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Well, after the Moths someone was bound to give it a go weren't they! I decided I was mug enough! As you can see from the photo we haven't really managed to get the boat fully foil borne (but *lots* of airtime!) I think the problem is the angle of incidence on the T foil of the rudder. I was anxious for the transom not to fly too high - pitchpoling at my target of 30knots would be a bit brutal, but I've gone too far the other way. Probably the solution is to have adjustable incidence on the rudder foil (maybe all of them (eek)), but that's a suprisingly tricky bit of construction. I've a bit put off by thinking about what would happen if the pivot snapped at top speed!
What I've done is extend the boat out to the new max beam with carbon tubes as gunwhales. These run right forward to level with the end of the snout, where another beam ties the two ends together. Thus the boat is exactly rectangular looked at from above! There's no downwards triangulation at the bow at the moment. I'm not sure about this, but the beams are very solidly braced from the shrouds aft where they're integrated into the extended flares, plus the diagonal brace from the foil stiffens it up, and you can't see the beam moving much in normal waves. The foil planform is a modified Bruce Foil type, known as a pro-L foil. There's a small horizontal tip to the foil , not visible in the picture. Personally I think it looks more like a J, than an L, but whatever! The rudder is a standard T foil like just about everyone seems to use.
This puts the foils right at the front of the boat, rather than abeam with the mast like Burvill's Moth. I reckoned that this was going to be essential with the Cherub, which has something like 3 times the pitch moment of the Moth. With the foils level with the snout - so actually forward of the stem! and the T foil on my (fortunately overbuilt) gantry there's nearly fourteen feet between the leading edge of the pro-L foils at the bow and the T foil rudder!
What's it like to sail. Well bl**dy awkward off the beach I tell you! The trick is to rig the boat on its side as per normal, and carry it out far enough so that you can tip it up without bouncing the foils too hard on the sand. At slow speed its still a Bistro, so nice and manageable, although you do feel the extra drag with all the extra bits on the water. As you pick up speed its kind of an odd feeling. The boat feels a little sticky coming up to planing speed, and very much sits with the bow in the water. However then the bow foils kick in quite suddenly, and the bow lifts quickly to well clear of the water, but the transom tends to drag down. You can tune this a certain amount by playing with weight distribution of course, but there is a sort of "trip" point at which the bow goes down very very quickly with predictable bruises. This is rather more pronounced reaching. Its got to be something to do with the incidence angles of the foils I think. Its very quick in bursts, especially when the transom does lift for a bit, but these tends to be followed by a high speed pitchpole! Its also horribly prone to roll ins when one foil or another comes out of the water. I think the photo is just on the way to one of these - if that windward foil comes right out of the water it sort of slides sideways and rolls in on the leeward foil. If the leeward foil comes out you roll straight in to windward. At least I think that's what keeps happening!
There's a LOT of work before its right!
Jim Champ
"Jim, it's sleeting in Cambridge"
"Aw, no worries, its fine here. Go for it."
It wasn't sleeting in Grafham. It was a full scale blizzard with
3 or 4 inch drifts against the clubhouse wall. Goodness only knows
why we didn't all just turn round and go home again. However we
didn't and 6 Cherubs arrived at Grafham, making us the 4th largest
class! We were in the medium fleet along with a sizable youth
squad of 405s, and a few Buzzes, Laser 2K/3K, RS400s etc.
|
Cherub Places |
No | Name | Design | Helm | Crew |
| 1 | 2660 | The Pasta Frenzy | Pasta Frenzy | Dave Roe | Clare Warren |
| 2 | 2662 | Fizzy Shark | Pasta Frenzy | Tim Dean | Una-Mary Colclough |
| 3 | 2654 | Hong Wan Paow | Trifle | Billy Wood | Iain Everett |
| 4 | 2656 | Domino | Platypus | Dominic Barker | Debbie Gibson |
| 5 | 2675 | Fuzzy Logic | Velocipede | Martin Hurst | Jonathon Garfitt |
| 6 | ? | ? | Squid | Mike Rolf | Jim Champ |
Jim Champ
Subscriptions to join/renew the Class Association membership are now due. Remember we won't be able to organise events, go to the sailboat show or anything else without a reasonable membership. Also unless you're an association member you won't get the mag with all the juicy gossip and other stuff that I'm certainly NOT going to print here! Hit this link to get a form you can print out and mail off to Una.
The Cherub PY number for 2001/2 is 1037. In my opinion this is fair for 97 updated boats like Dave and Claire and Tim and Una's Pasta's etc, and perhaps a mite generous for the full on 97 rules boats like Paterson 7 and Slug. For those of you out there with older boats it could be quite tough. There's no doubt in my mind that the latest big rig with the carbon sticks has made a significant difference in Cherub performance in lighter conditions, which is where the gains are coming. It seems, from the info I got at the RYA Portsmouth Yardstick seminar, that there are lots of you out there racing older boats (as I hope to be this season, Foot and Mouth permitting). Print out this Class list of suggested handicaps for older boats and show it to your club handicapper or race committee. The RYA state on the PY Web Pages that in "Development classes where the Portsmouth Number is likely to vary depending on the age and design of the boats. Clubs should consider adjusting the Number where it does not reflect the performance of a particular boat"
The 2001 Calendar is now up. Lots
of dates, well done Una.
We have a provisional date and venue for the 2001 Nationals. Put 19th - 22nd of July in your diaries! Castle Cove in Weymouth. This is a really nice venue* (Yes, I know I always say that, but its true!). Castle Cove is in Portland harbour, so there's a choice of sailing out to big waves in the bay,. or staying in the harbour if its blowing hard. I suppose my most obvious memory of the site is surfing out to a start in Queenie SJB with a local who was steering a Cherub for the first time. We were running down these biggish waves steadily, with the kite well out to windward (before asymmetrics this was) and I commented something about Queenie being a nice stable steady Cherub. I was greeted with this astounded look of disbelief!
*OK, for the cynics, one thing that's wrong with it is that access to the sailing club is down a steep path down the side of a cliff. Not ideal if you're several pints the worse, as of course never ever happens to Cherub Sailors...
There are more details of the 2000/2001 event on the Australian Cherub Website. Including some pictures of the venue.
If you're interested in going to the Intergalactics then please contact Una at Una-Mary@totalcoverage.co.uk . You should reckon on a budget of around £UKP 5,000 for the trip including getting the boat out and back, maybe new sails etc, and to arrive mid December get thoroughly unjetlagged, used to the conditions etc. Getting over there isn't going to be cheap, but no one who has done it has ever regretted it. Start filling that piggy bank up now!
There's now a search facility on this site if you want to look up what's where - or just how many times your boat gets mentioned! (and I note from the report I get that the latter seems to be a common occurence!)
URL for this site - if any of you still have a bookmark to http://www.paw.com/sail/cherub/* then it will have stopped working. The Sailingsource is no longer associated with paw.com, so only links to http://www.sailingsource.com/cherub/* work now.
Several new project pictures. I've dug out some pictures of Craig Simon's (the Australian Class Webmaster's) boat Custard Truck under construction. Quite a few differences in the way they do things to us, which is interesting. I've also dug out some old photos of my wood decked foam sandwich Bistro being built back in 1989/90. All on the building pages.
If you're in the U.K. then unless you've had your head in a
sack for the last 24 hours (or only read the Sun, which comes
to much the same thing), you'll have heard that Ellen
MacArthur finished second in the Vendee
Globe. A tremendous achievement : our congratulations to her.
Its worth noting that she has achieved her ambition by amazing
tenacity and commitment, with, of course, talent as well. It seems
she decided many years ago that she wanted to do a round the World
single-handed boat race, and metaphorically drew a line on a bit
of paper, with "Me Now" at one end, and "Me finishing
a Round the World Race" at the other. Since then she's been
steadily working along the line checking off one point after another.
So what's this to do with Cherubs? Well, the best
reason for sailing a Cherub is to have fun! But there's another
reason too. If the line you drew on your bit of paper when you
were 14 ended up with "World Famous Sailboat Designer"
or "Top Marine Industry Technical Expert" then a season
or three in Cherubs is likely to be a smart point on that line.
Amongst those who've hit that point on the line are Julian Bethwaite
(Current most successful designer of dinghies), Iain Murray (Americas
Cup and Offshore Racer designer), Steve Marten (Americas' Cup
etc Boatbuilder, including Ellen's boat) and of course our own
Tim Dean, who, apart from doing the Rig on Ellen's boat, is, I
believe, currently deciding between a bunch of job offers from
America's Cup and Volvo Ocean Race syndicates.
There are quite a few Cherub videos on Billy Wood's website.
Here are some from the 2000
Nationals
And here
and here
the Island
Barn SC, Molesey, Surrey shoot (two different formats). In
the latter I particularly like the one of Tim and Una teabagging
thoroughly, then picking the boat up to blast away from one of
the Local RS400s. Billy has also assembled some still photos from
that session, hit this
link to see them.