The RAVE V has migrated south for the winter. We ran out of warm enough weather to continue testing the boat in Ohio, so at the beginning of December we brought it with us to Sarasota, FL. Due to the St Petersburg boat show, we were only able to sail the boat twice, but we did get some positive results and learned more about the boat.
The first day of sailing the winds were blowing about 14mph. The sails were reefed from the 26ft to about 23ft in length. We were unable to get the boat to foil as we were driving the bow of the leeward ama into the water before we got sufficient speeds to foil.
After discussing the issue with Larry, we decided to try increase the rake of the masts and reef the sail more the next outing.
On the next outing we rolled the sail up further(winds were about 12-14 again), so we had about 20ft of luff and we increased rake by about 4 degrees. While sailing, we found that it performed much better in terms of the leeward bow burying, however we did run into other issues before we got fully foiling.
While we were able to get about 1/3 of the mainhull and about 1/4 of the leeward ama to raise out of the water, we weren't able to get the boat fully up. The biggest issue we encountered is that with increasing the rake of the mast and the rolling of the sail, the clew of the mainsail was too far down to be able to get sufficient tension on the mainsheet. This led to spilling of air in the leech.
We are sending the sails back to the sailmaker to have them recut the sails. We will be removing about 3ft from the foot, which will leave us with about 23ft on the luff, they will be adding a new set of reef points and adjusting the foot of the sail, so the clew rises about 3in from the tack.
We will be going back down in January for more extensive testing. While slightly disappointed that we didn't get the boat to fully foil on this trip we are encouraged overall with the boat.
