I finally have arranged for more a trial with more ballast. Fantasma now sports about 220 lbs. of steel plate as ballast. The plate are fashioned into 6 removable planks held in by hardwood strips.
For this daysail in light to moderate winds, I also added 2 x ~ 80 lb sandbags at the mast. That brings gross up to the 800 - 900 lb range, which is in the ball park for what Matt recommends.
Also on board for part of the session were 2 passengers (plenty of room for 3) and this brought total weight up over 1000 lbs. She handled that fine, more than fine, as I think she liked it even better.
All-in-all she was well behaved and fairly stiff with this amount of ballast.
This jibing photo is singlehanded (8-900 lbs) and shows her level and getting down to DWL.
These close reach and close hauled photos show her slightly heeled and the chine digging in.
There is still a bit of lee helm upwind in lighter breezes, but the additional ballast has helped.
3 comments:
Be shure to take som pictures of the steel plate ballast for the next post :D Nice see that you're still working on the boat BTW
George,
Your Fantasma is a beautiful looking boat and it sounds like it sails great also. Thanks for posting the great pictures and video. I'm glad to see you are finally getting the chance to enjoy sailing Fantasma.
I like the removable hatch covers, so you can stand up while sailing.I assume these can be stored against the forward bulkhead in good weather?
Where the rudder post comes through the stern, is there a saucer shaped piece of plywood to collect any water splashes, like on Paradox?
Along with Anders requested picture of the steel ballast plates, could you post a picture of the mast step on the bottom of the hull? Is this just a reinforced section of the hull bottom, beefed up with extra fiberglass and epoxy?
All the best.
Dave
I've found too that Matt's sharpies seem to perform best when they are fully ballasted to their designed water lines. When they are too light, the chines just don't dig in deep enough to provide good lateral resistance and the boat doesn't stand up well in heavy breezes.
In regards to your lee helm issue, I believe that this may well have been a problem too aboard the Enigma 360. When I was looking under the deck where the mast passes into the cabin, I noticed that the mast opening had been further trimmed aft another 2 1/4" after construction so that the mast could be raked back even more. With this change, the little sharpie seems to be well balanced.
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