The big ship

Thedailysail has a dig around Mike Slade's new Farr 100 footer, Leopard 3

Continuing thedailysail's self-appointed remit of making damned sure that we get to sail on the world's fastest boats, so we were privileged to go for a ride on board Mike Slade's impressive new 100ft Farr-designed maxi, Leopar d 3. We wrote about this boat during her build in McConaghys down in Sydney back in January, but the boats has now been eating up the miles around the Solent over the last weeks since being launched in Southampton.

Leopard 3 is the latest in what is becoming one of the world's most impressive classes - the 100ft offshore maxi and for the most part we have the Sydney Hobart to thank for this, with local owners like Neville Crichton ( Alfa Romeo X3), Bob Oatley ( Wild Oats X3) and Grant Warrington ( Skandia) building these boats along with their Kiwi brethren such as Stuart Thwaites (owner of Zana/ Konica Minolta) and Charles Brown/Bill Buckley ( Maximus) and some less happy examples such as the Hugh Welbourne-designed Bols (subject to a lengthy court battle) and the sporadically raced Dubois-designed Genuine Risk.

Of these the Reichel Pugh-designed Alfa Romeo and Wild Oats have grabbed the most headlines winning repeated Sydney-Hobart races, but the new Leopard breaks the mould being the Farr Yacht Design's first offshore maxi since Larry Ellison's Sayonara.

There are several key differences between the new Leopard and the Reichel Pugh offerings. While all the latest boats have been built to the new 100ft maximum length limit that hopefully one day organisers of all the classic 500 milers around the world will adopt, the new Leopard has a Volvo Open 70/Open 60 appendage arrangement with a canting keel and twin daggerboards rather than the CBTF system Reichel Pugh prefer. However like Farr's Volvo 70s, the boat only has a single rudder (saying this the old Brasil 1 has been fitted with twin rudders now...see more here - which may indicate a change in philosophy for their next generation of Volvo 70s...)



In fact Slade admits that the evolution of his Leopards has followed that of Volvo boats - his last, built in 1998 and now sold to a Spanish owner, had a fixed keel and water ballast, while the latest uses similar technology to the Volvo 70s. "Everyone has seen that boat," says Slade of the previous Leopard. "But you can’t just keep bashing around in the same thing and the crew and everyone who is with you, they want you to take the next step and out came Wild Oats, Alfa, Skandia, Maximus, and the swing keel guys following on from Pyewacket and Morning Glory and suddenly there was a new game in town. It becaome quite clear that if you want to be in the top five boat and create a name for yourself so hence a new boat."

The reason Slade wants to make a name for the boat is that another significant difference between Leopard and the Reichel Pughs: while at present she is very much a racing machine, she will also be a highly active charter yacht through Slade's company Ocean Marine. This, says Slade, was the principle reason why they went with Farr rather than the competition in San Diego. "Reichel Pugh were building slim boats and Bruce Farr has always been better at a bigger Volvo 70 type volume boat and it is a 100ft version of that that would give you more charter room. This boat is 25ft wide not 17ft wide and you have all the headroom you want, so it is the big beast in town."

Slade expects to charter Leopard for around 40-50 days this summer in the UK around his race program and more next year, also in Caribbean, and, aside from his own enjoyment, racing the yacht also gives it profile and that helps with the charter business. Leopard has already competed in her first race, the JPMorgan Round the Island race, under the colours of ICAP, but failed to beat her record by just a few minutes thanks to the light conditions.

Otherwise the major events Slade is gunning for are the Rolex Fastnet Race and the Middle Sea Race before the boat is shipped to Australia for the annual run south to Hobart, to, as Slade puts it "see if we can’t stop Bob Oatley getting three in a row". Slade would like to compete in the Hong Kong-Shanghai race too if he can find a backer. Leopard will then return to the UK via the Caribbean. Back in the UK next year Slade expects another 60 days of charter but at the end of 2008 her fate could get quite interesting. Depending upon how she is performing on the race course, the boat will either have the rest of her interior fitted, cabins forward, etc and focus on chartering (boooo!) or Slade is threatening to take the boat round the world non-stop, strangely the first time a monohull has ever done this fully crewed (yaaay!).

"It would be a fun thing to do and it would be the perfect boat to do it in," says Slade of this record. "This is a downwind reaching boat. It is a supersize Volvo 70 design. It has the canards, swing keel, huge rig, etc. This should be very quick around the world. It would be fun to do a fully crewed monohull round the world record in 80 days. I’m looking for some sponsorship for that. Why doesn’t someone come and take me on and we’ll have a race doing it?" Why not indeed? Mari Cha IV is up for sale....

Seeing the new Leopard for the first time in the water and she is longer and more muscular than the old boat with more beam and VO70-style chines and possibly the longest bowsprit of any contemporary yacht. However her overall appearance is uncannily similar to the old boat. Unlike her other maxi-boat competitors Leopard is not only the product of a naval architecture firm, but also a styling house. As with Slade's previous boat, the new Leopard has been fashioned by Ken Freivokh, hence the familar curved cabin top.

"We went back to Ken for this," says Slade. "They have done a great job with the style and the colour scheme. The style of doghouse and the way it looks is very important. You’ve got to go away and say 'that's a beautiful boat'. So we’ve kept the same look - people might even think it is the same boat - until we get the sails up!" A beautiful boat she most certainly is, although sadly not helped by the ICAP sponsorship branding.

Another principle difference between the new and old Leopards is that like the latest generation of maxis she is fully push button. While we disapprove of this for the other pure race boat maxis, on Leopard this is a good idea given her race-charter combined roles.

In Leopard's expansive cockpit there are nine push-button operated hydraulic winches. There are two at the aft end for the runners, a central mainsheet winch, two primaries and four other winches in the cockpit. There is no conventional pit as such due to the layout of the cockpit which has the working area slightly further aft than it would be on a pure race boat to accommodate guests in their own cockpit immediately aft of the main companionway, away from fast moving finger grabbing lines. However the working area of the cockpit is as far forward as it can be with the twin wheels well ahead of the main sheet track.

Aside from her looks, the coolest part about Leopard is in fact her hydraulic package. Wind on some traveller (press button....zzzzzuuuurrrrr.... release button, job done) and all the hard work happens below deck and there is no cascades of ropes spilling everywhere. The best bit by far though are her hydraulically operated twin asymmetric daggerboards. The leeward board must obviously come down, the weather one must come up during tacks normally requiring considerable crew effort. On Leopard, for the first time, this is push button.

The way the boards operate was designed by Nick McGarry's UK-based engineering company C-Designs and is similar to an old fashioned clothes mangle with a set of six hydraulically driven rollers pressing on to the board to roll it up or down. The top of each board drops around 1m below deck level and hoists to around 2m above. The boards have considerable cord - around 1m - their wide and short nature possibly being a limitation of the hydraulic system operating them. However they work a treat, tacking in around 8-10 seconds (the speed is definable, more on this below).



Obviously with around 95 tonnes of load on the boards, they must be handled with care and one imagines that moving them up and down will not be something that happens when the boat is sailing at 30+ knots. We understand the typical maximum speed for operating the boards is around 14 knots.

With the boards and winches, the hydraulics on Leopard is around ten times larger than what might feature on a Volvo Open 70 and is exponentially more complex. Fortunately there are some old hands involved with this. Leopard was built by McConaghys where Neville Crichton's Alfa Romeos and Bob Oatley's more recent Wild Oats were also constructed. McConaghys now have suppliers with considerable experience in hydraulic systems and the way they operate, including Central Coast Hydraulics where Greg Waters designs and builds all the hydraulic systems, the rams, the manifolds, etc and OElectric where Guy Oliver and his team design the control system and anything electrical on board. Waters, readers may remember kind enough to give us a video guided tour to movistar's hydraulic set-up during the Volvo Ocean Race (see this here) and he has since been working on Cup boats - and, as he says, all the technology from these has filtered down to Leopard.

The chart table on Leopard is aft beneath a small hatchway under the main sheet winch and forward of this is a large box containing the 'brains' of the boat known as the PLC Waters developed. When the lid comes off 'the big bugger' we are presented with a 'Las Vegas' of flashing hard drive lights, the four processors, two wireless networks and more comms ports than you could shake a stick at. Basically the controls for anything electrical on board passes through here, it is all programable and most impressively all controllable by remote by modem from Olectrics base back in Sydney.


The PLC

So can Mike Slade gybe Leopard from the comfort of his plush London office, much as Netscape boss Jim Clark could with his superyacht Hyperion? We put this to Guy Oliver. "Theoretically he could! On Wild Oats and Alfa we can steer those as well! But there is no forward steering on this…" Mike Slade and his skipper Chris Sherlock will no doubt be pleased to hear this.

To give some idea of the flexibility of the OLectrics/Central Coast system, the winches are push button as we have mentioned. Typically with coffee grinder powered winches, to change gear one stamps on a button on the deck. With this they have come up with a gearing mechanism for the winches which is not only automatic (as it is on Alfa and Oats), as a car gearbox might be, but it is also fully programable so that the crew can decide under what load each winch will drop a cog and can even program line speeds into individual winches. One could also set up most of the necessary operations for the boat to 'auto tack', easing the main sheet, dropping the traveller, operating the daggerboards, canting the keel, etc plus their limits (such as how far the keel cants depending upon whether the boat is racing or chartering) through the PLC via OLectrics smart touch screen control panels down at the chart table or the impressive 'dashboard' in front of each steering wheel.



While Wild Oats and Alfa Romeo have this kind of functionality on Leopard it has been taken a step further. This is partly due to Leopard being a more complex boat due to her requiring some creature comforts in charter mode and therefore needing to be Lloyds and Marine Coastguard Agency (MCA) approved, and hence requiring more back-up systems. Thus all the lighting systems, tank levels are all monitored via this system, the engine can be operated from here including the drop down leg for the propeller being raised or lowered, along with the three power sources - the main engine, auxiluary 'donkey' engine and the DC pack (batteries).

One benefit of going canting keel rather than water ballast (although the new Leopard does feature water ballast trim tanks in her stern) is that it frees up more space in the accommodation. The canting keel mechanism is hidden beneath the floor in main saloon area.

While on Mari Cha IV for example there is one humungous ram to cant the keel, on this there are two, but unlike the Volvo 70s where each ram must individually be capable of canting the keel to the maximum 40° of cant, on Leopard it requires two. Keel dead central can be held stably with one ram, as can smaller canting angles. The canting keel is otherwise similar to the Volvo-set up even with the pivot point for the pin recessed within the boat. There is a Y-shaped top to the foil, the two ears providing the attachment point for the two rams. The rams are made out of stainless steel and are each rated at 80 tonnes, have a bore of 250mm and a throw of 900mm. Obviously the complex equation here is working out the optimum lever arm here - the more foil protruding upwards from the keel pin, the less force required to move it, but the longer the required throw of the rams. On Leopard the distance between the pin and the top of the foil is around 700mm.

"You can cant the keel in 12 seconds upwards," Waters tells us. "We have yet to decide what’s the happy speed for this boat. Oats and Alfa are around 14 seconds. They can cant faster if they want, but they choose not too. With this boat I’m sure it will be something similar. At the moment there is a lot of learning to do."

As they found on the Volvo boats, where many were trying to cant the keel from their auxilary engines (the ABN AMRO boat always used their main engine) the speed of keel canting is dependent upon the power source. As Waters puts it: "The keel is canted with the main engine. It can be off the auxiliary engine at a slower speed. It can be done with the DC electric at a very slow speed. Or you can use the manual pump..."
Obviously the structure around the keel area is enormous. While McConaghys used carbon/Nomex throughout the boat, including bulkheads but with the exception of carbon/Corecell in the slamming areas forward, around the keel structure as well as for the stringers and 'planks' in the deck, solid laminate carbon was used, up to around 60mm in the keel bulkheads. The Reichel Pugh boats tend to be SP engineered, while Farr carry out their engineering in house under the beady eye of Russell Bowler. Unlike the Volvo boats where the bearing for the keel pin was mounted directly into bearings in the surrounding composite structure, on Leopard the pin hooks in to two giant stainless steel bearing plates attached to the bulkheads for added security.

Overall Leopard feels big in comparison to the Reichel-Pughs, thanks to her beam. However as a result and due to her fit-out she is certainly heavier - around 36.5 tonnes to Alfa Romeo/ Wild Oats' 29. She has more horsepower aloft to make up for this, but as a result we can expect to see the Reichel Pughs being the weapons in the light while Leopard will probably come into her own in higher wind speeds.

"There is meant to be a 7-8 crossover point above which we’ll be faster. We’ll have to wait and see," says Slade. "I suspect that the crossover will be a bit higher. If it is light airs we’ll suffer because we are a bigger heavier boat."

Fortunately aloft there is a very impressive sail wardrobe that has been co-ordinated by Kevin George of North UK but with design input from the likes of BMW Oracle's JB Braun and Steve Calder who focussed on the upwind inventory and Mike Sanderson who helped with the reaching sails and various other notables.

"There is a lot of carry over from the Volvo and boats like Wild Oats and Alfa Romeo. So we utilised the strength of the North Group," North UK MD John Welch told us. At present the inventory comprises 12 sails: mainsail, masthead genoa, J2, J4, J5, storm jib, A1, A2, A4, A5, A7 and an R2, trysail and genoa staysail. All are carbon/Kevlar 3DL while the main, J4 and J5 are taffeta covered for extra protection. At present this is an all-purpose inventory but there is talk of building an inshore mainsail which will be carbon 3DL.

On board Leopard for the races will be enough rock stars breaking sweat with all that button pushing, to ensure that the very best will be squeezed out of her. The line-up when we went out included Tim Powell behind the wheel, Adrian Stead calling tactics, Jules Salter navigating, wiry veteran Paul Standbridge running the front of boat, Andy Hemmings trimming and the likes of Justin Slattery, Guy Salter and Jason Carrington working the pointy end. "I’m delighted that all these guys have come back. We’ve all sailed together in the past."

So how will Leopard stack up against the Reichel Pugh competition? We'll find out in early August in the Rolex Fastnet Race

There's a few more photos on the following pages...

See the video from on board Leopard here