Does Weight Matter?
I sail a silver boat, 28 years old and maybe a little past her prime, but, she sails well, does OK in club events and I love her, so, well how do I go faster. On a beat, she is superb, on a reach equal to the opens but on a run, that’s where they get me.
I have gone down the usual route, learned to sail, tuning the rig, revelations about sail control and settings, polishing the hull and foils, making good tactical decisions (Usually!) so where next. It’s got to be the weight of the boat, this winter I noticed that the floor decks were frozen! It took almost a month for them to warm up in a cold garage, so there must be water in there = excess weight.
The boat is an Amos so if you know the type then you may remember that she has floor tanks in the crew area with drain bungs on the back of them. These were long gone and instead the tanks were full of foam, so this must be waterlogged. I set too with some keyhole surgery, a homemade ‘chopper’ for the drill and a jet wash.
The statistics are interesting, initial chopped foam weighed 8KG, more chopping took out another 5kg then a further 2kg, more came out with the jet wash but I didn’t weigh this, estimated another couple of kilos. So at least 15kg of wet soggy foam came out of the floor. She is an old boat and a bit weak in places so I re filled the tanks with about 3kg of expanding foam.
So this got me thinking and I started weighing everything with the idea of reducing as much weight as possible, see table below; (The ? marks are estimates)
……………………………………………….Was Now
Wet foam ………………………………15kg 3kg Dry foam
Wooden/ epoxy Rudder ………..4.82kg 3kg? Epoxy foam rudder
Wooden floor panel………………..2.25kg 1kg? Resin and foam panel
Wooden Tiller…………………………1.3 kg 0.6?kg Carbon Tiller
Metal tiller extension……………..0.21kg 0.05?kg Carbon extension
Spinnaker pole……………………….0.90kg 0.30?kg Carbon pole
Wire Kicker…………………………….0.12kg 0.02kg Dynema kicker
Old total…………………………………24.6kg 7.97 New total
So potentially I can save around 16.63kg obviously at a price of course so back to the original question ‘Does weight matter?’
Well so far all I have done is take out the wet foam, I raced on Sunday and actually it seemed to be much better on the runs, outpacing the next FF though I need more sailing to say for sure.
Whether the cost would justify the extra 4.5kg left to come out I doubt it – but I did say that I love her!!!!
Malcolm Hall