Broadblue 385 - One Owner's Pros & Cons

[Paul Carey]

Originally Posted by Troutbridge

Anybody tried a Parasailor?

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No I have not personally tried a Para sailor chute , how ever @ the Jan 08 ARC seminar they reported on the Nov/Dec 07 event where BB 385 Cat-Man -Do had a rig break using a para sailor . as you are aware the World Cruising club (the commercial co who organise the ARC & others ) promote para sialor chutes & their rep was blaming the rig . We have on our 385 a Westerways asymetric chute 12 m x 7 m controlled by a pair of handy billy travellors btween the two bows which with a snuffer works fairly well . However we are concererned the the standard halard may not be man enough & plan to uprate this to dyneema in the near future . If specifying a new boat I would recomend going for a reacher . I was involved in the delivery of 385 La-Lu-La Ipswitch to Turkey & this wing on wing outperformed any chute & was a lot easier to handle …

[Karinya]

Hi, I have recently bought a 385 BB and find i have really bad weather helm. I have only sailed mono hulls before chatering a BB and decided i like it and bought one.
Last week sailing in 20kts (first time out) I found i had massive weather helm. I brought the main down and still it needed 5-10 degrees of helm to keep her on a broad reach. I was flying the normal genoa and did not reef it.
Was i over canvassed and because the mast is so far aft does the genoa cause weather helm?

Any help would really be appreciated

[Spud7]

Hello,
I'm sorry for the delay in replying to this post, as I've only just seen it.
I refer to the BB "Cat-man-do" mentioned at the beginning of the thread. I was on-board Cat-man-do on the ARC in '07. I feel I should maybe add a few words. The "rig" failure referred to was not a rig failure as such, but a failure of the blocks used to tack the front of the sail to the front of the hulls.
We used the Harken blocks recommended and supplied by the supplier of the Parasail, before we got to St Lucia there was a huge bang as first, one of the blocks failed, closely followed by the other. They were subsequently replaced with Harken Black Magics' at huge expense. The supplier of the sail declined to help with replacements etc.
One thing I would mention though is a rig failure we had on the way back, about 500 miles from Portugal. If you have a BB 385 and the Bowsprit is held in place by "shrouds"? from the bottom of the hulls. Please check if the shrouds have a normal shackle at one end. If they have I strongly recommend they are replaced with bottle screws. We had a shackle fail and it very nearly brought the whole rig down. There was only two of us on board and stopping the genoa forestay flapping around and not ripping the rest of the rig off the boat was not something I'd like to repeat.
On Cat-man-do they've since been repaired and strengthened.