Hi Bjerne,

I guess that you are all about to pack up your boats for winter. I hope that you had a good season.

We are just starting now and we won our first IRC race last Saturday by a handy margin. Over the winter I made some big changes to the boat. We moved the forestay forwards by 500mm and put an extra 400mm in the bottom of the mast to raise both the forestay and the boom higher up. That has allowed us to put a non-overlapping jib on which has lowered the rating substantially. The jib area is about 3m² less than the genoa that you use but the advantage is that we can sheet it inside the shrouds for better pointing ability.

The mainsail is slightly smaller than the one that you use particularly in the top width because there is a penalty under IRC if the girths exceed a certain percentage of the foot length. We also have a masthead spinnaker which is about 71m² and a longer pole.

The IRC rating when I bought the boat in January was 0.944 and it now rates 0.928 which represents a rating improvement of nearly one minute per hour. We may suffer a little bit upwind in light airs but I have found that the boat is already quite fast in these conditions anyway and the bigger spinnaker will probably make up for the upwind loss of speed. 

I have attached a couple of photos and will keep you up to date with our progress. 

Regards

David Ellis