Despite focussing on buoyancy in the transom there is also a large cut-away. When asked about the purpose of this McDougall comments it is simply material that is not needed, so he has designed it out to save weight

Aside from the bow and the stern, the main aim with the boat has been to try and keep it clean and simple, with much of the technical work going into getting the Mach 2 onto its foils as early as possible. “I added a lot of features to my software to analyse a lot of different parameters. - what happens when it low rides, what happens when it is lifting off, what happens when the volume distribution changes, what do you need to do to get the foils at the right angle for take-off and how you do all that without having to have an adjustable foil angle?”

Of course until the prototypes are out on the water (they are being built right now in China) and have started to be tested it is hard to comment on the specifics of the build. We do know a few more details about the boat at the moment though. Firstly the hull should come out at under 8.5kg, a fine weight for a modern production Moth. The price will be comparable with the Bladerider, though not their recently announced top-end built-to-order boats. The plan is to sell three boats a week, which is factory capacity with the first set of moulds, which – taking holidays and weekends etc into account – should see the company produce 100 boats in year one. If things are going well at the end of the first year there is the possibility of milling more moulds and upping their production numbers. Mach 2 foils will also be available for purchase by those not buying a whole boat, though the vertical sections will not be the same due to slightly different foil angles and fittings on other hulls.

In many ways it will be hard early on not to view this boat as a Bladerider mk2, but really there is no actual relationship between the two. McDougall designed the Bladerider three years ago and the Mach 2 is likely to be different in a number of areas. The builder is the same as the old Bladeriders, but have a very different relationship with this boat. Payne and McDougall are keen to note the success of the Bladerider and, one suspects, without this company they would not be able to do what they are now doing. As to how many large scale manufacturers the class can support, Payne notes there are two big makers in almost all industries, citing Coke and Pepsi as one example. However, with the Bladerider already the biggest player on the scene, with Fastacraft moving mass production out to Vietnam and several others wanting a slice of the action, the question at this stage seems to be, who will be Pepsi?