Banjo

Banjo.

Banjo is an Ian Farrier designed F9 AX trimaran.

see www.f-boat.com for more details about the designer and boat. Our boat features under "latest news" a few years back. Look for "F9AX being built in South Africa".

I am also pleased to say that Ian Farrier uses a picture of our boat on the cover of his Study Plans book.

But briefly, the boat is 9,55 meters in lenght, 7,02 meters wide and weighs about 1 750 kg. The sail area is 59 meters square. That is a very light boat.

I built the boat mainly by myself over a period of 4 and a half years. The initial work was done in a warehouse at my business in Humansdorp, and the fit-out work was done in our garage at home and on the driveway to our house. The latter prevented the family cars from being parked in the said garage for three years.

What took 10 seconds to type, took an awfull long time to build.

I am pleased to say the build was successfull and the boat is everything I had hoped it to be.

It is fast. In any kind of breeze the speed soon climbs to 10 kts and as the breeze kicks in, the boat would speed up to between 12,5 and 14 kts. It would maintain that speed for ever. Stronger gusts of wind will push the speed up some more to about 16 kts. 18 and a bit knots is the highest speed to date.

All this is achieved with very little effort. The boat just goes!

It is the boat's ability to get up into the low teens and to hold that speed which is making me confident that we can be the first boat in at St Helena in December. To win a longdistance yacht race you want aboat that can give you nice high average speeds. It is no good to speed up to 20 kts for a few seconds and then to drop back to 8 or 10 kts again. You want the consistently good averages.

for more info on the Race itself, go to:

www.thegovernorscup.co.za