Schnick

The seattle Apple boat is not a Choate 40. My family had one for 10 years, transom shape very different.

The white pic looks to be after considerable sanding, which Blackheart needed. I agree, by far the best looking of these boats, I love that coachroof. The current gleaming paint and brightwork come out of Strait Marine. Along with the no-fear-sized rudder that is now on her. Going to be a very nice boat.

Also look at jibs. AM and ETNZ ar least, and I think Prada, have floating up/down jib cars. Ineos only appears to have in/out and a clew board with multiple holes. No real way to actively camber/flatten that setup other than maybe via forestay adjustments, which have other side effects.

My Catalina 36 had a boom ending near front of cockpit. I found a matching piece of boom section and spliced about 2' in at the forward end using SS rivets. Relocated all hardware, cut down a used J105 mainsail. Everything about the boat got better, more power, better balance, much better off wind speed, better pointing upwind. The balance argument is silly. Just like now, if the helm loads up too much you will ease some mainsheet or drop the traveler. Seriously considering moving the whole rig in my current boat aft 18" and expect zero balance issues...

Shoulda been a scow

What would really make this interesting is if there had been a non-foiling Manuard scow in the mix. The Classe 40 scows showed speed deltas against the conventional boats very similar to what the foiling 60s do. With so many foiler now out, but JLC hanging in the pack, it would make for a pretty interesting compare/contrast.

All I see is that there is now time to buy a new boat and have it ready before Swiftsure. Now if only there were decent boats for sale.

My family has had two VW rabbit based diesels in boats totalling about 25 years of ownership. The first was a pathfinder and the second was a Brazillian version. They have both been extremely reliable so I don't buy the arguement that a crazy amount of 'metal' is required for compression-ignition systems. And as noted above, ridiculously light for a 4 cylinder diesel at 43hp. Of course as a converted gas engine the stroker crank in this engine doesn't leave clearance in event of a timing belt failure - so don't let the timing belt fail! Complete used heads off a Rabbit are getting hard to come by so this is not longer a $100 fix..

Most surprising thing I think is that the mast did not fail in compression before the bow peeled off...

We had a crew member last year with a start-line app on a Garmin smart watch - virtually useless. You need the gps module fixed in one place on the boat, and you need constant access to the DTL if you are going to make actual use of it.

The VO65s had this problem also - without foils - last round the French-Chinese guys figured this out first and were very fast because they would reduce cant and get more RM..

Is a new Farr design going to be good? Total domination in IMS in the 90s, VO60s, Farr 40s, Farr 30s, Cookson 50 probably the best offshore production race boat ever designed. Cracks showed up at the start of the VO70 era, then we got the 11S (turd), Farr 400 (turd), Farr 280 (no idea, but at least a marketing turd). I'll concede that the two best non-foiling IMOCAs in the world are Farr designs but I think they're a good 10 years old also. I'm interested to know who left the office around that VO70 period, and who's really designing the new stuff. I know Donovan was in there during the Mumm 30 project, not sure when Bruce's hand left the page.

I just did the fwd cabin of my powerboat with 1/8" plywood, painted white. It came in a bit cheaper than the polywall, different finish of course. This replaced shag carpet that was glued to literally every surface of the boat - really, they put the carpet on before installing the bulkheads. Anyhow, compared to the stick on material, I lost headroom in many areas, in some cases up to an inch, as the material needs moderately consistent curvatures rather than conforming directly to the surface. You can see the gap I am hiding around the forehatch. Doing it again I would probably sacrifice even more headroom so that I could put crossmembers in every 3' or so, and attach the roof to that. In this case I picked flat planes of the structure to be my 'joining' points. On the hull sides I hit everything with a 60 grit sander and then painted the inside of the hull, but the underside of the deck was too ugly to do this...

I think the TP52s and similar are saving a few pounds with these Lombardini packages. https://www.lombardinimarine.com/en/product/ldw-1003-sd/