“There has been much interest in our last posting. The terrific photos were taken by Roger Lean-Vercoe of Boat international, and we apologize to Roger for not acknowledging him as the photographer."
There have been many questions about our sailing numbers. In looking through these data, we discovered that our best VMG occurs at around 35 degrees apparent. With full sails set, we may get pretty close to the 30 degrees predicted by the computer/wind tunnel tests. Another interesting aspect, is how the boat performance changes in gusts. Unlike essentially all other sail boats---except, perhaps the AeroRig--- which try to round-up in strong puffs, the Falcon with her DynaRig, simply accelerates, with no effect on the helm and no change in heading. There a number of reasons for this: the center of effort of the rig is relatively low; the keel is relatively long; but most important, there is no change is the shape of the sails. Other rigs tend for the boom to lift and the sail top to twist, which leads to an adverse change in the weather-helm.
We had allocated two days for sailing trials, but we checked off the full list on the first day, so we won’t go out again for sailing until we depart from Istanbul---the yard is grateful for the time to clean up the final details.
Thanks for your interest. We will try to keep you up-to-date. Tom