1/4 tonners + the cup

Having looked indepth into possible campaign into the quater tonner class revival it seems that the class has lossed the spirit of the event as it was intended. In order to have a competitive 1/4 tonner these days owners are spending between 20 - 50k on optimising their old quater tonner boats making them IRC friendly. It is getting ridiclious as the event quite rightly will not allow new built boats however some crews are taking old quaters throwing rigs, keels rudders, even entire deck away and rebuilding them to optimise them to suit the IRC rule under which the event is run. The hull might be origional but are they still able to class them as quater tonners? 

This may be all well and good producing a more interesting boat to race but is becoming cheque book sailing. The old unoptimised quaters still racing in IOR config. do not stand a chance at winning against those that have thrown silly money at rebuilding old quaters. Should the RCYC be splitting the class providing a cup for optimised boats and those that still are racing in the spriit of the quater ton class under IOR config??

The jury might be out on this one......

Originally posted by detente  but is becoming cheque book sailing.

The ton classes always were cheque-book sailing. There's obviously enough people who want to play this game and good luck to them.

 

I think you have to look at where a lot of these boats are coming from. Most that have been heavily IRC optimised were found rotting in barns and had to be re-built anyway. The likes of Morty et al, who happen to have a bit of cash, have got a lot of these boats back on the water and competitive and yes they cost a lot of money. That said there are also several highly successful production 1/4 tonners like Boleros, MG Spring 26s, and GK24s which should be able to compete under IRC reasonably well for little cost.
A lot of one off 1/4 tonners were ply boats built to minimum weight and longevity was not their strong point.

This past weekend i was sailing a quarter tonner in my local yacht club
regatta, built by my dad in 1986, with original everything, even sails!
Unfortunately it was only ever raced of the club PY and never got an IOR
certificate so we cannot race in the cup even though it is an original and
more with the spirit of the rules than these moderised ones!

You've completely missed the point! We bought our bolero almost by accident, we were looking for a sonata and while searching we came across the bolero.  The bolero was never designed to be competetive under 1/4 ton rating which is where boats like Purple Haze came from, she was an optimised bolero, smaller than standard with more sail and slightly different lines aft, not really a bolero as most seem to believe! That is beside the point though, our bolero was what was known as a Mk2, the difference being she has a lead keel, a small sugar scoop, an inboard engine and a slightly taller rig with jumpers and swept back spreaders (the standard bolero had a 3/4 swept back rig and an outboard with an iron keel).

Since buying the boat we have taken the inboard out becuase on a small boat IRC doesnt favour it. We replaced the old rudder with a new modern design because the old one was rotten and very very heavy! We have cut the scoop off the back to reduce overlaps now that the boat floats higher with 200kg of engine parts removed!

That was the end of our work on the boat until last years cowes week when we T-Boned runaway bus as they broached into us. We had some damage to the bow so while we got that fixed we also moved the forestay out to the bow from its previous position about a foot back. This gave us some extra fore triangle so we had enough room to make the genoa slightly smaller, turn it into a jib and sheet it inside the shrouds.  Doing this we went from 150% overlap to 115% which IRC also like.  We lost 2m of sail area from this which we added to our spinnaker and this allowed us a slightly longer pole for more projection because the SPL is a function of spinnaker area. Roughly 0.456 times the squareroot of the area.

For the price of some new sails and some patching up holes where engines used to go on top of the new rudder we have ended up with a much better boat to sail with much more room down below which is also faster around the windward leeward courses that we race on.  Fast enough to trouble the £50k boats at the top of the fleet at the quarter ton cup this year and finish in 9th overall. 

My advice if buying a 1/4 tonner is to either buy a really sorted one which should set you back no more than £20-25k and do nothing to it apart from buy new sails and sail the boat fast. Secondly you could buy a knackered old boat, the bigger ones tend to be more popular but just look for clean lines. Stick it in a shed, sand it back and strip everything out by hand.  All this should only have cost £7-8k.  Then spend the remaining 15k on a rig and a new rudder and some new paint.

Don't do what we did and buy a boat that someone had lovingly restored for cruising and then buy new sails for the old rig and then not have enough money for a new paint job and a new rig a year or so down the line!  You really have to take the time to get the boat right first time in the shed and then you can fiddle with it to make it faster.

As I have said though, most importantly look for a boat with clean lines, some of the boats had strange creases etc to make them fit the rule, perhaps these days the production boats that just happened to fit are a better bet because the lines may be cleaner.  Just a thought!