Turbo Kingfisher for Dalts' big brother

madforsailing talks to Graham Dalton and designer Merf Owen about their new Open 60

The boat
Until recently Graham Dalton's Around Alone project has been veiled in secrecy, but is already some way down the track. With a sponsor successfully signed up, in July Dalton commissioned the Owen Clarke Design Group (OCDG) to come up with an Open 60, as Merfyn Owen and Alan Clarke were part of the team behind Ellen MacArthur's Kingfisher. Fortunately OCDG already had plans for a new Open 60 on the stocks, which Owen describes as a Turbo version of MacArthur's race winner, quicker on all points of sail.

"When we did Kingfisher we backed it off for the Vendee Globe and we added built-in reliability in various areas of the boat. This is like Kingfisher, but with the Vendee Globe protection stripped off," says Owen. The reasoning behind this is that the Around Alone has stopovers, therefore boats can be pushed harder than they can in the Vendee Globe where reliability counts for so much more. With Kingfisher, Owen says, they took a sound boat and added additional structure in areas such as the rig, the hydraulics and the front of the boat.

If the basis for Dalton's boat was Kingfisher before they customised it for the Vendee, Owen says its design has further benefitted from some more post- Kingfisher R&D, the work OCDG have carried on their Open 50 designs for Viktor Yazykov and Kip Stone and includes some ideas that they were considering, but never used on Kingfisher for reasons of simplicity.

With Dalton's mysterious, but major league sponsor, they have gone for a full-on project with the build in state of the art carbon/Nomex and a hull weight which Owen believes will come out lighter than Kingfisher. The boat will have a swing keel, with a revised and presumably lighter canting mechanism. Like his brother, Graham is manic about parring weight from the boat so, for example, there is no cuddy as there is on Kingfisher. "If there is a choice to be made between personal comfort and weight he always prefers to grim it out," says Owen.

At present details of the rig are confidential. In the Open 60 class there is choice aplenty - from a conventionally rigged carbon tube like Kingfisher, to the wingmast and deck spreader configuration of Mike Golding's Team Group 4/ Ecover, to the more modern wingmast without deck spreaders set-up as found on Sodebo and Michel Desjoyeaux's Vendee Globe winner PRB. However Owen is known also to have been looking at a conventional carbon tube with deck spreaders as the wider shroud base helps reduce all important weight aloft.

The build began at Southern Ocean Marine in Tauranga in New Zealand in August and most recently the hull was turned over. Part of the design and build process was building a mock-up of the cockpit.

Launch of the new boat is due for mid-January, and Dalton plans to carry out sea trials in New Zealand and take part in the Round North Island on 24 February. He will then go off to sail his 2,000 mile singlehanded qualifier for Around Alone. This will end in Sydney where he will pick up crew and sail south down south of Tasmania into the Southern Ocean to see how they get on there before returning to Auckland where the boat will be shipped to Europe to arrive mid-June.

Owen says that Dalton is similar to Ellen in many ways. "He's got a good team and he listens. He knows his limitations and he's not saying 'I know everything'." To bring himself up to speed Dalton has employed veteran Australian BOC/Around Alone skipper David Adams, who will be carrying out a similar role to the one Alain Gautier played in the design of Kingfisher. "He'll look at the drawings to make sure we're not bullshitting Graham. He's adding his practical input - a reality check on the design," says Owen.

Another key player in the team will be Mike Quilter, widely regarded as one of the best navigators in the business, but who retired from ocean racing after taking Grant Dalton to victory in The Race. Quilter will be teaching and advising Dalton on weather and tactics during and in the build-up to the race.

Dalton says his only aim at present is Around Alone, but admits he would like to continue. "If we don't get out there and nail the Around Alone, then there perhaps won't be other opportunities. If we are successful in Around Alone then it would be nice to think we could do a Vendee."