Hi,

This is definately getting better. Today I have a boat fully equipped with comfort bobs and bits, weighing in at 4000kg, a slow IOR hull and a sail lacking 4m2 compared to the original bermuda. The handicap LYS for the original Mikkel was 1.07, while I got 1.04 with the junksail. The boat is sailing very close or better than the handicap in a blow,but is  underrigged in winds below 10 knots. To say that I am impressed with the rigs performance would be an understatement. The problem is more in the eyes of the onlookers: A slow boat do not impress! It does not help that I know how close the performance is to the original sail. The "normal" people dont take notice untill you sail away from them. They can still blame it on the hull being a fast boat, but they will have to admit that the sail is bl...y efficient with an old singlehander sailing away from them while he is eating a sandwich and drinking coffee. My hero is a Swedish skijumper by the name of Jan Bokløw. He has a bad stutter and epilepsy. He made the longest jumps, but was punished badly by the judges on the style. I saw an interview with him on TV, and the reporter asked what he thought about the judges giving him low score on his style. He then stuttered: III jjump aand thththey jjudge. How many skijumpers have paralell skis today? How many years and how much money has been put into the development of the bermuda rig? I may be a bit queer, but I see a bright future for the chineese lug. The only downside is that the invention is so old that taking out a patent is impossible, so making a living out of it may be difficult. A hobby for an old geek on the other hand...

Ketil Greve wrote:

Thank you David,

With a sailplan of 60m2, the sail would need to be reefed at 10-14 knots wind, and as the "normal" junksail sets better with a reef than fully hoisted, I think I have gotten the answer. The junksail is more top heavy than the pointy ones already, sooo...

Hi Ketil

All I can say is “Ouch!”  The idea of the Split Rig was to produce a junk rigged cruising boat that would compare favourably with an equivalent Bermudan rigged cruising boat, and I am more than happy with the results. The split rig was not supposed to be a racing rig and I only entered the RTI race to measure the performance against other boats who were also trying to go fast in the same direction.

You are now talking about going up a gear into the ‘hot ship’ brigade. I have sailed Poppy alongside an X-99 and it is a much faster boat. At 11% longer on the water line and only weighing 60% of the displacement of Poppy yet with more sail area it is always going to win. With a SA/ Disp of over 30 it packs a hefty punch. You will enjoy going fast in such a boat, but your

I know that sailing an X-99 would be fun, and if you could get a tall junk rig to work on it you would enjoy the fun, but you could also be very disappointed when the handicappers calculate your corrected race times. At the moment my thoughts are more modest, like getting a junk rigged FolkBoat to compete with the standard rig.

Hi David,

You wrote, “Slieve reports good performance, but Jef reports a performance that is not yet as good as a Bermudan boat, and it seems to me that everything has to be exactly right.” This is a potentially misleading statement as you are not comparing like with like, just as Bermudan sails look simple but actually are remarkably complicated to build. I built the rig to my own design, and knew what I was trying to build. Jef tried to copy the rig but with incomplete information and has missed the main design feature of the jibs. Therefore he has not ended up with a similar performing rig. I spoke to him on the phone today and it seems clear that part of his design is away off the mark, and I am not surprised he is getting poorer performance than the Bermudan rig. The idea of the split rig is simple, but the detail is not. Similarly with straight forward cambered sails, well designed ones will perform much better than poorly designed ones, though any camber is better than none.

In haste, as ever,

Cheers,  Slieve.

David,

If you wanted to make an already fast hull to go fast and close to the wind, would you choose a split junkrig or a wingsail a la Tystie? I have tracked down an X-99 with a blown engine and in the right state of neglect. Unfortunately the price is not right, but I will give an offer. My intention is to compete and to turn a few heads + give some lessons in easy boathandling, as I know that sailing with a junksail gives you a new lease of life sailwise. Being a lazy sod, I can now plan to sail well into my seventies, health permitting.

I don't think I can answer that question fully. 

I didn't get the opportunity to sail on Slieve's boat, and I only know what he has told me, pending the publication of his full description of the rig. As a cruising man, I see things that would not suit me, but they are nothing to do with performance. Slieve reports good performance, but Jef reports a performance that is not yet as good as a bermudan boat, and it seems to me that everything has to be exactly right.

The X-99 is going to need a wingsail with an area of about 50 -60 sq m, to match its bermudan area. My mainsail has a chord of 4.5m, and that is as wide as I would want to go with the tube size of my wishbones (1"). Whilst I think you should be going for the highest possible aspect ratio, a chord of 4.5m would mean a luff length of say 14m -very high, an aspect ratio of 3.1, and too many extra panels (my mainsail luff length is 9.5m). That means, I think, that you would have to make wishbones that are bigger than mine, of larger tube, to get a chord of about 5.5m, a luff length of about 11.5m and an aspect ratio of 2.1 - and we are heading off into the unknown, structurally. The weight is also going to increase, and whatever the aspect ratio, the wingsail is always going to be heavier than a single-thickness sail with straight battens. Will the X-99 stand up to a heavy rig, I wonder?