Twister_Ken
Well-known member
Seems to be Spirit of Scott Bader, which takes out wheelchair-bound people for sailing experience. Great shame - hope they can get it back together.
Orion looks like a Firebird 26
Anyone knowing anything about cats know that these were one of the best designed micromultihulls built and were the tiny sister to the Freebird 50. Very light & reportedly capable of over 25 knots.
Contrary to many other cat/multi designs the bows are designed to lift when planing downwind which can assist enormously in preventing digging a hull in the water and pitchpoling.
As Flaming states the crew also probably knew exactly how to handle the situations presented on Saturday - I wonder how many other of the multihulls sailers who had serious problems had been in seas such as that before & probably in many cases they had little room to manoevre to prevent calamity?
The cat in the pic above was on a close reach, almost close hauled. It started flying a hull, then gradually started heeling further and further, before slowly going right over.
So is flying a hull considered dangerous? I ask because last summer I played with a friends Tri and we'd get one out of the water regularly, using uplift under the tramp to help it out.
So is flying a hull considered dangerous? I ask because last summer I played with a friends Tri and we'd get one out of the water regularly, using uplift under the tramp to help it out.
We were constantly playing the sheet and helm though, so when it did start to go too high (and speed dropped off) we dumped the main a bit.
I got 19kn out of it, and my record has yet to be beaten by the owner or any of his other friends.
Big difference between a cat and a tri. There is also a big difference between a racing cat withan experienced racing crew sailing with a hull kissing the water, and trying to do the samething with a cruising cat with inexperienced crew. If you do this in a racing cat, you will go fast, and occassionally capsize. On a cruising cat it is really bad seamanship as the maximum righting moment for a cat is when the boat is upright. The more you lift a hull, the less stability you have.
To do this if you have disabled people onboard means that the sanity of the skipper should be in question.
Easy to say from the comfort of my office, but it seems they didn't dump the main... would that have made a difference
I take it there were no people in wheelchairs on the cat' at the time ?
Some major questions to be asked here, and I do NOT mean blame on anyone's part ( though I can't help thinking a few things ); the whole idea of taking wheelchair users in this or any other type of sailing yacht would seem pretty well torpedoed to me, at least for the moment - insurers will probably run & hide for a start...
No, for two reasons: firstly the kite was far bigger so the main would make very little difference. Secondly easing at that point of sailing would bring it up against the shrouds, still full of wind. Notice that the first sign of trouble was burying the bow of the lee float. The safe solution would have been to reduce sail by about 50% but if you're racing....
The trouble with over-pressing a multi is that everything seems fine until you cross that fine line then it all goes very wrong very quickly. You just don't get the warning that you do in a mono.
That's correct, fortunately I understand they got everyone off safely and put ashore in Seaview - there were a lot of spectator RIBs in the area at the time and it was relatively flat water.