comanche sailboat video

VIDEO. Have you ever sailed on board Comanche, the fastest monohull ever?

Comanche, the 100-feet yacht built by Hodgdon Yachts ( here you find our exclusive interview with Tim Hodgdon ), is the fastest sailboat ever built. These summer, during the Transatlantic Race from the US to the UK, Comanche smashed the monohull 24-hour distance record: with 20 crew aboard, covered 618.01 nautical miles at a 25.75 knots (47.7 km/h) average, beating the previous 596.6nm record set in 2009.

In this article you can find a video filmed on board during the Transatlantic Race and published on New York Yacht Club You Tube Channel .

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Comanche – A Fast Racer

October 18, 2015 By Daniel Mihai Popescu 2 Comments

Comanche is a 100ft (30.5 meters) sailing yacht, which has been built with the scope to break every yachting record possible, winning prestigious yacht races, and meaning that it will probably become the fastest. The beautiful yacht, a Super Maxi class, has been commissioned by the Netscape creator, James H. Clark and his wife, the former Victoria’s Secret’s Australian model, Kristy Hinze.

The sleek black and red yacht has been built under a contract with a lot of confidentiality clauses by Hodgdon Yachts from Maine. Comanche has one of the largest single-infusion hulls constructed in America, and even globally. The oven used to cure the hull and superstructure is the largest one in the United States, and has been built by Hodgdon Yachts itself. They have been using advanced composites for several years, both for yachts and for military projects.

Super Maxi Class Yacht, Comanche

The naval architects are Van Peteghem Lauriot Prévost (VPLP) and Guillaume Verdier, acknowledged names in the racing world. The 150 foot mast has been constructed by Southern Spars and the sails are from industry leader, North Sails , including a spinnaker of more than 11,000 square feet. Launched in September 2014, Comanche is the result of studies of the IMOCA Macif and Banque Populaire, first and second in the 2012 Vendee Globe. Different from her other 100′ rivals, like Wild Oats XI or Perpetual Loyal , with her large beam, her mast far aft and a boom directly over the transom, Comanche has a much larger sail plan. The cockpit has been designed for manual maneuvers rather than hydraulic and therefore saves weight. Comanche has a powerful hull shape and a maximum draft of 6.5m in order to enter most ports. With a low freeboard and lateral ballast the center of gravity has been lowered to gain power.

	september 2014		760 m2
	VPLP – Verdier		1100 m2
	Hodgdon Yachts, Maine, USA		< 30 tonnes
	30,45 m		6 m
	8 m		45 m

Comanche and its crew, downward view

Comanche is commanded by renowned US skipper Ken Read, and raced by a world-class crew of twenty-one international sailors.

Her performances, like what Ken Read has explained that happened during the Transatlantic Race 2015, an average speed of 25 knots per total, a top speed of 38.8 knots, and large distances passed in the mid 30’s knots, are things which will make me to dedicate more space to this kind of posts. I am thrilled by what man can achieve with a good boat, and pure racing, like this, using just the power of the wind and the ability to float over the furious waves, even to brake them if necessary.

Comanche Sails!! FAST!! from Onne van der Wal on Vimeo .

Above is a very short (too short) video made by Onne van der Wal, which shows Comanche sailing. Before publishing this, I have been looking for more videos, maybe more relevant, like I wish for this website to be, a better compilation of related sources on different matters.

So, I found this on YouTube, posted by sailingshack, where Ken Read presents the magnificent boat.

It really is a great boat, a very expensive one as well, it took $15 million to be built, and many millions more for the rest (called “campaigns”), and it made second place in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, losing to Wild Oats XI , and also second in the Transatlantic race 2015 (TR 15), loosing to Rambler 88 with a difference of only seven hours, which is really incredible, because in such a competition, they arrive at days distance. More on racing, in future posts, maybe I’ll make a new category.

I hope you like it and I’ll tell you more about yacht racing in general. What do you think, are you speed racers?

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About Daniel Mihai Popescu

Daniel Mihai Popescu is a ship engineer with background in sea transportation, real estate, yacht brokerage, construction, entrepreneurship. Avid reader, traveled the world, explorer of the human nature. Never stopped learning, now I create and manage Wordpress based sites . • Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn • Instagram • Pinterest • Goodreads • Medium •

January 7, 2016 at 14:04

Buna ziua, Mi-as dori un articol scris de dvs. despre velierele cu chila leagan, swing keel sailboat cum sunt cunoscute. Multumesc.

January 7, 2016 at 20:31

Am să caut mai multe informații despre ele, mie tipul ăsta de chilă mi se pare o complicație inutilă deși îi văd utilitatea. Mi-ar face plăcere dacă v-ați abona la newsletter, șamd…

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Built to win: On board sailing yacht Comanche with Jim Clark

Software mogul Jim Clark wants yacht racing line honours. But does his new radical supermaxi sailing yacht Comanche have what it takes to go up against the best? Marilyn Mower finds out...

Comanche is a superyacht that belongs at the front . The image below shows her tearing along – ahead of Sydney Hobart legend Wild Oats XI , a feat that surprised everyone watching. It was an advantage the brand new 30.5 metre Hodgdon speed machine was able to maintain all the way to the Bass Strait during the 2014 Rolex Sydney Hobart. But when 30-knot winds failed to materialise, the more slender Wild Oats slipped past Comanche and into the lead, a position she held all the way to Hobart for victory and her eighth line honours . Second place is never going to be good enough for Comanche ’s owner, software mogul Jim Clark, but it was a minor miracle his yacht was there at all. She was only launched in September , so the famously brutal race represented a kind of masochistic shakedown for a yacht designed for one thing – to win.

Think Laser dinghy or 49er morphed with rocket ship and you’ll get some idea of the qualities of Comanche . At the yard, the racer was partially hidden behind two larger yachts with immaculate pedigrees, Meteor and Artemis , but Comanche ’s square bow and carbon sprit jutted out beyond them, drawing the eye away from the varnished teak of her neighbours to a lean sailing machine intended to go as fast as possible powered only by the wind.

Sailing legend Ken Read, who also happens to be the president of North Sails, managed the project from day one for Clark. Built at Hodgdon Yachts in Maine, Comanche had a hand-picked design and engineering team of international experts. It also had a construction schedule that raised eyebrows from the first day Clark talked to_ Boat International_ about the radical project during the America’s Cup Superyacht Regatta in San Francisco, September 2013.

Comanche launched one year later and after stepping the mast in Newport, Rhode Island, and just two weeks of sailing trials, including a 600-mile qualifying sail to Charleston, South Carolina, the boat was packed aboard a cargo ship and sent to Australia to compete in the Sydney Hobart, which starts each year on Boxing Day.

Clark and his Australian wife, Kristy Hinze-Clark, met the boat in Sydney for its short re-commissioning, Hinze-Clark racing aboard the boat in a harbour tune-up event on 9 December 2014, where the yacht placed second despite poor conditions. The tabloids had a field-day, captioning photos with, “The supermodel and the supermaxi” and “She’s got legs” in reference to Hinze-Clark’s modelling career. These days she is a businesswoman, director for the Australian Nature Conservancy and the mother of two girls.

In our exclusive interview with Clark, shortly before the race begins, we ask simply: “Why?”

“It’s a hobby,” he says, “I like the supermaxis, they are like Volvo 60s on steroids.” Clark appears to be done with the J Class – his 42m Hanuman is up for sale – and is not a huge fan of what he calls the “multihull phase” of the America’s Cup with its reduced crew numbers. “The old sailing community is in monohulls and it’s nice to keep the guys engaged – there are lots of good sailors in the supermaxis and the guys are a lot of fun.”

When Clark decided on a supermaxi sailing yacht, his plan was to go for line honours rather than wins on corrected time, and speed/distance records that could be set for yachts with human powered winches. “I don’t want any of that record stuff with an asterisk that says push-button winches,” Clark scoffs. With this target, Clark and Read embarked on a “design experiment” for a yacht that could sail 30 knots or more on a broad reach. The experiment pushed them to some extreme stats, which Clark says were run through CFD tests and simulations time and again.

“The 25-foot (7.6 metre) beam saves weight,” Read says. “By going wider, we can have less weight in the keel to keep the same righting moment, thus we will go faster.” This thinking is carried over into the keel itself, which is solid stainless steel and not welded. With a 6.7 metre draught, the keel can be two tonnes lighter than a comparable keel on a boat with half the draught. The governing factor was the depth of Rhode Island’s Newport harbour where the boat will be based when not chasing records. “With the keel canted to one side we can just get to our berth,” Read says.

The downside to beam is increased surface drag when sailing flat in light air. “Being considerably wider than other boats, we need to be heeling at 11 to 13 degrees to present the same beam,” says Clark. “In light air, we are at a disadvantage. When the wind cooperates, there is no question the boat is explosive.”

Hodgdon, the oldest boatbuilding business in the US, might seem like an odd choice if you don’t know that part of the yard’s annual output is high-tech military vessels and another part is carbon fibre limo tenders. In fact, Hodgdon is quite skilled at innovative construction techniques and when Tim Hodgdon agreed to build an oven to cook Comanche ’s carbon fibre hull, the deal was struck. The yard’s location also made it a good gathering stop for its far-flung team.

Some critics have said the superyacht is too extreme and too powerful to handle, but Clark just laughs at this and suggests we “ask Kenny”. “Yeah, it’s still an unknown but I’m not overly concerned,” he adds. “The hull is well baked and it’s been ultrasounded and X-rayed. There is a fuse in some of the loads so that nothing super bad can happen. But you can’t have a fuse in the rigging… Some of those termination points on the rig are kind of scary,” Clark says.

That rig, which rises 47 metres above the waterline, is more than 50 per cent of the length aft from the bow, a surprising configuration but based on model testing for best all-around performance with the foil and appendages.

Also innovative are the daggerboards outboard of the mast and slightly forward of it. By canting the keel and putting the lee side daggerboard fully down, the boat generates enough lift to keep the angle of leeway to a minimum or crab up to a mark.

The wide cockpit, full of grinder pedestals, hydraulic sail controls and sophisticated LED panels, gives the impression of a workhouse with modern instruments of torture. In a way, that is what they are. Grinders will work these six pedestals to turn the Harken winches. The only push-button winch on board is used to raise the mainsail. Once that sail is up the halyard is locked off and the winch isn’t used.

The winch pedestals are set slightly inboard and Read explains that when sailing on other 30 metre yachts he found that waves coming inboard at 30 knots or so would sweep the helmsman or winch grinders off their feet. “I have fetched up in the corner of the cockpit with pieces of steering wheel in my hands,” he says. Thus, by having 10 feet more beam than other 30 metre boats, there is space to put people and gear in a safer location with the added benefit of space for sails to be temporarily stored outboard of the pedestals on the high side.

Another interesting option is set right into the deck. Small black plugs cover screw holes that allow a dodger to cover both hatches. “On long distance races, we wanted the option to erect a dodger to keep the crew safe when on deck,” Read says. A slot in the cockpit sole just aft of the dodger allows the steering wheel to be moved forward, allowing the helmsman to stand behind the dodger for more protection.

Step below the superyacht's deck and you can see how much weight has been saved. The single-skin carbon fibre hull and foam cored framing is fully exposed. It is mostly black with white non-skid patches. The forward end of the vessel is totally open, to store sails. Directly under the cockpit on either side are the crew berths, which keep the crew centre of gravity aft, close to the position they would be in when on deck; thus the trim of the yacht is not affected by off-watch crew moving around.

Directly under the cockpit sole is the navigator’s area with barely space to sit up. “The only requirement that navigator Stan Honey had was that we made the navigator’s seat 1.8 metres long so that he didn’t have to fight the crew for a berth,” Read says.

Talking to Read one gets a sense he is completely at ease with a project of this magnitude and the commitment it will take to sail it to its potential. He has sailed around the world with several of his present crew and all had input into the new boat’s design. That counts for a lot of experience, in addition to the French design team of Guillaume Verdier and VPLP (Marc Van Peteghem and Vincent Lauriot-Prévost). “Without the designers we would probably have built a far more conservative boat,” Read says, “but with their help we have taken a leap forward.”

On deck, Comanche is also radically different. All halyards go to the masthead, where they are locked off in the same style that was pioneered in the 12 Metre Class. But on Comanche, tension is applied on the sail luff by hydraulic rams mounted on the foredeck and by pulling on the sail at the tack. “It reduces weight aloft,” Read explains, “and allows complete sail adjustment from the [safety of the] cockpit.”

Another advanced feature not often seen on smaller sailing craft is that the jib tracks run transversely instead of fore and aft. “The clews for each headsail are in the same place and we might use the same sail for going hard to windward and when easing off onto a reach. With this arrangement all we need do is ease the track car to leeward when coming onto a reach. This enables us to keep power on without altering the shape of the sail when changing course relative to the wind,” Read notes.

The deck-stepped carbon fibre mast has swept spreaders to eliminate the need for adjustable running backstays. In some ways this is a disadvantage in that the masthead cannot be moved fore and aft when sailing up and downwind, but it eliminates the need for checkstays and runners. The masthead position is controlled with backstays to each corner of the transom and lines that are led into the mast from the backstays to control the rig bend.

“I started this boat thinking I could race it,” says Clark wistfully. A degenerative condition in his ankles that makes standing uncomfortable has recently cropped up in his wrists as well. “They made a seat for me where I can drive it,” he says, but he opted out of the Sydney Hobart to make room for America’s Cup-winning skipper Jimmy Spithill to assist Read on the helm.

“I feel confident we’ll start getting line honours and next summer we’ll do the transatlantic race and see how that goes,” promises Clark. “I’m optimistic.”

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100ft supermaxi Comanche looks set to confirm a new monohull 24 hour distance record

Harriett Ferris
July 14, 2015

Jim Clark and Kristy Hinze-Clark's 'speed-monster' Comanche sailed 620nm over a 24-hour period to scoop the record

The new world sailing speed record for the greatest distance covered by a monohull in a single 24 hour period is now 620nm (subject to ratification by the World Speed Sailing Council). The previous mark was set seven years ago in the Volvo Ocean Race.

The 100ft supermaxi, built for no other purpose than record breaking , looks set to be called the fastest monohull in the world after an incredible perfomance in the Transatlantic Race .

Conditions lent themselves to a record-attempt with a long stretch of strong wind and reasonably flat sea, following a frustrating period of light airs.

Designed by Guillaume Verdier and VPLP Architects and launched in late 2014, the yacht put in an impressive perfomance in the Sydney Hobart Race but narrowly missed out on the top spot, taking 2nd place in her first appearance on the racecourse.

Comanche finished the 2,800 mile race at 01:49 GMT on Monday 13th July, sailing from Newport to Plymouth in a startling 7d 11h 35m 11s .

(The only boat to complete the course in an even shorter time was the MOD 70 trimaran Phaedo3, with an elapsed time of 7 days, 2 hours, 4 minutes, 9 seconds. Watch their incredible video here )

Comanche’s skipper Ken Read sent in this report from onboard:

“What started off as a very frustrating light air Transatlantic Race 2015 has turned to gold for all of us aboard Hodgdon’s 100 foot super-maxi Comanche. Approximately 1300 miles out of Newport, Rhode Island in the North Atlantic we set up underneath an approaching low pressure. We’ve had a phenomenal stretch of strong wind and reasonably flat sea which has propelled us to what we believe is a new record for the greatest distance covered by a monohull in a single 24-hour period.”

COMMENT: Launched: the fastest monohull ever?

GALLERY: Super-maxi Comanche, a yacht so beamy she’s christened the Aircraft Carrier

After jibing to starboard about midnight EST on July 9th navigator Stan Honey and I had a long talk about the chance that we had a possible weather and race course window that may give us a run at the 24 hour record. The previous 24-hour monohull distance record was set by Ericsson 4, skippered by Torben Grael in the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 race. They covered 596.6 nautical miles (1104.9 km) during Leg 1 between Alicante, Spain and Cape Town, South Africa with an average speed of 24.85 knots (46.02 kilometres per hour)

Comanche was built with the ability to sail the boat using only human power, allowing the boat to qualify for record attempts like this. Stan and I decided at that time to sail the boat during the entire time period surrounding any possible 24 hour record in the manual power configuration that the WSSRC requires. Turns out this was probably our best decision of the race so far!

The 20 person crew aboard couldn’t be more proud of this achievement. A special thanks to Jim Clark and Kristy Hinze-Clark, the designers, the builder – Hodgdon Yachts – that helps manage this amazing campaign. And of course thanks to Comanche for seriously having some jets.”

Follow the tracker for the Transatlantic Race and see the rest of the fleet’s progress here

Watch Comanche in action below:

COMMENTS

100ft record breaking yacht Comanche on a test sail - YouTube
One of the first videos of the new 100ft canting keel yacht Comanche, designed to break race and ocean records, shot by photographer Onne van der Wal...more.
"Comanche" VPLP 100 Super Maxi Ocean Racing Yacht - YouTube
Maiden sail of Jim and Kristy Clark's VPLP 100 foot Super Maxi Ocean Racing Yacht COMANCHE in Newport, Rhode Island on October 13, 2014. Skippered by Ken...
Comanche Crushes Transatlantic Record - YouTube
Comanche, the 100 foot racing yacht owned by Jim Clark and Kristy Hinze-Clark, has successfully set a new monohull transatlantic record of 5 days, 14 hours, ...
Comanche Sails!! FAST!! - Vimeo
FAST!! Jim Clark's 100 ft carbon Hodgdon built machine Comanche took off (literally) for Charleston, SC last week and I grabbed a couple of video clips and still photos…
Have you ever sailed on board Comanche, the fastest boat
Comanche, the 100-feet yacht built by Hodgdon Yachts, is the fastest sailboat ever built. Here a video filmed on board during the Transatlantic Race.
Comanche, a yacht so beamy she's called the Aircraft Carrier
STERN Comanche’s beamy stern swiftly earned her the tag The Aircraft Carrier. Her optimum heel angle is anything over 20°, while at 25° she has the same wetted surface as Wild Oats XI .
Comanche: Across the Atlantic - Sail Magazine
Ever wonder what it’s like sailing aboard the 100ft super-maxi Comanche. Well, now’s your chance to find out in a new documentary produced by Great Big Story that chronicles the boat’s record-breaking transatlantic passage in 2016.
Comanche – A Fast Racer - The Yacht Owner
Comanche is a 100ft (30.5 meters) sailing yacht, which has been built with the scope to break every yachting record possible, winning prestigious yacht races, and meaning that it will probably become the fastest.
Built to win: On board sailing yacht Comanche with Jim Clark
We talk to software mogul Jim Clark about racing his 30.5m supermaxi yacht Comanche in the Sydney Hobart and his future sailing plans
100ft supermaxi Comanche looks set to confirm a new monohull ...
Comanche finished the 2,800 mile race at 01:49 GMT on Monday 13th July, sailing from Newport to Plymouth in a startling 7d 11h 35m 11s. (The only boat to complete the course in an even shorter...