As the most aggressive-looking one-design yet from Nautor’s Swan, the strict one-design ClubSwan 50 piles grand-prix concepts into a straightforward boat that will challenge amateur crews but reward them with speed, especially when the breeze turns on.

Heel — 18 degrees of it — is something to get used to with the ClubSwan 50. Flat is not fast. This Juan Kouyoumdjian creation is the first one-design of Nautor’s Swan new direction. Where similarly sized Swans of yore were laden with cruising interiors, this one is not. It’s a furniture-free 50-foot one-design race boat to be sailed hard and put away wet (with a dehumidifier, of course). For an owner looking to get into TP52-style boat-on-boat racing without the new-boat arms race, the ClubSwan 50, the judges say, is one way to go, here and now.

“It’s definitely more of a one-design-class racer than an offshore racer,” says Stewart. “With the big cockpit and the clean Euro styling, it’s a bitchin’ looking boat on and off the dock, and the class racing will be a lot of fun when you get to fleets of 15 or 20 boats.”

Considering two dozen owners ordered boats within the first year of the ClubSwan 50’s launch, and a robust regatta circuit is already underway in the Mediterranean, Nautor’s Swan is delivering to a demand in Europe for big-boat class racing — that’s where the one-design action is at. The challenge for faraway American owners, however, is the designer’s intentional disregard for any and all measurement rules. Handicap racing is not the point of the ClubSwan 50, nor its selling point. “The development of a one-design class in North America will be the ultimate success,” says Nautor’s Swan’s Tom Lihan, who is tasked with recruiting U.S. owners, “and that’s the goal.”

Roughly $1.3 million will put the boat on the racecourse, with 10 to 12 crew members to feed and dress. According to the judges, it’s a boat that demands a professional bowman and two good sail trimmers. The one-design sail inventory is robust — mainsail, four upwind and four downwind sails, as well as two storm sails — will require proper management on the boat and of the morning sail shuffle to and from the container.

As a wide, high-volume planing hull with twin rudders (scalloped trailing edges to make them unique), the ClubSwan 50 is also a yacht that requires the owner’s/driver’s undivided attention directed toward the instruments. With only six winches and the use of constrictors to free up winches at times, there’s a lot of dancing through maneuvers. There’s a lot to get right and a lot that can go wrong, but that’s the appeal of big-boat racing, right? Clean mark roundings and precision boathandling are what get you to the podium.

A year of development with first-generation hulls resulted in a 700-pound diet, which puts the class minimum weight at 18,086 pounds (“or somewhere around there,” says Lihan). The biggest weight savings were accomplished by upgrading to a carbon keel fin and trimming materials where overbuilt. Exploring Hull No. 3’s deepest recesses, Tom Rich found no flaws with the construction, and overall, the judges gave the build high marks. Back at Nautor’s yard in Finland, CNC machines cut pre-preg carbon cloth before vacuum-bagging and pressure-cooking the hull with all the interior components and structural bulkheads in place.

The deck-stepped rig sits atop a solid carbon interior structure (Lihan calls it the “phone booth”), which creates a clear centerline runway for sails going to and fro. The interior finish, while minimalist and easy to strip for regattas, says Stewart, is appropriate for the boat’s purpose while retaining just enough touch of Swan luxury.

There’s modern minimalism with the deck hardware as well, says Rich, pointing out that the boat has fewer winches than he’d expect on a boat this size. Two cabin-top winches are in high demand, especially during jibes. The big challenge is jibing in 20 knots of wind without a pedestal, Lihan admits. Consequently, ClubSwan 50 class management is exploring an electric option for the cabin tops, or a pedestal. “There is an option for a pedestal, but nobody has ordered one yet,” he says. “You can’t do reach-to-reach blow-through jibes, so you just do proper outside jibes, come out low to get that last bit of sheet, and then point it up again. It’s one-design, so as long as everyone is doing the same thing, does it really matter?”

In strong winds, the ClubSwan 50 will be a powered-up machine, says Allen, one that will be fun and forgiving to drive but demand solid crew work. With class rules in place, owners already taking charge, and sanctioned regattas scheduled in the U.S. in 2019, there’s now a turnkey platform into big-boat, big-boy, one-design racing.

At a Glance

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As if on cue, in the midst of our BOTY dockside briefing with J/Boats’ Jeff Johnstone, a middle-aged gentleman appears in the companionway, out of the blue. Johnstone introduces him as an owner, from Portland, Oregon, who is trading in his J/46 for a yet-to-be-built J/121. He climbs down the companionway stairs, interrupts the judging team’s Q&A session, and then promptly cites all the races he intends to enter when he takes ownership of Hull No. 14: the Swiftsure, the Oregon Offshore, the Van Isle 360, and even the Pacific Cup from San Francisco to Hawaii. Moments earlier, Johnstone had explained this very concept: The J/121 is a bucket-list boat. This guy is Exhibit A.

“We saw that signature events were attracting record fleets — the Fastnet Race, the Three-Bridge Fiasco in San Francisco, the Chicago-Mac, for example — all these types of short-handed, adventure-style races where it’s more about the experience than winning,” says Johnstone. “We thought that if we could eliminate half the crew on a 40-footer that’s purpose-built for point-to-point racing but still pass the beer-can and daysail test, we’d have people interested.”

Their research led Johnstone and his brother, Alan, to a design concept built around a crew of five. As for rail meat? No need. That’s what the water ballast tanks are for.

Extra hands to get sails up and down? No need there either. There’s an impressive quiver of headsails, most on roller furlers. With the entire inventory hanging from the rig on halyard locks, and sheets and furling lines spilling into the cockpit, the boat could be easily mistaken for a Class 40 — albeit, one that actually goes upwind.

The J/121’s five-sail inventory is designed for racing with a crew of five. The main has a 10 percent first reef, then a deeper second reef. The primary jib is 105 percent, and a heavy-weather inner jib is about 85 percent. For off-the-wind sailing, there’s a Code Zero and an A2 all-purpose runner.

“This is your classic J Boat in that everything is well-thought-out and works well, and it sails really nicely,” says Rich. “You can race the boat with five people, no problem, although I’m sure you’ll end up with more people who want to go.”

While an owner might have to leave a few friends on the dock in order to reap the benefits of 800 pounds of water ballast, Stewart was unsure the rating hit would be worth the trade-off at times. “ORR hits you on water ballast, at least a little,” he says, “so the question will be whether the water-ballast effect on the displacement will outweigh the rating impact. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Regardless, the point of the boat, the judges all agreed, is not windward/leeward racing but point to point where the tanks remain full for long stretches. The water doesn’t have to leave the rail to get a sandwich or relieve itself.

The 121 isn’t configured for cruising, and Johnstone says no one had yet ordered the optional V-berth package. “The interior is function versus form,” he says. There are proper passage-making berths, synthetic flooring, molded furniture and mahogany trim to make it homey enough while taking day-to-day race abuse.

The Johnstones labored long and hard over the deck-hardware mock-ups in order to accommodate the many leads, deflections and loads of the headsail sheets. There isn’t enough side-deck area for athwartships tracks, so the J/121 uses hybrid floating jib leads that allow in-hauling or barber hauling. On a long offshore leg, you can tweak all day long.

While cockpit ergonomics are excellent, says Stewart, and all the winches are well-positioned and easy to work at, the traveler system needs to be rethought. “With the 4-to-1 mainsheet, we couldn’t get the traveler to centerline. Changing it to 2-to-1 might solve that. The winches are plenty strong to allow it.”

The common phrase among the judges was, “There’s a lot going on,” when all the sails are on deck and ready to deploy. “It’ll definitely be a new sort of learning curve for owners in terms of when to use the water ballast and figuring out the sail crossovers. A couple of days of training with a sailmaker, and a good bowman, will be necessary.”

But any good sailor enjoys a good challenge, says Allen, who has sailed the boat in winds far stronger than those experienced during the BOTY test sail. “In 15 to 20 knots, the boat is really fast and stable, with or without the ballast. The rudder never loses its grip. It’s rock-solid in a breeze, a great boat all around.”

At a Glance

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As a unique foiling object, indeed the UFO’s most appealing aspect is the ability to sail it in conditions that have other foilers on the beach. Sailors new to foiling will be quickly rewarded with minimal effort.

Dave Clark is the UFO’s co-creator, builder, tweaker and apostle. When he explains the construction of his 10-foot catamaran contraption (“we use this apocalyptically thick triaxial fiberglass layup”) and its handling (“as you ask the boat to challenge you, it will continue to challenge you, but only when it’s asked”), his enthusiasm is as animated as the UFO’s behavior on the water, especially in flight. The UFO is otherworldly, the judges agree, with the potential to disrupt the dinghy-sailing scene as an all-access low-cost foiler.

Nowadays at Clark’s Fulcrum Speedworks factory in Bristol, Rhode Island, he’s cranking out these pint-size craft, shipping batches in cardboard boxes and containers with international shipping manifests. He’s taking orders over the phone, on credit cards, from impulse buyers dropping $7,600 for an “all-inclusive” sailing experience.

How’s the UFO built? It’s vacuum-infused, with carbon-reinforced vinylester for an all-up weight of 110 pounds. The wishbone spar assembly is a mix of carbon and fiberglass components; the foil struts are extruded aluminum; and the elevators are a mix of carbon, glass, foam core and stainless-steel parts.

“Complexity is the enemy,” says Clark, who developed the UFO with his father, Steve Clark. “I need it to be robust, and I can’t have parts go missing.”

That might be true of the UFO’s big pieces, says Allen, but there are still quite a few little pins and parts required for assembly and flight. “You’ll have to take good care of it, especially if you’re in and out of the water, and moving it around all the time.”

The carbon windsurfing mast tube that Clark uses is bendy, so he added a jumper strut system to stiffen it. The wishbone arrangement is then the most effective way to provide high leech tension and power in the sail, which is essential to the entire rig package.

The judges’ testing session in sub-8-knot conditions doesn’t allow flight for Tom Rich nor Greg Stewart, both of whom exceed 200 pounds. But Clark, at 170 pounds and with two years in the boat, has it foiling in a heartbeat, using an explosive kinetic technique he’s perfected to get liftoff. Allen is initially unable to get it foil-borne, but 2 knots more of windspeed and a little extra effort on the mainsheet is all it takes to get him flying.

The UFO’s tunnel hull is a simple and defining platform that allows it to be sailed home when the breeze gets to be too little or too much. Its T-Foils lift nearly flush with the bottom of the boat, for launching it from a shoreline or a dock. The ride-height wand is easily adjustable to the desired challenge of the day. “Low to start and learn,” says Clark. “Higher as you get better and faster.”

At the end of your UFO session, break it down and leave it on a dolly, or stuff the whole lot into your family wagon.

“That’s what makes this boat so cool,” says Allen. “It’s innovative, creative and inexpensive. I can see a lot people getting their first taste of foiling with this thing.”

Or as Clark pontificates, “You can use it across your entire sailing career — from your Opti until you’re old and dead.”

At a Glance

To watch video of the UFO in action, click here.
To read more about the genesis of the UFO, click here.

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With the HH66 catamaran’s sharp reversed bows pointing into a light northerly, the electric halyard winch winds a square-headed mainsail swiftly skyward. A single crew member assists while standing atop the carbon boom while the rest of the sailing team stands elbow to elbow in the pit, observing the thick halyard tail snaking into its rope well beneath the mast. At their backs, watching through the catamaran’s large glass windshield, is the solitary helmsman, his hands resting upon the polished carbon steering wheel, anticipating the moment he can bear away, unfurl the Code Zero, and watch the boatspeed race to 10 knots in a blink.

The speed build is fluid and easy. There’s no chaos, no clamor of crew grinding the headsail home before scurrying to the rail. Instead, there’s a fine-tune button press or two, and when the Boat of the Year judges — Chuck Allen, Tom Rich and Greg Stewart — finally look up from all the controls and displays at their fingertips, the distant Chesapeake Bay shoreline is blurring past.

It’s said that a big boat dulls any sensation of speed, but with the H66, the judges are feeling quite the opposite.

“The boat immediately comes alive,” says Stewart, who eventually abandons the boat’s inside helm station and takes the best seat in the house: the white carbon helmsman’s chair mounted alongside the tiller. For experienced sailors, the short carbon tillers are perhaps the one simple and distinct detail that immediately separates the HH66 from other cruiser/racer catamarans of this ilk.

“When you’re racing, you’ll be out at the tiller,” says Stewart. “It makes a big difference being where you can better feel the wind and the heel angle. The sight lines through the window and under the jib are good.”

For long passages, or in bad weather, he adds, you can simply duck inside to the big, cushy leather chair.

Even with the inherent friction associated with having two tillers and two wheels connected to the steering system, the feel on the HH66 helm is light and engaging, says Stewart, and that’s partly due to a combination of hull shape and the boat’s deep C-shaped carbon daggerboards. The boat, says Stewart, drives like a well-balanced big boat, not a big rig.

Acknowledging the influence of pioneering Gunboat Catamarans of the past, designs that propelled the high-performance crossover catamaran genre to where it is today, yacht designer Gino Morrelli says the HH Catamarans line — which spans from 66 to a 48-footer in the pipeline — benefits from 15 years of make-and-break development. The HH66’s hull profile is full forward, flatter in the midsection, and bigger in the transoms, says Morrelli, which, when coupled with less rocker than his Gunboat designs, results in better handling in a seaway. Less pitching, he says, is fast.

“Daggerboards have changed dramatically over the years as well,” adds Morrelli. In the old days, boards were short, straight, wide and thick, but as owners and race teams added more horsepower to the sail plan, the boards and platforms weren’t up to increased loads.

“C-daggerboards increase vertical lift and lateral resistance, which dampens pitching,” says Morrelli, “which makes for better all-around performance.”

The HH66 is lightweight for its size, scale and complexity. Teak soles, deck hardware and everything including the galley sink, eventually tip the scale to 46,000 pounds. Weight savings, says Morrelli, is due to the lower cost for carbon today, and HH isn’t afraid to cook the black stuff into the boat wherever they can.

“We’re racing these boats on one hull now,” adds Morelli, “so when we started, we knew it had to be a full carbon boat. The glass windows too can now take the horsepower that’s being put into these platforms.”

It’s easy to become enamored with the luxury-level construction and cabinetry, but all the bells and whistles that will allow an owner to play off-grid are equally impressive. “This is the first boat we’ve seen in a long time where it was as good-looking at the dock as it sails,” says Rich, a custom race-boat builder himself who can spot a shortcut or shoddy workmanship with one eye closed. “With the construction of this boat, I couldn’t find a single thing to complain about,” he says. “It’s really impressive what they’ve done with so many man-hours.”

The judges agree that a boat of this size and complexity demands a full-time boat captain, ideally one that’s involved in the build, the sailing and the upkeep. To race it will also require a few paid hands to get it around the track, and eight to 10 experienced hands, especially for races involving overnight action.

“We’ve made sure this design is race-ready,” says Morrelli. “The 66 is for an owner who wants to race and cruise, but it’s a big boat, and unless an owner has significant experience, they will need a pro or two to help.”

At Stewart’s fingertips in the tiller seat are push-button controls that deliver instant adjustment to the traveler, sheets and daggerboards. Flash has the racing hardware package with upgraded winches, but there is also a turbo-rig version for those who desire ever more power in the sail plan. There’s no doubt about it, says Allen. “This boat is racy, and you feel it right away in the helm, even without the turbo package.”

While the HH66 carries an all-purpose A5 spinnaker, the judges deploy everything else in the fruit basket — a Code Zero, an inner jib and a J1 — as they zigzag up and down the bay. “Everything is on halyard locks, and it’s easy to get everything up and down,” says Allen. “The rigging and the leads are really clean.”

“Clean” and “sophisticated” are the two traits that come up most often in post-sailing discussions. There is sail-control redundancy throughout the boat and enough technology designed into the systems to keep an owner out of trouble, including Ocean Data System’s UpsideUp anti-capsize system, which monitors cap-shroud loads and automatically triggers an alarm, eases sheets or adjusts the autopilot to prevent the boat from exceeding preset parameters.

“I hear it all the time from guys who are sailing all these types of boats; they say it’s the way of the future,” says Rich. “I can see why because the performance is really there with this boat. It’s not just a step beyond what we’ve sailed in the past; it’s steps ahead. It’s going to be a great boat for long-distance point-to-point racing, where you’ve got four or five experienced guys, a navigator and a few passengers who aren’t sitting on the rail the whole time.”

With such sophistication, however, comes the $4 million price tag, but even that, the judges say, is a selling point. To build this same boat domestically, with the same man-hours, says Rich, it would easily be well over $6 million. You get a lot of boat per dollar, he adds, with the potential for a lot of miles and a lot of fast, fun sailing along the way.

At a Glance:

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Over the past year and half, high-ranking and highly engaged members met inside New York YC’s Harbour Court Station to agree upon what the club’s next sanctioned one-design class would be. The result was the commissioning of the Westerly Marine-built IC37 monohull, of which club member Malcom Gefter has little interest in. The white-haired and freakishly fit septuagenarian thorn in the selection committee’s side will instead be off flying his 36-foot TF10 trimaran. Gefter and four others, including New York YC Commodore Phil Lotz, have embarked on their own endeavor, one that packages multihull sailing with foiling.

The TF10 is not only about going fast, says Gefter, although, for him, that is the appeal. Gefter’s 11 years of experience in one-design grand-prix racing includes stints in the Melges 32, Swan 42, and Marstrom 32 classes. His takeaway from those experiences is that often the difference between winning and losing is the pocketbook and not the skill of the owner-driver.

When North Sails president Ken Read suggested to Gefter he get in on the Marstrom 32 catamaran, however, he saw an opportunity to race at a more level owner/driver playing field. “The Marstrom was a place where the heavy spenders couldn’t dominate because there was a balance of experience, and it’s an environment where they were not comfortable.”

His entre into the multihull world did more than put him on even standing, however. It allowed him to push beyond his own physical and mental limitations, to a place he says most of his yacht club peers today are unwilling to go — “there” being outside their respective comfort zone, as well as the gym.

In lobbying his New York YC colleagues to embrace a multihull concept, however, he had to strike down the stigmas of catamaran sailing: the inherent dangers of pitchpoling and capsizing, and the greater technical challenges of big-boat foiling: primarily the power required to raise and lower the foils under load. Safety, therefore, became the underlying principle when Gefter and a group of stakeholders commissioned their foiling trimaran to the design offices of Morelli & Melvin and the builder, DNA Performance Sailing in the Netherlands.

“If you look at all the ocean-going multihulls setting records, they’re all trimarans,” says Gefter. “This boat bridges the gap between monohull and multihull sailors and embraces both worlds.”

For the foiling aspect of the TF10, they looked to the A-Class catamaran, and the concept of “four-point” sailing whereas both foils and rudders deliver the necessary lift and down-force components for simpler and more stable flight. Four-point foiling also eliminates the need to mechanically drive the boards up and down during maneuvers. Flight control, instead, simply comes from electronically adjusting the foils’ angle of attack. You can set the ride height how you like, says Gefter, depending on your skills, conditions, and personal comfort level.

As a strict one-design class, says Gefter, the TF10, provides a new generation owner/drivers a fresh start because they’re at the same experiential starting point. It is, however, not a dumbed-down foiler on a four-point walker. The 2,400-pound platform is built with pre-preg carbon, the tapered “Z-foils” are carbon, and controls are electric (no grinding), powered by a 48-volt Lithium-Ion battery bank that Gefter says provides faster and more precise foil control than possibly manually and enough juice for 20 hours of sailing.

The first boat of the line was launched earlier this summer and immediately foiling in sea trials before a round of tweaking (anticipated changes to foil and rudder areas) and tested in the lower half of the 6-to 25-knot wind range. “It was faster than the Marstrom in non-foiling conditions,” says Gefter, adding that in flat water, the boat could easily be pushed into the 30-knot wind envelope. With an experienced crew, of course.

For practicality, the boat hinge-folds (like a Corsair trimaran), the rig is deck-stepped, the rudders are kick-up for ramp launching, and the foils can be slotted into the daggerboard cases from above (rather than having to insert them from below while the boat is suspended in a hoist). At less than 3,000 pounds all up, it’s a perfectly towable and compact package.

One of its more attractive selling points, Gefter adds, is the factory-controlled inventory of one-design components as well as the experimental class rules governing professional sailors. The rules, says Gefter, are written to prevent professionals from manipulating them. The class will begin with a pro-am in place whereby the professionals must have multihull experience. They’ll be hired by the class and rotated amongst the boats at sanctioned regattas. There, is however, a “circuit breaker” in the rules that will allow them to revisit the concept should it not work as intended.

The asking price? A half-million dollars. And while it’s a non-commercial venture, says Gefter, they’ve invested in tooling with the potential of at least 100 boats. He’s not in it to sell boats, whatsoever, he admits, but rather to prove a concept, to solve a problem, and have a game-changing platform that ordinary sailors—like him—can embrace.

Watch the TF 10 in action:

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