Designer hopes to cop good karma

Rob Shaw and Ben Costello believe their 9.1-metre Karma Police will prove competitive with the much bigger yachts in the Round North Island fleet. Photo / Supplied

When the 2011 Round the North Island fleet sets sail next Saturday many eyes will be one of the smaller boats in the fleet: Rob Shaw's Karma Police.

Karma Police stunned many race watchers with her close-to-the-leaders performance in the 2009 Coastal Classic. At just 9.1 metres LOA, the lightweight (displacement: just 1800kgs) canting-keel racer has proved able to foot it with far larger yachts, especially once the wind slides aft of the beam.

From the pen of her owner, designer Rob Shaw, Karma Police and near-sistership Deep Throttle have been making quite a name for themselves in local coastal and harbour races.

Shaw now hopes to build on that reputation when he and crew Ben Costello set sail in the Round the North Island Race on February 19. The race, which circles the island anticlockwise, is a gruelling, 1244 nautical mile marathon with just three brief stopovers: a 24-hour break in Mangonui and 48-hour lay overs in Wellington and Napier.

Despite the Shaw 9's relatively short waterline, her owner is confident she has a good chance of being up with the leaders.

"Since we've been sailing Karma Police, she has proved to be much faster than other boats her size and well up with the 40 and 50 footers," he says. "The boat's systems have been designed for ease of use when sailing short-handed, when doing manoeuvres like hoisting and dropping sails, so we are really well set up in that regard. We are hoping for lots of downwind conditions so we can compete with the bigger boats."

Shaw says he had the Round North Island race in mind when he was building Karma Police and ensured he was set up for both short-handed and fully crewed sailing.

"The boat is built of carbon fibre, so it is incredibly strong as well as being lightweight," he says. "We have sailed her in some pretty wild conditions; the last SSANZ [Shorthanded Sailing Association of NZ] race this winter was in up to 40 knots and we were down to storm jib and two reefs but she handled really well.

"We're going to get wet, that's for sure, but we'll be safe."

Shaw believes his design has proved successful because it is not an extreme open-style chine boat.

"Instead, it combines light displacement and high righting moment. This provides excellent all-round performance, even in the low wind range, and good control characteristics in the upper ranges."

Shaw says the design's canting keel, combined with lifting foils, provide significant improvements in performance upwind over conventional keelboats, producing speeds in the mid-7s with good height. However, the biggest gains are produced reaching and running, thanks to the design's high power-to-weight ratio.

Construction is pretty impressive for a boat of this size, too: carbon skins over a foam or Nomex core, vacuumed over male moulds and post cured. Karma Police's foils (including twin asymmetric dagger boards for better upwind performance) are built inside CNC-cut female moulds for accuracy.

The yacht's rig is a triple-spreader with topmast runners.

"These give better control and an element of safety when running under masthead gennaker," says Shaw. "A coarse- and fine-tune purchase system means the runners don't need to be loaded onto a winch when gybing."

The keel, canted by a 6:1 purchase running back to a pair of dedicated cockpit winches, ensures there is sufficient stability for two-handed racing.

Shaw says a pre-race weather forecast from weatherman Bob McDavitt also seems like good news for Karma Police.

"It's interesting how we have recently had those two cyclones, because Bob predicted it would be this kind of summer when he spoke to us before Christmas.

"He reckons the pattern in mid-February will be for some decent easterlies, which would be ideal and would give us lots of reaching."

Shaw says he and Costello plan to stick to their own programme, rather than worrying too much about the other boats in the fleet.

"We want to concentrate on getting maximum speed out of Karma Police. This will be the longest race we've done on this boat, so being consistent on each leg and not pushing too hard will be important."

Both s have extensive offshore sailing experience and currently hold the WSSRC (World Sailing Speed Record Council) speed record from Hawaii to Japan. Shaw has also extensively campaigned Karma Police in the 2009 and 2010 B&G Simrad series and Coastal Classic yacht races.

Costello's CV includes the 2008-9 Volvo race and the 2008 Round North Island race, on board the 15-metre canting keel yacht Ran Tan II.

Karma Police

LOA: 9.1m

LWL: 8.8m

Beam: 3m

Draft: 2.5m

Displacement: 1800kg

Sail Area: upwind 66sq m, main 42sq m, , jib 22sq m, gennaker 120 sq m

Fleet timetable

Round North Island Race Start: February 19

Leg 1: Auckland to Mangonui

Leg 2: Mangonui to Wellington

Leg 3: Wellington to Napier

Leg 4: Napier to Auckland

More info: ssanz.co.nz