Thank you David, I am glad you like them. I think the event took everyone's breath way, such a colourful and beautiful little boat. In the words of Brian Clifford, she sits in the water like a duck. Congratulations on the design!

Roger, your set of beautiful photographs shows the joy, the colour, and all the interesting innovations and details of FanShi – the Chinese-style bow, open between the bulwarks, Annie’s “delilah posts”, the heavily-cambered teak-laid flush deck, the little cockpit hoop delicately supporting the mainsheet, the rotating pram hood and see-all-round dome, the wind vane set in clear air above the light-and-simple low-slung davits which make a platform for the little solar panels, the rudder trim tabs, the asymmetric canted bilge boards, the delicate five-planked FanTan tucked in behind the lute stern in burglar-repellent colours... there is so much going on… what a symphony, what a boat!

You must put these photos in (and on) the magazine and document the launching.

Here's my favourite

David: I'm not in Whangarei but can post (lend) a go-pro if Annie wants it.

What an astonishingly beautiful boat.

I think it’s just knocked Jonque de Plaisance and China Cloud down to 2nd and 3rd places. 

Awed congratulations to Designer and Builder.

Annie it has been such a joy following your build from start to finish. 

I do hope you’re not at all disheartened at the Sail balance teething trouble. 

After a rest you’ll have her sorted in no time and sailing like a Witch.

Ready to voyage on the Sundering Seas..

Anyone who has put a newly-built, one-off boat into commission will know that feeling - 12 hour days, a great many things to learn and think about and evaluate after launching, starting from zero. What I'd do is take a week off and sit in the sun, then come back to the sailing trials.   

Being a bilgeboarder has to be taken into account when thinking about helm balance - the boat doesn’t like to be sailed too tight to the wind with the boards stalled. Better to point off the wind enough to keep the speed up and the water flowing over them. Otherwise they don't lift, and there's lee helm.

The ‘driving’ boat will end up to windward although the ‘pinched’ boat seems to be pointing higher.  

If the YHP is doing nothing much ( which was as planned, to reduce the stresses on the sail and skipper), maybe you can afford to move the halyard forward on the yard a little, and rig a THP as Arne says, as well as pulling the tack back?

Arne, yes, the battens are hinged, but the shape of the camber in the middle of the panels won't be very different from that in one of your sails.

Arne wrote:It looks to me as if ‘Fanshi’s sail only has camber in the front section, and then combined with a hinge in the battens, right? The combination of these two features could possibly move the CP quite far forward.

I wonder; is the same lee helm experienced on the port tack?

Obviously, the simplest remedy is to shift the sail further aft on the mast, and see what happens. If there had been a Fanshi 2 only two months away from launching, I would have suggested that the sail was build with all-cambered panels and with the max-camber point at the middle of the sail. A little late now for that...

Cheers,
Arne

Thank you for that, Arne.  As you know, I don't have a technical mind and trying to assess the sail intellectually is probably beyond me.  It was very difficult to get a real handle on what was going on in the very changeable conditions, but there was undoubtedly lee helm and it was sufficiently pronounced that at present I would not attempt sailng off the mooring in anything of a breeze.  I think it was worse on starbboard tack.

As you say, the obvious first attempt is to haul the sail further aft.  I might add some standing luff parrels to help with that.  The way I had set up the running luff parrel, although it fitted with PJR's advice, made it bind quite badly and I'm not entirely sure I had hauled it in far enough.  The YHP does nothing until there are about 4 reefs in the sail, so the yard is obviously well forward, too.

Suggestions such as altering the rake or adding a mizzen are essentially impossible, but if the worse comes to the worst, it is entirely feasible to take the sail off, add 300 mm to the leech and extend the forward part of the battens with some sort of mandrel and a wrap of glass and epoxy.  I should much rather spend my summer sailing than fooling around with all that palaver, so am keeping my fingers crossed that moving the sail aft will do the trick.  The wind has blown relentlessly since Sunday morning and I haven't had a chance even to raise the sail again.  To be honest, reaction and a month of 12-hour days have left me exhausted and I'm surprised I've even managed to think it through as much as I have!

I still have an incredibly feeble Internet signal, so can't send and receive much in the way of images.