S9 Camp Foiling Week 2020 report.
Photos from the Foiling Week, video from a past regatta. Report by Michele Petrucci, designer & builder of the S9.
S9 Foiling Week 2020 Report
“The Foiling week 2020 is over, 3 days of wonderful wind with gusts up to 25 knots and a bit cold.
8 S9, 5 Phantom, 3 I fly, one A cat pro. Difficult conditions, strong winds and waves, which we were not ready and trained for, 3 new crews with just 5 hours training with no experience in foiling and catamarans at all!
Unfortunately this covid did not allow us to train and identify the right setup in high winds, probably the best of us was at 60% of its potential including boat, but we still defended ourselves very well, the performance was almost identical to the cat of the higher category, so we are very happy with our small S9, we still have improvements margin in performance, I expect about 30% and that’s a lot of stuff.
The S9 had very few capsizes, no damages to equipment at all, all crews were safe and had tons of fun even outside the races.
Just to mention, S9 was the largest class, it would have been right to have a separate classification: racing S9 in open class against bigger boats in real time without using Ratings is hard to compete but still interesting, however we had a great time all together!
In summary, the S9 class is having a good success, every year members increase, and despite Covid this year there were many, crew ages from 20 to 62, range of use from 1 to 25 knots wind, top speed 26 knots , high levels of racing performance, probably the foiling cat with the best performance-price ratio.
As manufacturer Regattas are important moments to deal with competition and certainly get visibility, some of us do it in a fairly way with fun and friendship some others do not , creating situations of contrast and collision at the start.
We appreciate the performance of young 20yrs old Alessandro Caldari with 5 hours of experience, immediately behind a latest generation Pro on A cat. Greetings to all. S9 Class”.
