A tour of Paikea, our Catana42s, would not be complete without discussing the carbon fibre rotating mast. We have mentioned the rig before in a previous post Recycling a TNZ America’s Cup mast into a rotating rig.
Rescued from the rubbish, this is a mast with history. It is the old America’s Cup Team New Zealand rig from the 2000 campaign which made its way to Spain to compete as the French challenger in 2007. The French never made the finals so the rig never saw true America’s Cup competition. It was left in the yard when the competition finished and the Teams left. For the next 12 years sat forgotten in an abandoned yard.
Fast forward a couple of years and here we are sitting in the Caribbean after crossing from Spain to the Windward Islands a year earlier. We’ve been so incredibly happy with this mast. It’s stiffer, stronger, with less windage as we have no spreaders or associated rigging etc. It means that even the way we sit on anchor has changed.
The section is so large we use the mast as our 5th reef and we talk about the fact that because of this we do rotate this mast. We mounted the rig on Paikea with a ball and socket arrangement. This was done as it allowed us the option of either fixing or allowing the mast to rotate. To be able to move and rotate the mast makes a huge difference to the sailing performance although it does mean that our wind instruments need to be mounted with a gimble to allow for the rotation.
Lot’s more discussion in the video.