Ashiki is cruising the “top end” of Australia where the winds are quite placid, not much high speed reaching along like on the west coast anyway. Sails are almost always fully raised, we spend most our time at 2 to 3 knots, and almost always to windward. I don’t know how we compare anymore as all the bermudan boats we encounter motorsail. We seem to be the slowest boat up here, we only motor in calms, and not for long. Last week we were beating to windward to round Cape Flattery (far North Queensland) and going at a reasonable clip for a change, 3 to 3.8 knots and, shock horror noticed we were getting overhauled by another yacht (shock more for the fact other sailing boats are few are far between up here). Looked to be a racer with full crew on a parallel course about 1/2 mile away, they eventually left us for dead.
Fast forward to Port Douglas, we’re dinghying away from the yacht club and a guy in another dinghy asks us if we’re from the “junk rig schooner”. Then say’s he was on that yacht passing us at Cape Flattery. Yep, you guys thrashed us, I told him. On the contrary, he says they have encountered junk rigged boats before and said, we were really “trucking” and took ages to catch us. And they noticed how close to the wind we were “trucking” which really surprised them.
By way of explanation, I told him the panels of our sails were cut to foil shapes, like any sail is supposed to be, and older junks had flat sails. He seemed to get that right away.
Looks like a another compliment for Arne’s cambered sail design.