When I was 12, I lived at Sand Point on Pittwater, North of Sydney. There, I watched the tuning of the first six-element C-Class Catamaran wings on the beach in front of my house
Two sailing clubs operated from that beach strip: the Palm Beach Sailing Club for monohulls and the Pittwater Catamaran Club for multis.
The Palm Beach Sailing Club for monos and the Pittwater Catamaran Club for multis.
Got to see a lot of cool things. One was tuning up the first six element C-Class Catamaran wing on “my” beach in front of where we were living at the time.
I did a bunch of reading at the library and made a model of a round bilge wingmast catamaran with a soft sail. I knew about the relative angle of incidence between sail and wing from my reading.
One day Lock and John Haines turned up with a part wing masted C-class cat – Helios. They used to test it against an older sloop rigged C called Cheetah.
It was always a crowd draw when Helios rolled up at Sand Point and they commenced the mast raising process – quite an affair. I think she had a 50/50 wing and softsail at that point from memory.
Helios ended up not being fast enough. This was the era of the domination of Miss Nylex – a less sophisticated but lighter wing that was better sorted out.
Miss Nylex, the First full Wingsail C-Class Catamaran
Before taking it down to Melbourne for the trials (below Nylex afloat, Helios on the beach) to select the challenger for the Little America’s cup I built a model. It was pretty cool and my first boat design technically.
And that was the end of that. Nylex was a much better boat.
Complex controls on Helios and a historical summary
Helios is the charioteer that guides the sun across the sky every day. The boat was sponsored by “The Sun” newspaper that had Helios and his chariot in the sky. You can see it was somewhat sensational which I guess meant money for boat sponsorships!
A friend of mine, Graham Murray, got to talk to John Haines decades later. John said when it came round time to take the Helios wingmast apart it was a few days of hard work. It was built much too strong. Which is code for heavy.
Gary Baigent NZ designer, historian, artist and boatbuilder posted an image of Helios sailing with this quote attached;
“Perhaps the most complex wing rig ever built. This new rig for Join Haines Helios was created by Lock Crowther with considerable help from Frank Bethwaite. The three sections of the wing were designed to pivot separately, each with their own series of flaps. There are 8 control lines coming out of each side of the base of the wing. The rig was heavy and did not prove successful. Had there been more time to correct some of the faults the result may have been quite different.”
None of that sullied the idea that I could learn more and more about boat design.
Miss Nylex original technical paper
Here is the technical paper on Miss Nylex and her wingmast.
Miss Nylex full wingmast catamaran Paper full
Anchor text: Multihulls for the rest of us
