Multihulls in Bretagne – Travel report and lessons learnt

Picture: Michelle, Bernard and Ulrika enjoying life! (And yes - the boat is moving forward!)

Just back from Bretagne with Ulrika (my lovely becoming wife, still having the record of 19,8 knots in Stegesund, a very narrow sound. Only one trimaran can pass at a time – Stockholm sailors know!), having had the opportunity to spend two fantastic days on board of Eureka together with our busy sailor Bernard (owner of Seaon 96crb Eureka) and his wife Michelle. First hand impressions:

1) What a lovely place on earth!
2) Brittany sailors are a tough breed.
3) Some waves (in their terms probably flat sea…) and 15 knots of speed must absolutely not interfere with a proper lunch (measured by French standards)!

Starting off on Saturday just west of St. Malo we headed towards the Ile of Brehat some 40 nm westwards. Initially we had very light winds, less than 5 knots. Later the wind picked up to between 4-8 knots and we set the “Furling Genacker” (new development in last year) logging between 5 and 9 knots in easterly winds (yes – we had to make a few gybes!)

Picture: The Furling Genacker and Bernard meditating or just plain relaxing

Also calculating a change in current direction due to tidal waters….(occasionally up to 3 knots, nothing we are very used to in Stockholm – to say the least) . The “Furling Genacker" is basically a Code Zero, but in order not to mix it up with the Screacher it was named the Furling Genacker.

Picture: Favorit position on the beam - Very light winds....Ulrika focusing on keeping speed above 6 knots (and the famous extra outborder!)

Arriving at Ile de Brehat we very conveniently used the dinghy with a small out border to come a shore from the mooring (now I fully understand why Bernard vigorously has been arguing for the inflatable dinghy on board.....with an extra out border – it is definitely worth the extra kilos even though we are always fighting to reduce weight even with our dear customers). Again sea and shore does not look as we are used to…..up to 12 meters difference between low and high tide. What would we have done without the dinghy….no Taxi around.

Picture: This time Bernard did not need the dinghy..but one is not always lucky to find mooring and timing like this!!

After an excellent dinner, a good night's sleep discovering Bernard’s new innovative companion way night hatch (his foul weather jacket) we were ready for the trip back. The wind now picked up to approx 8-14 knots now from the south. Initially we set the heavy jib for convenient sailing, expecting the wind to increase further (it looked like it would), but then later changing back to the self tacking jib as the wind decreased a little. A part of the trip that took us almost three hours the day before we now managed in one hour at 12-16 knots.

Picture: Bernard and Jan on the windward beam enjoying more wind on the second day

Lunch, a fantastic salad with a delicious dressing (of course home made on the boat!), wine, cappuccino, cookies and chocolate (very far from the usual sandwich and water lunches I am used to!) was served at 15 knots which caused some small problems to keep the smaller salad pieces in the bowel in the aft part of the cock pit. As we got closer to Cap Frehel and home for Eureka the wind pick up again. Speeds up to 19 knots was the perfect “Grand Final” of the marvellous trip and made everybody smile on board (if I get my Firewire driver to work properly I will put up a short footage from my DV cam from the “Grand Final”)

Epilogue – getting closer to shore Bernard took the helm and speeded through narrow passages, made an elegant tour around moored boats, windsurfers and a close 90 degrees gybe at the beach (people were running out of the water….). I was obviously not trusted with this kind of manoeuvres – as I said: Brittany sailors are a tough breed.

Lessons learnt:

* Not many liveable multihulls around (except for the Orma 60 we sighted in St. Malo harbour however a lot of beach cats – Hobies, Darts and 18 footers around) This must be an opportunity!

* Always listen to the customer! Bernard’s strong requirement for the dinghy and out border for this is absolutely righteous.

* We will recommend Bernard his Eureka as “professeur” for the Seaon Sailing Academy

* A few improvement opportunities discovered - more input into Seaon product development

* Some annoying rust stains (however polish able) on various stainless steel equipment (not only one suppliers equipment to be fair)

Again thank you Michelle and Bernard for a fantastic weekend!

/Jan

New visit at Ericsson Volvo Ocean Race 70 Racing Team boatyard

Yesterday we visited the Ericson Volvo Ocean Race 70 shipyard again guided by our team rider Mange Olsson – what a progress since our first visit! The whole boat yard, virtually placed next the Ericsson Head office is now fully operational with products coming out of the ovens. There is even a separate visitor area behind glas overlooking the whole shipyard where there is a constant flow of impressed visitors looking at this very high tech boat building project. There are routers, ovens, freezers (for the carbon pre-preg) various rooms for various type of milling, lamination, lathing etc operations. It is a complete real professional shipyard building a 70 fot high tech ocean racer in midst of Stockholm Telecom city Kista! (Want to know more about the secrets about the Ericsson Racing team boat yard ? Check http://www.ericssonracingteam.com/video.html )
Obviously there is an envy from our side on the scale of operation, however there are also as mentioned before some strong similarities with our production: Freezers, ovens, different kind of QA tools such as curing temperature supervision, adhesion testing equipment, loadcells etc paintbox, fairing and filling room etc …..and we use the same supplier and carbon pre-preg system from Advanced Composite Group in the UK (http://www.acg.co.uk/ also supplier to Americas Cup winner Alinghi).

/Jan

A report from a "typical" Lake Geneva trimaran day....

Sebastian reports from yesterday:

"Just came back from a record breaking family sailing.
Start at 1 pm wind speed 7 knots from SW heading just north of west averaging 9.5 knots on the GPS. Wonderful weather and rapidly catching up with ESSE 8.50 on same course. We tack and head east moving on at around 10 knots under full main and screacher and then go back towards Pully in decreasing wind speed. We observe boats along the Swiss coast move with lots of wind from n-NE, we are still with a southerly less than three miles away. Screacher taken down, self tacker unrolled and within 3 minutes we have a north easterly at 35 knots steady with gusts well above 40 knots. Two reefs taken rapidly but no smaller head/sail than the self tacker. Thanks Matte for keeping the small jib in your loft!! Course 320 degrees, speed mounts to well above 20 knots with peak on the GPS of 25.6 for over 2 minutes. Constant spray over the leeward forward cross-beam but the leeward bow is well above the surface and the boat runs like a TGV across the French countryside. Stable like a rock. For once we take the sails down outside the harbour and motor in. Good reason to run over to the restaurant and fetch a bottle of iced champagne, a cooler and four glasses. Olivia was playing on the windward net all along, Kerstin was scared to death but the two guys on board thought this was terrific."




Kerstin - cool at the helm



Well - what to say?

1) We hope Kerstin got a lot of champagne
2) A fine trimaran day
3) You do not always need to sail at 25+ knots.....there are slower gears (if not left with the sail maker)

/Jan

Multihull sailing - Racing or Cruising?

Multihull sailing - Racing or Cruising?

Every now and then the issue about “multihull sailing for who” is brought up, meaning what are the characteristics of the typical multihull sailor. As always there is no black and white answer. However what we frequently see is that speed (….even in our story telling…) is emphasized a lot and with speed comes racing. In our case this is actually not true, potentially we have not fully brought forward what it is about – an experience which makes sailing and nature even greater.
Yes we have a lot of action and racing pictures and movies, however the vast majority of the time our Seaon sailors just sail for fun and great pleasure – with their families including children and even grand children from age of a few months to grown up. There is Alex and Henrik who sail with their families and young ones across the Baltic from Sweden to Finland, there is Bernard who enjoys the waters outside Bretagne with his grand children, there is Sebastian in Lausanne who is sailing with his family as much as times permit (almost daily that is…. And actually always docking with sails – Captain Sebastian principally does not allow the use of the engine except if there is absolutely no wind).
This is why we get somewhat astonished when we get the question: “Can you go cruising with a Seaon? Can it be sailed by a “normal” (!? Let’s not define “normal” at this time!) sailor? Do people sail with their children? Obviously the answer is YES! And obviously it means we have to think more about the “evangelism” we are preaching (we are not religious ….but very passionate!)

We have mentioned it before – we designed the Seaon 96crb to satisfy our sailing (and to some extent racing) vanity, but mostly to fulfil a joyful (with families!) sailing experience, where amongst other the production technology we use help us to make the boat easy to handle due to less need of sail area. The high stability and high speed of trimarans demand very hard work by the crew when handling large genoas. Beating upwind in a narrow strait with our self tacker jib is a real pleasure.

/Jan

Stockholm Archipelago – explored from a trimaran

Stockholm Archipelago is truly a beautiful place. Obviously coming from Stockholm we are “slightly” biased, however Herve Hillard from excellent French magazine Voiles & Voiliers seemed to be very excited about the Archipelago having explored it on a Seaon during a week this summer. We are looking forward to his report in Voiles & Voiliers later this autumn!

/Jan

An unexpected trimaran visitor...and fortunately a camera

Our busy Seaon sailor Bernard in Bretagne got an unexpected visit a few days ago. Fortunately he had a camera with him...

But so had fortunately also the visitor...

/Jan

Factory on wheels – trimaran moving towards lean production

Not only that we challenge the traditional yachting market conceptually with function (probably an understatement - being a trimaran ….and folding) and design, but also using new advanced production technologies, we continuously have to challenge ourselves as well. Having the first year and a few boats of experience in our new production facility, we introduced a “Bible” - the “The Toyota Way”. In order to stay competitive, being able to develop new features and models, we need to work even harder with improvements. Part of this is improving our lean production thinking (that’s where the Bible comes in – however read and implemented in our way - “The Seaonata Way”). Not that we have converted to a new religion – but instead of having several religions and bibles (with all the problems and discussions this can cause) we get a common belief (and services!).

Even though the only very first few “Evangelisms” have been preached and discussed, the first results can be seen – on wheels. The staff has literately interpreted “flow” (being one of the key principles) …..We now have toolboxes on wheels, gigs on wheels, a new smaller oven on wheels…. Why? To be able reduce “Waste” which has become an “un-sacred” word …to say the least. We rather spend time on new features, technologies,… etc.

For those of you who are familiar with the term “Andon calls” I can tell we encourage to pull - in our case actually “push”, the Andon button frequently. In fact, without Andon stops it would be strange…no Kaizen = Improvements.

“It is the journey that is the objective”/Witek-san

Carbon trimaran – “carbomania minded” staff

Producing a high tech carbon trimaran has its sides….
Of course quality and productivity is key, but obviously as a manager half the battle to progress is won if the staff takes pride in their product. Not only to the extent that they take their families to the show the production and product, but also in the participation in the “look and feel” of the product”. Working with carbon cloth and especially with various fabrics that give almost a magic look and feeling creates a state of “carbomania”. In some cases it is almost hard to resist proposals for new developments with a carbon finish – balancing of the staff “R&D” time is needed. Not that a carbon finish may be everyone’s desire, however some constraint less “creative projects” are important to keep an open mind, continuous development and testing of new concepts going, not only hard facts productivity and functionality. The latest developments that have left the “creative studio” on the floor are amongst other the companion way carbon stairway, the carbon boarding step and the carbon saloon windows frames.

But it is not only about the finish, as always for us …it is about the weight - and on the production floor we do understand the importance of weight. More than often Stefan (Design) has explained the importance of getting into the positive weight spiral (less weight requiring less reinforcements, requiring a lower mast and less sail area, requiring less material…..) or as marketing puts it:” the weight of the interior for free”.

/Witek

Trimaran colours

Last week another metallic painted Seaon96crb was launched in Lake Geneva. Sebastian’s SUI-1 caused quite significant attention. It seems the interest for multihulls is growing immensely, but also the trend away from the traditional colours such as white and marine blue is increasing.

To be noted – painting large surfaces such as boat with metallic paint is not an easy task and is also an extra add on feature. A popular direction right now seems however to be yellow….

/Jan

Multihull / trimaran mindset in Europe?

Having our office in Stockholm Sweden we are of course influenced by local multihull activities, which as I wrote in a previous blog entry are growing substantially. Of course multihull entries in races are still a fraction of the total however it is being generally recognized that in the last one or two years a lot of races now as standard are open to multihulls. Racing is done according to the Swedish LYS rating rules. This rating also allows to appoint a total winner among all classes (mono and multihulls), an opportunity which many organizers use.
Of course it is quite tough to win overall with a multihull, however it adds to your ego passing through fields of monohulls classes, especially since one the last few years enjoys admiration rather than a puzzled or scared UFO encounter facial expression.

Multihulls also are quite active on Lake Geneva with their big racing event Bol d’Or coming up. Obviously Mr Bertarelli and the Décision 35s catamarans are an attraction (http://www.decision.ch/ANG/default.htm) on the lake, however on the very extreme end of multihulls. Soon having two Seaon 96crb on Lake Geneva we of course would be delighted to grow a fleet for racing and high performance cruising there.

Obviously there are a lot of multihull activities around Europe – it would be nice to share some experiences on the multihull mindset among monohull sailors around Europe. I assume many of us at least initially have encountered arguments such as “multihulls cannot sail upwind”, “multihulls cannot tack”, “not appreciated in harbours” (due to space needed) etc. however I assume we have passed this first level of “scepticism”.
What is your experience? Are multihulls gaining admiration and interest? Once tried most sailors are “hooked on the feeling”? What is the multihull mindset among monohull sailors?

/Jan