Harvey Bowden's Firebird Orion 15, this frame was taken from a video. Sailing very well, and close to the point were it gets too exciting! Highest speed during Speed Week 1999 was 20.84 knots.

Orion is a Martyn Smith design from 1983. A micro multihull cruiser and winner of the 1997 round the Isle of Wight race.

Having Fun!

In this picture Orion has the mast forward which tends to bury the bows, compare this to the first picture on this page where the mast was aft which helped to keep the bows up.

The following is from John Perry's report on the AYRS meeting and helps to explain the five pictures below which are taken from a video.

"Harvey Bowden brought his highly tuned and stripped out Firebird catamaranto this years Speedweek and used it not only for speed trials but also to demonstrate Slade Penoyre's suggested self righting method. He has nowtested this self-righting method seventeen times with success on all but two occasions. Unfortunately one of the two failures was during a demonstration on the Tuesday of Speedweek and resulted in the breakage of an expensive carbon fibre mast. During the interval we studied a video of the demonstration. The main shrouds are both fitted to tackles and with the cat capsized to a fully inverted position the shrouds were adjusted to incline the mast under the water. An air filled bag, which I think was one manufactured by Seaflex, was then attached to a spare halyard and winched to the masthead. This successfully brought the cat to an angle of heel somewhat more than 90 degrees, floating on one hull with the mast tip supported by the  bag. The next stage is to incline the mast the oppositeway to cause the boat to overbalance and flip upright. Unfortunately at this point the shroud out of the water was inadvertently slackened off whereas it should have been kept tight. This meant that as the cat very suddenly flipped upright the mast stayed roughly horizontal and smashed against the hull. Harvey immediately ordered a new mast but obviously the boat was out of action for the rest of Speedweek.

Slade has since been thinking about avoiding the need for adjustable length shrouds. In this case the final stages of righting would be by a pole and water filled bag deployed from under the bridgedeck.

During the interval we also watched video footage of Orion travelling at well over 20 knots on the speed course. At these speeds the lee hull throws up a most impressive bow wave."

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Amended 08/04/06