Queensland States Championships 2017: Steve Brewin 1st

All images Lox Pix / Queensland A-cat Association , Full galleries at Lox Pix Flickr web. Excellent dorne Video by “Explore Eye in The Sky” –  Official States web held at Humpybong Yacht Club: hyc.net.au.
2017 Queensland A-Cat State Title went to Steve Brewin who scored 7 bullets and a dns in eight races. Second place for Andrew Landenberger, the former IACA President was able to compete and foil in spite of his knee being reconstructed (sic)! good event for Landy with not much sailing behind latest months , third place for Mark Johnson.

Brewin, 2011 World Champ,  is used to win local events and he is also one of the main testers for Exploder yard along Darren Bundock. His platform is a D3 but with a more forward case position than Landy’s D3, and also newer and radical boards from Gonzalo & Jakub, version is Z15, the team continues R&D towards Sopot.

On rigs/sails, Landy already sailed a shorter mast at the 2017 Aus Nats with good results, he felt the shorter mast was doing good and that his lack of hours foiling upwind were a major factor for not getting more perf. It seems Brewin took notice of Landy’s shorter mast, cause that is what he used in this regatta.

When I first saw Brewin’s new sail it looked rather a strange sailplan, at first glance and without any reference is difficult to identified a shorter mast more with that sail plan. Reviewing fleets pics and scaling his rig I identified that ‘strange’ sail plan origin: a shorter mast.
In contrast with Landy’s more uniform planshape , Brewin went for an extreme fat bottom and a sharp taper towards the top. Trying to maintain same area for a 9mts mast and keeping the small top, gives you that sail plan we are seeing in first pic above with Steve balsting upwind foiling.

This sailplan proved to work really work for AUS 4 in combination with his more updated platform/foils and of course being a top notch A-Cat competitor / foiler helped ‘a bit’.
In the galleries the upwind foiling difference can be seen in some sequences, check link above.
Brewin is on a mission for Sopot Worlds in August: aclassworlds2017.pl

A shorter mast used by Carolijn at Medemblik and later by Landy and now by Brewin seems the way to go for the targeting the 100% foiling mode. Landy tells me that he raced some calm wind races and he did Ok too.
This Queensland State Championships was full breeze on so we’ll need to wait to see the shorter rigs work in 5knots. The trade off is that new devels are taking earlier lift off to lower tws requirements reducing the range where full floating will be an advantage to ‘Classics’. Just remember our Punta Ala reports…

No news from the DNA camp on further devel, but clearly Mischa and PJ are not going to stand still, they never do. Sopot will be defined by upwind foiling and if breeze is on I go for shorter masts to be key. Some further sail devel will be there , I see much room to play with the windsurfing double luff/cams concept.

Great Worlds ahead in terms of flight devel, but IACA is not leaving the floaters behind, check news on this at https://a-cat.org/?q=node/984  .

Queenslad State Top 10 below. Full reuslts at https://hyc.net.au/racing/regattas/a-class-states-2017/