Cirrus Icon Development

As Andy the dancing farmer & I are both Blaze sailors without Blazes, we took '04' along to QMSC so we could spectate on the Blaze inlands & have a play on a decent sized bit of water.

Wind developed into a good F4 & we had some cracking reaches with huge grins to match. Pity there wasn't anyone around with a camera.

Having never capsized this boat, before heading ashore we took advantage of QM's depth to do a test.  Firstly, it's very resistant to capsize.  It gets to about 45 deg & stops, but with sails sheeted & us both on the lee side it went.  It seemed to be quite stable with the mast horizontal - needed definite encouragement to go turtle.  With the mast pointing down it's very stable!  So it needed both of us to bring it back on its side.  Having spent a good few minutes underwater, the mast had filled up so it took a reasonable effort to get it back up, but Andy (sub 70Kg) on the board was able to scoop me (+90Kg) up without any problems.

.....but Andy (sub 70Kg) on the board was able to scoop me (+90Kg) up without any problems.

and that is the amazing bit ....  (Sorry Mike !)  

It looked fun the rest of the time but we are a bit pre-occupied racing of course and I missed your test.....   A bit of elbow room must have been nice compared to what Andy and I had at Broxbourne last weekend

Mike L.

PS - 'Porkies' ?  Normal adults more like whatever GRF suggests. 


Edited by blaze720 - 21 Oct 12 at 7:48pm

Hi Scotsfinn

I've sailed /raced the boat now with many different crews - our combined weight has been less than 130kg to well ... whatever it really was we'll admit to 190kg+  (That is Peaky and me a year or so ago).  I usually sail '03' with the increasingly infamous 'Dancing Farmer' and we total about 155kg.   

Conclusion ?  If it is very light and I mean very you can even singlehand the boat on a balmy Summer Wednesday evening race and everything is easy enough and it positively flies ... well so it should.  Across a more typical series with a variety of conditons I'm very happy with our regular crew weight.  If it howls, just as in most classes, a bit of mobile extra lard can always prove rather useful !   When we add more Icon v Icon racing I think we will find 140-170kg is the 'central zone' of the crew weight distribution but that you can still have your day as well outside this range....

When you get your Devoti built Icon lets get a few of us together and run some training / racing days in early 2013.  There will be at least two more demo boats around in the UK as well soon so a few 'guests' can  be invited along as well.

Mike L. (aka Cirrus)

It's great to see Roman Teply (MD of Devoti Sailing) and his wife enjoying sailing the Icon together 

Edited by rodney - 23 Oct 12 at 6:38am

A few more Icon photos in this set from the FOM:

Edited by pondmonkey - 23 Oct 12 at 9:39am