You can follow his progress as he builds this exciting new design on his web site through the following links:

http://buildboats.com/solo16/Solo16.html

http://buildboats.com/solo16/solo16buildlog.html

The Solo16S will provide Tom with a stable, fast sailing platform for spirited daysailing and interesting coastal adventure cruising. You can read more about the design of the boat at this link:

http://www.lunadadesign.com/index.php?s=solo16+s

The latest work on the Gato Especial build in Athens, Greece have just arrived. Alexis and his father have, once again, made significant progress on the completion of their crusing catamaran. It’s important to observe that they have continued their practice of doing excellent work with a creative set of adaptations on how they’d like to use their boat.

A cleverly built space for the porta-potti

Looking down into galley

Port Holes on port side

Foredeck anchor locker and access hatch

With the main hull now successfully launched and then paddled briefly with his wife and kids, Ben has taken the first important step towards the completion of his XCR.

Sailing and paddling trips await Ben with this boat as it can seemlessly morph from a straight-up decked tripping canoe to a very nice sailing trimaran in minutes.

There are all sorts of photos of Ben’s build progress at his Blog site.  http://www.bensboats.blogspot.com/ 

Take a few moments to scan through his entries and you can see for yourself how easy it is to build an XCR of your own.

First of all… La Trinite is a pretty small and cozy coastal town in Brittany with a beautiful harbor surrounded by seaside shops, restaurants and boating related businesses. Private homes are tucked up into the trees along the shore. The highest elevation in town tops out at 40 feet, or so, above sea level. You’d just never imagine that there is a fairly hefty collection of the most exotic, state of the art sailing machines sitting within the safety of its moorings, but there they are.

As of this writing, the highest of high end fully seaworthy maxi multihulls are represented by the nearly twin trimaran designs from Nigel Irens and Benoit Cabaret in the form of Francis Joyon’s, World Record holding IDEC and Thomas Coville’s Sodeb’O. These two trimarans are nothing short of pure wonderment as they sit quietly on their mooring lines while representing totally coiled power that takes them to frightening speeds when under sail in the hands of a talented and experienced skipper.

They sit about a hundred yards apart in the harbor, staring across the water at one another as if to say, “Yeah, dude, what have you got?” I’ll touch on both these boats in my next post, but there are other distractions for a sailor at La Trinite that should be described before I get carried away with the globe shredding multihulls.

  Monohull sailors will rejoice in the fact that tied up on moorings, just feet away from IDEC were three, big fast ocean racing monohulls being readied. We pulled up to the harbor to get our first view of things. Arrayed before me on moorings and dock were, Safran and Gitana80, both Open 60 designs destined for the Vendee Globe race beginning November 9th… http://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/  and Bostik, a Veolia Oceans One-design at 52′, http://www.soloceans.com/en/veolia-oceans/   slated for the SolOceans, solo round the world competition… Each of these racing boats had crew aboard who were going over last minute prep work for their respective big events.

Prior to flying over to France, I had done some Google Earth work to get a feel for how the whole scene was laid out in La Trinitie and one of the photos you could see showed IDEC, just bobbing along on her lines. While I was not sure that she would be in harbor when I got there, I was seriously hoping that it would be true so I could take in both the big trimarans in one session. But the big bonus of having the mini fleet of 60 footer’s with some fairly active team mebers aboard just put everything onto a new level.

For me, a boat designer who has just begun his budding career, this was a huge opportunity to take a long look at these incredible boats and absorb all the little details up close that you just can’t get from looking at photos, no matter how cool the shots are.

The Safran team was loading a mainsail in to the lazyjack flaking bag on the boom and by the looks of things, it wasn’t anything like an easy job at all. Two guys were standing on the foredeck lifting and shoving while one guy was well out on the boom, swinging around a bit while trying to lift the aft end of the sail bag up so it could slide into place. Apparently, they had some urgency as the very next day, Safran went out in gale force conditions for some last minute testing in full, 30-40 knot winds. A day in that stuff would tell you what is and what is not working and might save you some hassles once the Vendee Globe gets fully underway.

Here’s a collection of monohull images…

Bostik

Gitana 80

Safran 

I’m posting this piece from Nantes, France. I’m enjoying a little time exploring the city while I wait for my return flight to the USA tomorrow. But first, let’s back track a little, so that the whole thing makes sense.

The Delta flight over to Paris took 10 1/2 hours from Salt Lake City, followed by a connecting jump from Paris to Nantes. The passage through the French Customs at Charles deGaulle Airport was as painless as it can get with the agent simply shuffling my passport from one hand to the other and nodding while handing it back.

I soon met my fellow Helly Hansen contest winners, Tim Lund from England and Kjetil Simonsen from Norway, along with Helly sponsored Norwegian extreme skier and all-around outdoor adventurer , Stian Hagen and his fiancé, Andrea Binning, who is also an extreme skier  from Australia. More correctly, Stian and Andrea now live in Chamonix, France and were our terrific hosts for the visit to France and our sailing experience on the Trimaran Sodeb’O.

Andrea

5 minutes into our first meal together, it was obvious that we were going to have a great time during our stay in France as introductory stories and well-told jokes were soon flying around the table. Actually, I could not have asked for a better group of companions for this kind of “out there” experience.

Stian and Tim

 Well, unless you told me I could do the same trip with the Swedish Bikini Team and an unlimited budget…

That night, the jet lag really smacked me down pretty hard in the form of not being able to go to sleep until well after midnight. I would pay for that later the next day when coupled with a dumb choice for a midday meal.

Kjetil

… more in the next posting from France when we go sailing on the Sodeb’O trimaran skippered by Thomas Coville and his ultra-talented crew.

A remarkable,

compact tool for

watersports shooters

In the last post, I indicated that I’d be using the Bonica Snapper dive camera for shooting while on Sodeb’O this coming week. Well, the camera arrived on Friday and I’ve been going through the box and all the stuff that is included in the full kit…. along with the screw-on wide angle lens for the water housing.

Wow!, this is a really remarkable package for the suggested retail price, much less for what it typically goes for after a routine discount at the dive outlets that sell the system. There’s a handheld HD camera with a fold-out screen, a silicone “glove” that fits tightly over the camera along with a snap-on screen cover. The silicone slip cover protects the camera in watery environments such as rain, the kind of spray you’d encounter on a fast moving boat, etc. It is not meant to be a dive housing for taking the camera underwater.

The actual underwater housing is pretty sweet. It’s an injection molded polycarbonate two piece shell with an integrated o-ring in one half of the housing to give it a full waterproof seal against the elements. The housing is held together with three hefty cam clips that provide an equal pressure closure system around the perimeter of the o-ringed seam. The housing is rated to 180 feet underwater, so it will be good for a huge number of dive applications, as well as for whitewater boating, sailing, power boating and surfing/boogie boarding.

If there is time, I’m excited about the potential of getting in the water in La Trinite-sur-Mer and shoot Sodeb’O from a water level perspective. I used to do a lot of split screen effect shots of surfers back in the 80′s with my water housing equipped Nikon stills equipment. This is a technique in which the camera is held right at the surface with the water level in the middle of the focusing screen. It can be tricky to get really good images because you have to account for water clarity, exposure balancing for the two envionments and a well compose and framed image. A really well done image shows what is happening below the surface, as well as what is going on above in the same frame. Of course, you can over do it, like any specialized technique imagery. Too many of the same thing and the effect loses its value as an attention getter.

I’m looking forward to shooting in HD video for this blog as well as Youtube postings and also capture stills from the 5 meg still shooting capability.

I’m going to have to spend a good part of tomorrow getting tight on the camera functions, so they are natural parts of my photography moevments. It’s not an overly complex camera to learn, but this shooting gig is too important to have to fiddle with camera settings and controls while risking a lost shot.

I’ll write a full, photography review of the Bonica when I get back from France.

 Chris Ostlind

Lunada Design

105′ Carbon Fiber Racing Trimaran Sodeb’O in Sydney Harbor

Welcome Aboard! 

It’s confirmed, the flights are booked and I’m leaving on Tuesday afternoon, September 2nd on a non-stop flight to France. I’ll be going over to sail with Thomas Coville on his 105′ carbon fiber trimaran, Sodeb’O as a guest of Helly Hansen from Norway, the maker of outrageously cool outdoor clothing, such as the Ocean Racing Jacket, pictured below. While I will be staying in Nantes, the boat is actually up the coast a bit in La Trinite-sur-Mer.

Coville has already set two significant solo speed sailing records with his boat, the furthest distance covered in 24 hours and the fastest trip across the Atlantic from New York to England. I expect that before the boat is retired, he will be setting additional records of all kinds with an attempt at the Solo Round The World record scheduled for late in the fall of this year.

I will be shooting a ton of High Definition video on the trip, as well as hundreds of high res. still images. I’ll be using a terrific new, Bonica Snapper HDDV Underwater Camera for video/stills, which is completely waterproof and so compact that it fits in the front pocket of virtually all offshore sailing jackets. You can see the full kit at this link: http://www.scuba.com/scuba-gear-535/069742/Bonica-Snapper-HDDV-5.0-Megapixel-Digital-Video-Camera-with-Underwater-Housing.html

A full report, as well as a huge stash of HD video clips and photos will be available on this site after I get back and get myself pulled together from the jet lag.

Chris Ostlind

Lunada Design