[brian eiland]

Originally Posted by Mirabella V

..The word "race" must not be used since MV is strictly prohibited from racing by insurance companies (my guess is that MF is too, since Lloyds is fairly standard). So there will be no formal start and end point. My father has spoken to Tom Perkins about this already, and the idea was just to go out and sail together (!) if possible.

There are clearly problems with two large boats sailing together, not the least of which is wind disruption. It may end up that we ruin each other's ability to sail well if we're too close. So this may not end up being quite the scene everyone is picturing.

We are hearing interesting numbers from MF's sail trials, and these are similar to MV's, so this should be close. The difference in waterline length may be just too great to us overcome for outright speed in heavy air, but the weight differential may work for us in medium wind.

Anyway, don't hold your breath for this to happen anytime soon, but eventually we'll come across each other in open water. That will be fun.

MIRABELLA & THE MALTESE FALCON MEET AGAIN IN ANTIGUA
The world’s biggest sloop and the world’s biggest clipper met up again in Antigua.The Mirabella V wasn’t racing, of course, just doing a bit of sail testing, but everyone wanted to know who won.

This is how the Superyacht Cup organizers saw it.
The first day’s sailing was a spectacular sight for all, with a stunning display by two of the world´s largest sailing yachts, as the three masted Maltese Falcon (88m) and the sloop Mirabella V (75m) sailed away from the start area outside English Harbour.

The two yachts started together one hour after the first boat, in the pursuit style race for superyachts. Maltese Falcon and Mirabella V are two radically different yachts, but they both performed impressive speeds of over 22 knots in the 18 – 20 knot trade winds. The course took the fleet on a close reach, south of Antigua, followed by a bear away, towards Curtain
Bluff, and a beat back up the coast.

There was little doubt that on the broad reach Maltese Falcon was the fastest boat, flying full sail, but after rounding the bottom mark for the beat back up the coast Mirabella V showed she was willing to put up a fight. Although officially not competing, boat for boat, the two yachts were clearly displaying their credentials.

This is how Mirabella V’s captain saw it.
We were sitting at anchor, in Antigua, minding our own business. I got talking to Chris, captain of Maltese Falcon and told him I was taking Mirabella V out, as I needed to do some work on the sails while underway. He told me how happy it would make Tom Perkins if we would go and “play” with them in the Superyacht Cup the next day, off Antigua.

When I called Mr Vittoria, to ask if I could take her for a spin, he said he had received an email from Tom, not an hour before, asking him to let us sail. He cautioned me that insurance doesn’t let me race, so to just cruise along, but that it was a great opportunity for the two boats to have a great sail together.

We’d had some work done on the bottom section of the mainsail, in Genoa, by Doyles, and I had yet to re-attach it to the top section of the main, not an easy job to line up the batten pockets so the batten can lace them together, but I decided I could sail with a reef in, because I didn’t have the bottom section attached. I can hear the keyboards typing away already at that comment “still not sailing at full hoist, yadda yadda yadda........”. In retrospect, it was a fine sail selection; I had ample power and all the speed I needed. After the hoist, I gingerly bore away and sheeted in. When I settled onto the course to the leeward and a little ahead on a beam reach. Maltese Falcon was piling on sail all over the place and I thought that it was all over the way she looked to be passing me. I killed the engines, feathered the props and rolled out a jib.

In the 18-22 knots of wind, I found we were only just being overhauled by Maltese Falcon. Because of my concern for the mainsail foot, I didn’t want to vang on, or sheet on, to what I would normally like, so the main was not doing
its best, but I figured Mr Vittoria might not like it if my next phone call was about a ripped mainsail, especially with charter season starting, as I don’t have another in the container!

Anyway, that’s my excuse for the reach, at first; being gentle on the main.
The staysail is the equaliser
I unfurled the staysail and found that we were now pretty even on the reach, both doing around 17 knots. The staysail was the equalizer.

Maltese Falcon looked magnificent; waterline length rules, on a reach, and Maltese Falcon has plenty of that over us, so I was surprised we could hang on.

Remembering that Maltese Falcon was competing and we were not, I had to confront my next problem. Maltese Falcon was above me and had to bear away and gybe at the turning mark. I don’t gybe and now had the problem of letting Maltese Falcon roll me and gybe in front of me. I furled the staysail and she creamed along in front and gybed; it looked pretty good from where I was driving. I then, despondently watched Chris take off down the run. He was sailing very high of the mark, because I assumed he needed to run square to reduce sails before the next beat, so he put distance on us very quickly, before slowing down as he ran square to the mark.

I rolled the jib and tacked under main. We came out of the tack at
about 3 knots, set the jib and bore away. Next thing we are still doing 15-16 knots on the run, which amazed me. Once I was up and running I don’t think we lost distance down the run/broad reach.

I closely watched Maltese Falcon round the bottom mark and saw her come out of it at very slow speed and then tack. I realized she was being squeezed for water beyond the mark. My plotter showed her as being in less than 10
metres of water, so I avoided the mark and stayed in deep water (draft being 10 something metres).

I then waited until she was well to windward of me again and then came on the wind. This was Mirabella V country moderate seas and 20 knots. I was getting more confident in the mainsail, so sheeted and vanged a little more. I never was trimmed on as tightly as I wanted, though, and thus was carrying a little lee helm up the beat. We saw 33 knots AWS up that leg, with 35 AWS being the jib’s theoretical limit. I found that 30 degrees AWA worked well with the main undertrimmed. The alarm went off for the jib sheet tension, set at around
20 tons, so it was near its limit. I am glad we had just end-for-ended all the running rigging, because we were maxing stuff out. We also had the cap shroud 200 ton limit alarm going off, but it felt very comfortable.

We put a mile on Maltese Falcon
Curtain Bluff to the finish, off English Harbor is about 5 miles and I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say we put a mile on Maltese Falcon up that beat. I so severely overbaked the layline that I reached into it, but this is what Mirabella V is supposed to do and I can’t take much credit for it. No shame for Maltese Falcon on this leg, it’s just not her point of sail.

At this point we’d had a chance to compare the boats on different courses and I had work to do to the mainsail, so I bailed out and left them to it. The original start time for Maltese Falcon was 1400. Tom Perkins requested it be brought forward an hour, but I don’t think anyone told the chopper pilot, so that cameraman missed some great footage of the two boats barreling along at 17 knots.

That night we all had a beer together in Nelson’s Dockyard. Maltese
Falcon stole the show by going stern to all lit up. I saw Chris and we were both pretty happy to have had a blast together.
There just aren’t that many sailing boats over 200 feet that can actually get out of their own way and we had just had two of them, only a couple of boat lengths apart at 17+ knots. It all makes it more fun for owners and spectators and that is the name of the game.

The tortoise & the hare
Mirabella V and Maltese Falcon are apples and oranges; you can’t compare them. I, personally, think Mirabella V is faster on all legs in moderate wind, as she should be, but Maltese Falcon eats me on the corners, as they just brace the yards around and steer. It is the Tortoise and Hare scenario.

I commend Chris on the way he runs and drives Maltese Falcon. His skill complements a very fine craft; she is a really handy vessel. Mirabella V sat out the rest of the races, so I could keep prepping for charter. Sadly, I watched Maltese Falcon through my porthole as she tore up the Caribbean Sea.
As the race organizers have adjusted the handicaps, the racing has become closer and closer, with Maltese Falcon finishing mid fleet today, in the final race, I think. Good job Chris, I was jealous every day.

The best thing to come from the day is that Maltese Falcon is toying with some underwater mods to improve upwind performance. I say “bring it on, Chris”, then she will draw too much water to be able to use my favorit berth at Antigua Yacht Club. See what our priorities really are now?

Guess I’m ready for a “flaming” from Sailing Anarchy readers. Bring it on, guys.

Everyone who saw the boats sailing that day loved it and I just had way too much fun to worry about it.
David Dawes, Master.

The Magazine from BYM News Issue 1 - January 2007
http://www.*******.com/magazine/January2006.pdf

[YachtNews]

That surely made good reading. Stuff like that keeps you nailed to the pc, going to bed at late hours all the time.

[brian eiland]

Every day of the regatta the vast 88m (288ft) three masted Maltese Falcon built by Perini Navi left everybody in awe including experienced yachtsmen. The remotely controlled free-standing carbon fibre rotating rigs, complete with 18 yards are a technological masterpiece, setting 15 in-mast fuling square sails operated by 75 electric winches aloft. The detailed design, testing, planning and engineering for such a vast and untried project is difficult to comprehend and the execution is an outstanding testament to all invloved.

For the final day of The Superyacht Cup it was possible to see the awsome offwind power of Maltese Falcon in action. Rather than the typical offwind problems of large sailing superyachts where exrtra crew are required to handle gennakers to give any reliable offwind performance, on Maltese Falcon the helmsman just bears away and the square sails instantly offer maximum projected area.

On the final reach to the finish Maltese Falcon was sailing close to 20 knots pushing a large bow wave in front of her.

[brian eiland]

On July 3 David A. Kaplan's new book, "Mine's Bigger": 'Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built' was due to be released.

"Tom Perkins had a dream. It wasn’t to get rich, acquire power, or marry fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He’d helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006, his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board of directors triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and to become Danielle Steel’s Ex-Husband No. 5.

No, as hit his 70s, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever–the “perfect yacht.” His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship–as long as a football field, 42 feet wide, with three masts each rising 20 stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger–the Maltese Falcon–would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the 19th century.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek’s David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat. We meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him. And we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is ever eyeing. In a battle of egos on the high seas, Perkins loves to preen, “Mine’s better! Mine’s bigger!” On the Falcon’s climactic voyage across the Mediterranean–1,600 nautical miles from Istanbul through the Dardanelles, to the Greek Islands and Malta, by Sicily and Sardinia, and on to the French Riviera–we revel with Perkins as his creation surges along at record-breaking speeds.

This is the biography of a remarkable boat and the man who built it. More than a tale of technology, Mine’s Bigger is a profile of ambition, hubris and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur. And in the end, too, it is a story of love and loss.".....Kaplan

Buy the book, see more photos, watch a video...at Kaplan's website:
http://www.davidakaplan.com/

[kalmeran]

Perhaps one should read the comment on this book on the website of the Falcon......www.symaltesefalcon.com

[YachtNews]

Yea I read it yesterday...was shocked but yeah...

[brian eiland]

Found this interesting set of photos by Tim Wright of the Falcon at the St Barth's Cup
http://www.photoaction.com/index-1.html

..click on St. Barths 'Bucket' 2007,
..then chose Maltese Falcon

[brian eiland]

Does anyone have knowledge of the 'luff-rope' details on Maltese Falcon??

I use the word 'luff-rope' (for lack of another word) for the edge treatment of the sail that must follow some grooved track in the yardarm?

[kalmeran]

Originally Posted by brian eiland

Found this interesting set of photos by Tim Wright of the Falcon at the St Barth's Cup
http://www.photoaction.com/index-1.html

..click on St. Barths 'Bucket' 2007,
..then chose Maltese Falcon

Thanks, Brian ! The best photo-series of MF I have ever seen !
I never knew whether I would like the Falcon or not, but since I visited the Bucket, and after having seen her, I fell in love with her : she is anchored or sailing so impressive..........that she is very,very high on my list as "favourite yacht" !!

[brian eiland]

Originally Posted by kalmeran

...I never knew whether I would like the Falcon or not, but since I visited the Bucket, and after having seen her, I fell in love with her : she is anchored or sailing so impressive..........that she is very,very high on my list as "favourite yacht" !!

She kind of grows on you, doesn't she? I wasn't so sure I'd like her when I first saw the drawings

[YachtNews]

I'm not sure whether this sail installation pics of the Maltese Falcon were seen already but here are some from the manufacturers, Doyle. They are an interesting set of pictures:

http://www.doylesails.com/gallery/in...20Installation

And for Carl, you said that you wanted to see some more pics of the Bridge of the Maltese Falcon then here are 2 pics. These Two pics I have never seen with the consoles and displays still wrapped up in covers:

http://www.doylesails.com/gallery/in...ls%20-%20d.JPG

[brian eiland]

...another excerpt from Kaplin's book...


"After the customs shipment appeared, after we lifted anchor and docked alongside a tanker to take on 20,000 more gallons of diesel fuel, we set out for the ten-day shakedown cruise through the Dardanelles, into the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean, on to Malta and up to the Côte d'Azur and the Italian Riviera. At that point, the Maltese Falcon had sailed only one day in her life. This was unusual: sea trials for a new yacht typically lasted for weeks to ensure that everything worked and that the boat wouldn't sink under the stress of wind and seas. But the two 1,800-horsepower engines had performed flawlessly, the electronics showed only minor hiccups, the experimental sailing rig was still standing, and nothing leaked. And Perkins was in a hurry. He wanted out of Turkey, where he had spent parts of five years while overseeing the Falcon's construction—often living aboard a motor yacht he kept docked at the shipyard. He'd had enough of the noise of all-night welders working on freighters the next dock over, toxic fumes from the painting shed, metal scraps in his scalp—and the nasty stray cat in the shipyard he named Satan. He wanted the open sea.

The sea was his sanctuary—all the more so after the death of his beloved wife of thirty-three years, Gerd Thune-Ellefsen Perkins, a decade earlier. Perkins knew the Mediterranean and Caribbean better than his own San Francisco Bay. Untethered to the worries of everyday existence, life on the water seemed to allow Perkins to escape to a world of beauty, freedom, and on-demand solitude. He could brave the elements, yet live in the rarefied luxury of mahogany and cabernet. He could test out every new technology and gadgetry that an engineering geek loved, yet have chefs and stewards to cater to every detail of his needs. His 138-foot old schooner Mariette had given him the chance to compete on the European racing circuit with a classic yacht. His 154-foot Andromeda la Dea allowed him to cruise the oceans and circumnavigate the globe; on that ketch, he had sailed to Antarctica before rounding Cape Horn, criss-crossed the Atlantic seven times, and in a victory of happenstance over prudence, survived the 'perfect storm' of 1991 near Newfoundland that killed at least 12 people.

................

Day by night, as he experimented with the Maltese Falcon's sail formations and angles of attack on the wind, Perkins absorbed himself in his technological masterwork. Most of the time, he seemed to prefer that obsession to the corporate intrigue he thought he'd long gotten out of. No longer was he on the board of thirteen public companies at the same time—chairing a record three of them on the New York Stock Exchange. The Falcon was the crowning achievement of his half-century of yachting. It was to be his retirement project—actually, given the boat's mammoth size, it was to be his self-described 'retirement village.' As the maiden voyage got underway that morning in July 2006, Perkins decided he'd try his ****edest to stay on course with what was supposed to be the trip of his life.

It was a journey long in the making. Perkins had gotten what he wanted most of his life. The Falcon was the ultimate prize—a boat nobody else could have conjured up, a fantasy that made him a visionary, a fool, or both. Nearly six years earlier, he had decided to create 'the perfect yacht.' Given both advances in materials science and the explosion of dot-com lucre, two other American tycoons were attempting about the same thing. All the better to Perkins: he wanted to make the best boat, but it would even more satisfying if he could beat out others while accomplishing it. 'Mine's bigger,' as Perkins liked to say, meant somebody else's needed to be smaller. In a kingdom of haves, he had to be a have-more. Temperamentally, constitutionally, pretty much clinically, Perkins needed to be in a battle of egos on the high seas. After all, there's not much fun in winning a competition of one.

Perkins's 'clipper yacht' was intended to evoke the era of magnificent vessels that once raced across the oceans. But his 1,367-ton square-rigger would be more New Old Thing than mere tribute to the past. It was a futuristic marvel born of modern technology and design. Gone was all the rigging: there were no ropes, no wires, nothing to support the masts or the horizontal yards, or to control the fifteen sails carrying nearly 26,000 square feet. No longer was there a score of deckhands to climb the rig to furl and unfurl every sail. Instead, the masts were entirely freestanding and, unlike masts on any other boat, they were not stationery, but rotated. The sails were deployed at the push of a button, rolling out from inside each twenty-five-ton mast. Dozens of computers and microprocessors—connected by 131,000 feet of cable and wires—integrated the whole thing, allowing helmsman and crew to control the boat nearly effortlessly. And unlike the clippers of yore, with their vast, white expanses of billowing canvas, the Falcon's sails in effect formed a nearly flat vertical wing on each mast. Conventional clipper morphs into fin-de-siècle machine—a marriage of old and new, or a mutant of tradition? It depended on your perspective.

Damm the risks, damm the uncertainties, damm the costs—it was full-speed ahead. That was the Silicon Valley ethos that Perkins was so elemental in establishing. Now he would change the culture of sailing. Part art, part science, and part magic, sailing was a way of commerce for thousands of years. It had been the instrument of global discovery going back to antiquity. It was a romanticized sport of kings since the seventeenth century. Sailing was no longer necessary to travel the world, but it remained essential to Perkins. Sailing was beautiful, dangerous, enduring, primordial, noble. Sailors reined in nature and harnessed the wind——yet were at their mercy. Tom Perkins resolved to leave his mark on that long arc of history and imagination—in short, he intended nothing less than a sailing revolution. And a vessel through which his boundless ego could be expressed—the largest privately owned sailboat on the planet, the Maltese Falcon."

This is the story of that yacht and the man who built it.

Excerpt from Mine's Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built by David A. Kaplan (HarperCollins 2007).

[brian eiland]

...great view, courtesy of marine photograher Amory Ross

[Codger]

If the intent of that photo was to make the viewer want to be on board, it worked.

[brian eiland]

Originally Posted by Codger

If the intent of that photo was to make the viewer want to be on board, it worked.

Does kind of make you want to be there, doesn't it.

Too bad I couldn't get the whole length of the photo in to the width allowed on the forum, as the extended back deck creates yet another different perspective, especially with the two crew members standing at the rail

This photograher, Amory Ross, does a great job !!