Moth update

Simon Payne and National Champion Mike Cooke share their views from the sharp end of foiling

Foiling Moth sailing continues to go from strength to strength with new models coming out, refinements in gear and techniques and ever more top notch dinghy sailors joining the elite flying club. The Worlds this year at the magnificent Cascade Locks on the Gorge in Oregon, featured present day Olympic sailors such as Nathan Outteridge and Brad Funk, and numerous ex-Olympic and America’s Cup sailors such as Dalton Bergan, Charlie McKee, Kevin Hall, Morgan Larson, etc. Moths are now jockeying with A-Class cats as the world’s fastest singlehanded dinghy, regularly beating them around the race track down under. We reckon it is probably remains the world’s fastest growing dinghy class.

At present the dominant foiling Moth is the Mach 2. This has taken over from the Bladerider as the grand prix boat of the moment. Bladerider International Chairman Mike McAuley told thedailysail that his company has modified their plans and are only now manufacturing RXs, their “cost effective carbon boat” (as opposed to the top of the range VRX). “We are currently arranging with well established boat builders to Europe and US to build hulls. We will still be manufacturing parts (hydrofoils, centreboards, etc..) in China/Taiwan. Hulls will still be manufactured in Taiwan, but only to supply the Asia/Pacific region. Assembly will occur at the boat builders, who will supply the market directly. We will be announcing the successful boat builders in a few weeks.” McAuley adds that, in due course, they may well license other manufacturers to build the VRXs and entry level FXs.

Rohan Veal, for so long the leading light and pioneer in Moth foiling is also no longer with Bladerider and has announcement his retirement from Moth sailing (although he has done this previously and returned…)

Meanwhile production total of the McConaghy-built Mach 2 is now up into the high 60s with seven of these residing at Hayling Island Sailing Club, from where importer and past Moth World Champion, Simon Payne sails.

The Brit fleet at present includes much talent with Payne at the top of the pile, being the highest UK finisher at both the Europeans (where he was second behind Switzerland’s Arnaud Psarofaghis) and the Worlds, where he ended up fifth. There are old hands like Mike Lennon, Adam May and Rod Harris while young Mike Cooke is doing well, winning this year’s UK Nationals and finishing fifth at the Europeans, on board his new Ninja design. A new addition to the UK fleet is well known 14 sailor, James Fawcett. With a winter training plan in place, Payne is anticipating more depth in the fleet come the next World Championship, to be held in Dubai in the spring.

At present many of the biggest guns in the class, including current World Champion Bora Gulari, are from the US, while in Australia, Nathan Outerridge has been enticing others within their Olympic sailing squad to come play, including Laser ace Tom Slingsby and Beijing 470 gold medallist Malcolm Page’s new helm, Matt Belcher. We suspect we know the nationality of the 2010 Moth World Champion, which will be good as not so long ago it was an Australian, Rohan Veal, who put Moth foiling on the international radar. In comparison Team GBR Olympic sailors have been slower to get into the Moth, although this may be due to time constraints.

As mentioned the McConaghy-built Mach 2 is the competitive foiling Moth of the moment and this has already seen some development. The boats are now over their early wand axle issue and the wave-sensing wand mounted on the bow, used to drive the flap on the main hull, as an automatic ride-height adjuster, has changed. “We used to have the equivalent of a knitting needle that used to cut through the sea. What we are finding now is that if a paddle planes along the water it gives better response and less drag,” explains Simon Payne. “So particularly when you are diving into a wave it has the surface area to push the wand back whereas previously the flap used to drive the wand. Now we don’t have that issue.”



Perhaps the most significant development this year has been the manual ride height adjuster on the main foil, Bora Gulari used to win this year’s Worlds. While on most foiling Moths the mechanism, mentioned above, is automatic, Gulari was also able to adjust it manually by putting an extra controller into the system at the top of the daggerboard.

“Bora had great downwind speed largely because of his expertise in controlling his ride height and was able to push, push, push quite a lot harder than most downwind by adjusting his ride height so the boat was lower,” explains Payne. “He was simply dropping the boat to go fast downwind and then pulling it on upwind, whereas traditionally we’ve had a set-it-and-forget-it style of ride height. [Downwind] it means you can heat it up really hard and go very fast without fear of popping out and take the apparent down with you.”



Payne also observes that there are more sailmakers getting into the class, although Bori Gulari uses KA, as he does. “The profiles are different, the cloth is different, the size is different. I see the North is slightly fuller which helps in the lighter winds. It is quite hard to get rid of that power, so it is not a great heavy wind sail, but that is just my person take on it.” North sails were used by, among others, European champion Arnaud Psarofaghis and by Rohan Veal at the Worlds.

There is also a choice in masts. Mach 2s come with their own McConaghy manufactured masts, but Bora Gulari was using a CST, no doubt much to the delight of the World Championship sponsor. Southern Spars also make Moth masts and earlier this year Rohan Veal was working on a North Sail/Southern Spar combination.

For some time we have questioned why Moth sailors haven’t started matching foil and rig sizes to their weight, but it has become apparent this year that this doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue as previously thought. For example, at the Australian nationals at the beginning of the year, Nathan Outteridge won at 73kg, Simon Payne who came second weighed in at the high 60s, and third-placed David Lister was a hefty 87kg. More important than the foils, Rohan Veal advises, is that the mast/sail package suits a Moth sailor’s weight.

“If you increase the foil size you increase the drag,” says Veal. “We believe that there is an optimal area that the front and rear foil should be. It is hard to say - all we know is that they work really well. In the past we looked at different areas, but everyone is agreeing that the front foil needs to be a certain span, and the rear to be a certain span. But the trend may be for the front foil to increase in its span and the rear to get shorter more like an aeroplane, as long as the pitching moment is controllable and the lift is balanced. Maybe the centreboard will come aft to balance the load more. So there are all these theories, but no one knows what is going on.” See Mike Cooke’s comments later on in this article.

Payne gives his take on what Moth sailors are looking at: “I think there is great debate on the set up right now, what your angle of attack should be, what your mast rake should be and what the gear ratio should be on the wand.”

Anyway, the upshot seems to be that you don’t have to have a spindly Laser-sailor type to be competitive in Moths.

When it comes to technique, mastering foiling gybes has now been ticked off for the top sailors who are now still developing the foiling tack. In our interview recently with Nathan Outteridge he spoke about the amount of time he had put into perfecting these

“I think more and more people are getting familiar with the foiling tack even if the hull just kisses. Undoubtedly if you project forwards that’s where we’ll be,” says Payne, adding that more people tend to ‘gack’ – gybe tack – when it is light and conditions are marginal for foiling. “But it does go wrong. Sometimes you can disappear out of the boat! If you are winning the race you probably wouldn’t want to try one on the layline with 10 boats queued up behind you. But sometimes if you just do it well it tends to work. Often you are left wondering why it worked, but it does! I don’t share Nathan’s view that they are super critical. I err more towards Bora’s definition of a foiling tack: provided the foils are loaded and lifting, it doesn’t matter if the hull kisses slightly.”

So where is it all going? If John Ilett’s Fastacraft built Prowlers were the boat of the moment at the genesis of Moth foiling, followed by the Bladerider and now the Mach 2, it suggests that foiling Moths have a competitive life cycle of about two years.

“If I close my eyes and I think what the class might be like in another 10 years - we probably won’t be sailing these boats and it’ll move on,” says Payne. “So the challenge for any builder is to produce well what you are already building, but to determine well what the future might be. Mach 2s are the boat of the moment, but they will have their lifespan and it is up to us, if we want to stay in the game, to design the next one.”

For example it seems possible third party manufacturers will get into making custom foils, so that just as there are alternatives when it comes to masts and sails, there will be some foils choices. The issue with this is that Moth foils require precision building and are the most expensive parts of the boat.

While the Mach 2 is the present boat of choice and Bladerider currently out of the grand prix end of the market, there are also some smaller manufacturers offering competitive alternatives. From New Zealand, there is the Assassin, developed by ex-Martin Marine/McConaghy boat builder, Darren Schofield. This comes in two flavours – the full on GRS racing version and the standard SS featuring a more robust hull laminate. Assassin recently appointed a continental Europe and Scandinavia agent, Felix Schulte, based in Germany.

In the UK foiler Moth production is now limited to Mike Cooke at Aardvark Technologies, who’s new Kevin Ellway-designed Ninja debuted at the RYA Dinghy Show, before going on to win this year’s Nationals as well as several open meeting in the UK.

The boat has a very different hull shape to the existing foilers, as Cooke explains: “All of the hull shape up until now have been long and slab-sided things with very little rocker. We started almost from scratch and we have a lot of rocker and very rounded sections with quite a lot of volume in the back with the aim to get foiling as fast as possible. And it seems to do that.”

This early take off speed is a function of the hull shape but Cooke puts it primarily down to the ratio between the foils – having a smaller lifting foil on the rudder and a bigger main foil. “In total area it is similar to the other guys, but what it has done is given us an earlier take off speed. It has improved control to some degree as well. I believe it is the earliest flyer of all the current designs, including the Prowler. Simon [Payne] was pretty much untouchable when he had his Prowler. No one could get near him in the light stuff. It is hard to put a number on it. It is fractions of a knot in terms of boat speed, but it seems to be quite noticeable. If you can get foiling before the other guys in those marginal ones you end up with massive distances on people. There was one race at the Inlands where I beat the entire fleet and lapped almost up to third place in marginal conditions.”

Aardvark make their own masts, something that Cooke’s father Terry, a well known dinghy and offshore sailor, has been developing. They have a tie up with Hyde Sails with Mike Lennon using their spar, while they use Hyde sails.

Including Cooke’s own boat, five Ninjas now exist and a new tweaked Ninja is due for 2010. The hull shape of this is the same, but it has fractionally less freeboard and a new bow design to make it look a bit prettier, says Cooke.

All up a Ninja is £9,000 so substantially cheaper than a Mach 2 but a little more expensive than an Assassin (around 8,900 Euros for the racing version), although probably much the same or even less, once the Assassin has been imported.

A significant coup for Cooke is that well respected Moth sailor and former National Champion, Jason Belben has purchased a Ninja which Cooke is at present finishing off.

Payne sums up: “We have a great class where the DNA of the class, that was started all those years ago, is still there. And people like Nathan [Outteridge] and Brad Funk and some of the other Olympic guys who turned up at the Worlds, I believe enjoy the class because of the culture as much as the racing. These guys race top flight all their lives, it is what they do as a job. We have jury people ringing us up all the time saying ‘can we come to do the Worlds?’ I started to wonder why this was. I think it is something to do with us usually going to nice events, generally we have great sponsorship at the Worlds and we never have any protests. We still have that pioneering, early flight spirit, which you can see at every event. We must be one of the biggest growth classes in the world at the moment.”

So roll on the next World Championship in Dubai over 5-14 March.

More photos on the following pages...