When looking at Moonwave from a distance, before she was easily recognizable by her blue metallic paint and the radar dome at the point of the longeron. The paint stayed the same – she got a nice new paint job of the same color & the radar got removed [more info about electronics choices in the next post]. Since her re-launch Moonwave has now two new very distinct features that will make you notice her from far. The first one are her brand new straight dagger boards [more about those in one of the next articles] & and the second new feature is a beautiful new boom.
In the past we had a “park avenue” V-boom that came with the original rig package (mast, boom, longeron, martingale). The boom was made out our carbon with a clear coat finish and looked very nice but it was probably over-spect as there was lots of layers of carbon that made it very heavy. Moonwave has a hydraulic ram inside the boom for a push button trim of the main sheet. With the old boom we had to change the main sheets a lot as the sheet had to do tight turns from the boom to the main traveller. Carrying a lot of weight high up is also not of advantage for a catamaran. We started to look for better options for Moonwave.
With the assistance of Rigging Projects we got different propositions for newer lighter booms and we decided for a very elegant and light weight version from Lorima. The new boom is almost 100 kg [!!!] lighter than the original one and has a lot of great new features that improve performance and safety. The boom has “fish bone” brackets that welcome the main sail when not hoisted. Those carbon brackets do the same job as the V-boom before but without the extra weight. The boom also fits the original hydraulic ram for the main sheet and bigger sheaves for the main sheet to avoid the tight bents that caused us troubles in the past.
A great new feature of the new boom is also the “second” sheet that comes out a bit forward of the boom end. This “line” can be used as boom preventer or in case the hydraulic fails, it can be used as a spare main sheet that comes back to the forward cockpit and can be trimmed with the primary winches – very smart…
The new fish-bone boom also has a rotating gooseneck (the part that connects the boom to the mast) – this relieves quiet some torsional force pushing the boom towards the mast. This feature allows smoother sailing especially downwind.
We want to use this opportunity to thank Lorima and Rigging Project for the great service and end product – we really like our new elegant carbon boom and the paint job of black and clear carbon is a stunner.
And when the sail is not up, the boom is still visible in all its splendor due to the custom main sail cover done by Incidence Sails.
And Moonwave is “happy” about the lost weight above the coach roof ;-)
