It doesn't have to be a rich man's sport

We speak to Ian Jenkins and Damian Smith about C-Class catamaran campaigning on a shoestring

While back in the mid-1990s Steve Clark spent US$500,000 in total to win the Little America's Cup back from Lindsay Cunningham's Australian team, his Cogito campaign harnessing all the facets of a big America's Cup campaign, there is a group of sailors currently competing at the C-Class Catamaran Championship in Bristol, RI who don't see it as having to be that expensive.

The Australian Catamaran Challenge from Perth, now renamed Team Ronstan ("because they gave us some stickers") comprises a group of fantastic characters from team head and financier, Ian Jenkins, a man who looks like he has just walked off the set of ER and in reality is an intensive care specialist and anaesthetist, to the team's designer Damien Smith, cunningly combining the present event in Bristol with his honeymoon, and their young blade drivers Gavin Colby and Darren Smith, both leading lights of the Hobie 16 class.



The team came into being following what Jenkins describes as a "20 year hiatus". In his native New Zealand while at university in 1978 he bought a pair of half finished C-Class catamaran hulls built in cold moulded plywood, finished them off and took them sailing in the Hauraki Gulf. "We hooned around in that until we hit something offshore and it sank," he recalls.

Moving to Perth shortly before the America's Cup was staged off nearby Fremantle and "getting stuck there", Jenkins sailed and raced a number of boats before getting fired up at the end of 2000 to launch his own C-Class challenge. At this time Cogito had won the Little America's Cup off Lindsay Cunningham's team from Melbourne and the first stop was a trip across Australia to see the Australian C-Class and speed sailing legend.

"We looked at The Edge III and Edge IV," recalls Jenkins. "They very kindly lent us the moulds for Edge III but were not willing to loan us or give us a wing as there was no point: Lindsay Cunningham was the only person who understood how they worked and even then it was a struggle. They said you’ll just end up with kilometres of wire ended up around your neck and ankles..."

If the single-slotted three element wing on Cogito is considered complex, the Edge wings were even more so - with a double slot and miles of internal control lines, a package many believe has the most 'thrust' of all the C-Class wings ever constructed.

With the moulds of The Edge III hulls the team set about building a C-Class catamaran with a conventional softsail rig. In retrospect Jenkins says this wasn't useful and if he had his time again he wouldn't have built a soft-sail boat.

Designer Damien Smith disagrees: "It was a good team building exercise and it also gave us a heads up on the loads on these boats, because they are just huge. If you aren’t cognisant of just how powerful these things are you can just produce something which is too light - said the bloke who designed something which broke last week..."

The power generated by C-Class rigs is huge relative to their size and, following the strict saving weight regime Cogito was built to, the bar has been raised to a very high level when it comes to power to weight ratio. "If you have a Formula 40 you just have big fittings that don’t break," says Jenkins. "If you look at Cogito there is nothing big on it. Every component is down to the bear minimum and that is the boat to beat."

As initial tests were being carried out on their softsail C-Class cat, so Smith and his team were getting on with designing, engineering and finally building the wing for their new boat.

To start proceedings Smith carried out an in-depth analysis of previous C-Class rigs, their pros and cons of each and why in several cases they had broken. After considering the options, inspiration came to him in a dream. "I literally woke up, bolt upright in the middle of the night, scrabbled for a pen and paper, sketched out what we were going to build and went back to bed and there is was in the morning. From then on it was a case of analysis and doing the detail work."

The inspiration for Team Ronstan's unique rig, says Smith, came from hatch cover-less container ships. "They have the same problem in that they are a shell and so they have a lot of problems with torsion and racking. I originally had an idea like what Invictus is trying to do with their wing twist, with a ladder frame on the back controlled with strings. But I did the sums on it and came to the conclusion that that wasn’t going to work as there would be too much stretch in the strings."

While their rig is a single slot type like those on Cogito and Patient Lady VI, the front element is unique in being a 'monocoque' construction with an internal frame to prevent it buckling, but with the loads taken in the carbon/Kevlar/glass/Nomex shell.



To keep up with Cogito's technology it would be necessary for this front element to twist. They achieved this through intricate engineering and the laminate spec of this spar but Smith came up a more ingenious method too. The trailing edge of this front element isn't joined and when the wind pipes up the two sides of the element twist relative to one another - Ian Jenkins demonstrates by folding a piece of paper into a wing shape and moving the two side of the trailing edge up and down.

On the boat the crew are able to adjust the twist in this front element by controlling the amount the two trailing edge of the front element move up and down relative to one another.

"It’s really hi-tech," says Smith wryly of their twist control mechanism. "We tie it together with a bit of string." In fact the system is slightly more complicated as the movement up and down between the two trailing edges is only about an inch, so the team came up with a way of effectively lacing the two trailing edges together so that the twist control line amplified this movement. "The cable goes up and comes back and you end up with purchase and it keeps the string length short to minimise stretch," says Smith.

Aft of this front element the Australian wing bears some similarity to those on the American boats with a flap on the trailing edge of the leading element to dictate the size of the slot and a third element at the back. However there are a few significant differences.

The aft element is smaller than that of Cogito and is attached to the aft end of the front element rather than half way down it as Cogito's aft element is. This creates a smaller lever arm between the front and back elements.

Rather than have a centre aerofoil element on the back of the forward element to create the slot in the rig as Cogito has, Team Ronstan simply has four flaps, made of packing cardboard, their degree of movement restricted by yet more string. "It's ugly, but really simple," says Smith. "A bit like Barbara Cartland," adds Jenkins. They also reckon that their system is aerodynamically cleaner than the set-up on Cogito.

An unusual feature Team Ronstan's crew have been getting to grips with is that the controls work in the opposite way to those on conventional boats. "They have been taught since they were five years old that when the wind gets up you pull everything on, whereas with this if the wind get up you let everything off," explains Smith. "If you let off all the controls it puts max twist in the rig and flattens the top off. And to achieve those things on a normal boat you crank the vang and you pull the Cunningham down. So the controls are the equivalent of a Laser. You’ve got the equivalent of an outhang, and a vang and a Cunningham. The difference is that they work backwards."

Once you have got the hang of this sailing the boat in a moderate breeze is not hard - just scarily quick.

While a lot of the ideas that have gone into the Team Ronstan rig are great, there have been some major flaws. In order to get the front element to be light and allowing it to twist correctly, the construction has been exceptionally light and the thin layer of fibres covering the rig have been found to be porous. On the first day of racing in torrential rain, onlookers were amused to see their front element turn from Kevlar biege to a more cigar coloured dark brown as the Nomex core began to absorb water.

Aside from this Smith says the biggest problems have been under-estimating the loads involved and quality control during building.

"The shock loads are the key," says Smith. "We’ve had it flying a hull and the skin seems to hang together quite well. The last prang we had was because all the twist control fittings and the little reinforcement plates tore out of the back of the wing. It is very hard to model and until you break a couple you don't know how strong to make them."

Despite the breakages the monocoque construction has come to the rescue and Smith believes that compared to the construction of the American wings is more tolerant to shock loads which get distributed throughout the element. "If you have a frame thing, with lots of little tubes in it, one little tube pops and the whole thing comes down like a house of cards," he says. "There have been a couple of notable failures where that’s happened." Thanks to the monocoque construction if it does break, the damage tends to remain localised and it is relatively easy to fix by cutting out a whole and laminating a new piece in its place.

In terms of the loads there are a few issues with the platform as well. Since wing rigs have come along mast sheet loads have dramatically reduced. While the massive aft beam/track arrangements found on Tornados and the even bigger ones on old softsail C-Class cats where the mainsheet pulls down on the luff, cranking the mast back and pulling the bows together requiring often a 12:1 purchase for the main sheet, on solid wing cats the main sheet loads are so small that the bottom block can simply be fixed to the trampoline.

However due to the loads on the centre beam and the wide overall beam of the catamaran the platforms now suffer more from torsional loads. But the potential for carnage is much worse if the rig is accidentally gybed due to the high internal loadings within the wing. "The potential to crash gybe and destroying the gizzards of your wing are quite realistic and quite a serious issue," continues Smith. "A big thing is managing the internal loads within the wing. If you can do that you have won half the battle."



Team Ronstan 's rig turned cigar brown on the first day of racing

While the British Invictus Challenge team had no time to sail their boat prior to the C-Class Catamaran Championship, Team Ronstan have been sailing theirs since March, initially on the Edge III platform and then on their new platform.

"It was quite scary, because on the second sail we took out two of the four beam mounting points which broke when this 45ft power boat came by pulling up about 4-5ft of wake and we managed to get the boat perched on opposite corners," says Smith. "We almost lost the whole wing at that point. Hence why we have a retro-looking couple of hundred screws holding the beams on."

Smith firmly believes in a belt and braces approach to the C-Class campaign, which is lucky as the team are working on a very tight budget. "You can spend a lot of time producing something really pretty, really gorgeous but utterly useless. And our gear looks a bit agricultural but after seeing Lindsay Cunningham’s stuff you realise that the aim of the exercise is to get a boat sailing not to produce a piece of furniture. It just takes too long and our resources are really limited and you’ve got to use them really well."

In contrast Cogito is both gorgeous and mightily effective on the race course. Smith points out though that including Duncan MacLane's involved with all six of the Patient Lady Little America's Cup campaigns, Cogito represented their seventh go at a winning C-Class catamaran and Steve Clark due to his influential position as head of Vanguard, the leading dinghy builder in the US, has had access to many friends including some of the top individuals in the business from both Goetz Marine Technology and Hall Spars.

"In Perth, Western Australia it is difficult to find skilled experienced and formally trained composites people - there aren’t any basically," says Jenkins. "We’ve now found one person who is experienced, but it is not the same as you find around here."

However Smith repeats what Steve Clark has said - since they built Cogito in the mid-1990s technology has come on leaps and bounds from computer programs able to carry out structural analysis and CFD not to mention better, easier techniques for working with carbon fibre and composite laminates.

The result is that Ian Jenkins says that the total budget for Team Ronstan is around £78,000 including everything - building two boats and getting the race boat and the personnel half way around the world to Bristol, Rhode Island.

He adds that from what they learned from it, he wouldn't have bothered building the softsail boat and would thus have saved £12,000. He also thinks that because those with experience of building C-Class catamarans around the world can be counted on one hand "you might as well do it yourself with experienced volunteers as the British have done, because you won’t find people who can do quicker or better, because they don’t have experience. And a lot of the simple composite stuff isn’t rocket science once you’ve learned how to vacuum bag and taking foam and carbon to a laser cutter is not hard."

Although he has not firmly committed to carrying on his C-Class team just yet, Ian Jenkins is clearly enthusiastic about the campaign and is seriously considering it, particularly at the next International C-Class Catamaran Championship is scheduled to take place in his own backyard - on the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia early in 2007.

Next time round they will take more care with the quality control - part of their present wing wasn't built to the drawings and was underbuilt.

They also hope that next time around they will have more opportunity to raise sponsorship. "We’ve had trouble with the whole Trustees thing," says Smith, referring to the split with the Seacliff Yacht Club when they turned the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy into an event for Formula 18HTs. "Because every time you go and speak to a sponsor the first thing they do is go and type into the net, 'Little America’s Cup' and there’s all this Little America’s Cup pollution about these stupid plastic boats [the F18HTs]. Now we have got something, we have got keen people and we have shown it is possible so we can go to sponsors and we have got something to sell. Whereas previously with the other mob, Seacliff, they destroyed our ability to sell it to sponsors. We had no clear title to the event. We had them telling the world that the C-Classes were gone, it’s now in F18HTs. To be frank I would be happy if the Trustees were dealt out of it altogether. I don’t think they have the nouse to run it."

While £75,000 seems like a lot of money to be playing with 25ft catamarans, these boats have the most advanced rigs of any sailboat and while this might not appeal to weekend warriors, they are 'projects' par excellence and perfect for those with a technical bent.

"We want to turn this into the sort of event where people can come and play with the technology," concludes Smith. "The cost shouldn’t put it out of the league of enthusiastic amateurs, people who perhaps in their professional lives deal with technology."

More photos on the following pages...