– Oct 22nd 2019 Yachting World Magazine

E
ach year the curtain rises on the Mediterranean grand prix regatta season at the PalmaVela. The increasingly popular event is not just a chance to shake the rust off race boats after the winter, but more often than not there are a couple of eye-catching new designs to be spotted.

The 2018 PalmaVela saw the Melges 40 make its public debut as a class at the popular multi-class regatta. Interest spread like wildfire. Despite a small entry of five boats, competition levels were high. Four of the five international teams won races during their nine race series, the regatta title went to the wire, and there were just five points between 1st and 4th.

The Melges 40 is the confluence of two sets of ideas. Botin Partners were already convinced that canting keel technology was the way forward and had done their own preliminary designs, while Melges had a small number of successful top-level Melges 32 owners who wanted to move up to something bigger. And the new design simply had to be faster; which is a big ask considering the downwind and reaching speeds of the 32.

Adolfo Carrau of the Botin design office is a huge fan of the end result. “The concept and the way the boat behaves are unique,” he explains. “It is really easy and safe to race hard but it goes very fast. It is very overpowered but it is easy to control. It has a huge sailplan and a very tall rig. It accelerates really quickly and the owner-drivers can push the boat very hard downwind because the bow is usually up, and it has the twin rudders. In essence you get 10 per cent more righting moment than the Fast 40+ with a bulb approximately half its weight.”

Botin’s Carrau confirms: “You always return to the boat with a smile on your face. That is not marketing speak. I have always returned to the dock with a smile on my face. Everyone always looks forwards to going sailing in 20 knots and big waves because it is so easy to sail. It will go 23 to 24 knots.”

He smiles, “Who needs foils? It is very simple. Keeping it simple was our priority. It is very easy to get very complicated very quickly. Complex boats are appealing but at 40ft they quickly need a shore team to maintain and you need an engineering team.

“We wanted to avoid experiments. After all, in the round the world races the canting keel system here is well proven. So we are not inventing anything, we are putting pre-existing technology in a production boat.”

Read the full article at Yachting World

The Melges 40 is the only canting-keel production one-design yacht in the world