Fox 50'

The Fox is Loose

 

 

Boats designed by Jean Marie Finot and built by The Fox Group are defined by their directional stability and very light displacement, carry sails easily and steer with minimum strain under autopilot. This light displacement leads to speed and ease of handling with less stress on rigging and sails. These exceptional handling qualities are attributed to a highly engineered structure and generous use of carbon fiber in the mast, keel, rudders, and deck.

 

 

 

To go far, quickly, easily, comfortably, in full safety...

 

The FOX 50 was conceived by using all the modern techniques of the moment, all the experiments on racing sailing boats, specially boats without rating, without prejudices, in order to build an easy, safe and practical boat.

 

In the last races around the world, the evolution of the implementation and the evolution of the materials (specially the carbon masts, ballasts...) lead us to conceive a new generation of boats, more sober, bulkier, with less pieces of furniture and less things useless. These boats, compared to those of the preceding generation, have a profit speed from 10 to 20%. They do not heel, the handlings are much simpler, they are more stable, more solid and thus safer.

In parallel, the navigators seek especially sailing pleasure : the simplification of the boat and its maintainability make life easier and increase sailing time.

 

Characteristics

Main sail 100 m Solent 35 m Génoa 70m Spinnaker 270 m

length 15,24m LWL 15 m beam 5 m Draft 3,60 m Displacement 5 T keel 2,1 T

Main sail 68 m Mizzen 78m Solent 35 m Génoa 14 m Spinnaker 270 m

THE SAILING

 

The boat is stable. This stability is obtained by the broad shape of the hull, a deep ballast and by the water ballast, hidden behind the aft berths, the kitchen and the navigation station.

 

This stability makes the boat very safe, decreases the number of handlings to be made, involve possibility to sail heeled slightly. The handlings are safer.

The shape of the quite symmetrical hull is disigned in order to have a great stability sailing. This balance, when the boat heels, involves her to go always right even with auto-pilot system.

 

Everything is done to give to the boat a weight relatively low.

That gives speed, lightness to handle.

 

Lightness is obtained by:

a tidy construction in Scrimp system,

a mast carbon

a mixed ballast stratified/plomb,

a good organization of construction,

but especially, keeping on the boat only what is significant.

This sobriety, this search of essence are the concern of the architect, of the manufacturer, but also of each customer.

It costs this price to obtain a boat easy to carry out, to manage, to maintain.

 

 

 

 

Laying out

 

2 solutions :

Solution A	Solution B
2 aft cabins kitchen, navigation station and crew cabin in the center 2 toilets and a bow cabin	vast crew cabin in the aft with sight on outside cabin of the owner at port beam side in front of the kitchen and navigation center a passage with 2 benches starboard side 2 toilets and a bow cabin.

The Fox 5O Cruiser

Cruising Will Never Be The Same !

 

Fox 5O Extreme & Fox 5O Open

 

If you've followed sailboat development over the years, you']] know that racing designs, with few exceptions, breed the next - year's cruising designs.

When long, narrow, fullkeeled boats were winning races under the Cruising Club of America rule, most cruisers were long, narrow boats. When wide-beamed, pinched-end, fin-keel designs started winning races under the IOR (international Offshore Rule), the cruising fleet took on a notably wider, fin-keeled look. Now that IMS (international Measurement System) has formed a type of boat-still wide, but with shortercord keels, nearly plumb bows and transoms, and wide, flat stern sections-cruising boats are losing their overhangs, while growing wider aft, to follow suit. This trend would presuppose that what racing designers know about speed can translate to faster cruisers. But the trend has skipped a generation, so to speak. The boat type developed for single-handed around-the-world racing with no real rating rules to consider extremely wide, water-ballasted, huge sail area, bulbed keel-has been virtually dismissed by the industry marketers so far. These high-tech machines are capable of 25-knot bursts and 1 5-knot averages over a 24-hour run, resulting in high speed for long passages in some of the nastiest sailing areas in the world. They are also sailed by extremely shorthanded crews. I imagine that accompanying this speed is the belief that these are extreme craft, manned mainly by deranged Frenchmen, committed to crazy long distance capers characterised by high risk and consistent discomfort. This is partially true, but the resultant perception-that these craft bear little relation to real-life cruising-is not.

 

 

 

The Fox/50

Noted French designer Jean Marie Finot has created some of the fastest single-handed, single purpose ocean racers out there. Now he's trying to change public perception. His vehicle , the Fox/50, the first of which will be equipped with a free-standing ketch rig, is directed squarely at the cruising market. But can a wide, water-ballasted speedster ever hope to sway the minds of traditionally conservative cruisers?

There's no question about the speed credentials of this concept. The offshore racers routinely jump out of the "conventional" displacement-boat limitation of hull speed by planing or semiplaning when sailing off the wind. They can do this because of their light, strong construction and their hull shape-narrow entry with wide, flat aftersections that promote planing. While sailing upwind, however, these boats can be set up with enough heel to keep most of the flat stern sections out of the water, minimising the wetted-surface drag and wave-pounding that would seem inherent in a flat-bottomed design. On ail points of sail their wide beam adds inherent initial stability and lends leverage to the water ballast.

Water ballast is used to keep the boat flat while reaching and at the proper heel while sailing upwind. Seawater is pumped into tanks located as far to weather as possible, but with the added advantage that this balancing weight can be dumped when it's not needed-for example, when sailing broad reaches, down wind, or in light air. In effect this system achieves the same benefit that conventional racers get from putting "beef on the rail" without having to feed, bunk, or listen to the railmeat. The important thing to remember, though, is that water ballast on these boats is extra, levelling ballast, not capsize-control ballast. The keel handles capsize control.

 

In The Fast Lane

 

Seaworthiness

Okay, this boat is fast, but what about seaworthiness, ease of sailing, and comfort, all qualities that individually outweigh speed in the minds of most cruisers? The seaworthiness of this type of boat has been amply proven by the tough test of intense round-the world single-handed racing, competition that presses these boats to perform in all conditions, including seas and storms that cruisers would sensibly try to avoid. These boats have shown they can take the worst the sea has to offer, and they have managed to do this in most cases by sailing at speed rather than heaving-to in caution. And one skilled person can handle them.

The questions of ease and comfort bring us right back to the Fox/50 design, which has carefully addressed both these aspects. The interior layout can include all standard cruising amenities. Although plans for the first boat include only one head, because the first owner is intending the boat for family use, mostly by him and his wife, there are several other interior layout options to accommodate different needs. The point is that this design does not ask the cruiser to give up facilities that he or she would normally demand.

But an obvious question arises about how much the boat's performance is affected by the weight of cruising stores and paraphernalia normally carried by a cruising family of four. There's no question that the addition of any weight beyond the necessary structural strength will inevitably subtract some speed. This would be a fractional loss that might concern the racer, but not the cruiser. It could be logically argued that the passage time saved by this substantially faster cruiser will mean fewer stores to be consumed and therefore less storage space required.

The higher speed potential of this design should also be factored in as a cruising safety feature. This may seem like a contradiction to most of us who are highway-conditioned to equate higher speed with greater risk. But the option of higher speed is a real insurance policy. The ever-growing availability of accurate weather information, precise GPS, radar, and other navigation tools, combined with the speed of this type of cruiser may help sailors to 'dodge' storms, much as a pilot flies around bad weather. The cruising addiction to rugged, heavy, slow boats designed to slug it out with severe storms can now be challenged by strong, light, fast monohulls that are able to take a storm but that have the multihull option of speeding out of its way. Concern about whether this shape is right for the round-the-world cruising family should probably give way to the far higher incidence of coastal or regional cruising, where added speed opens up greater weekend-vacation destinations and the ability to duck more quickly out of bad weather into safe harbours.

The combination of speed, stability, and ease of handling sets the Fox/50 apart. Although the available sloop rig is probably marginally faster, the ketch rig is the fastest and easiest offwing rig. Both big sails can wing out on opposite sides for balanced drive and reduced helm, and a large staysail can be hoisted from the tall mizzen mast. And by dividing the rig into three manageable units and spreading it out horizontally, significant sail area can be carried while maintaining a low centre of effort.

This cruiser can blow right by many raceboats, while retaining the comforts, seaworthiness, and easy handling that are dear to the cruiser's heart. With this kind of boat, cruising in the fast lane is here and now.

 

 

 

Excerpted.. Cruising In The FiW Lane by Garry Hoyt. Courtesy Sail Magazine.

 

 

Photos: Billy Black

Page d'accueil/Home page: www.finot.com