It's the real thing...

The Mach 2 story as a press release which is going to on and off line media today.

The hot news is that Australian boat builder McConaghy has teamed up with Moth design guru and owner of KA Sail Andrew McDougall to produce a new foiler Moth at their China facility. McConaghy who built the V70 Green Dragon for Ian Walkers team and have recently put the new Alfa Romeo 3 on a ship bound for Europe are no strangers to Moths having built over 200 hulls. McConaghy and McDougall have always had a meeting of minds and it is rumoured that when they we’re free and clear of other obligations they decided to pursue the next generation moth together forming a new joint venture company.

Mark Evans McConaghy Production Director says “Moths have always been in the blood of this company. The Moth was one of the first boats built by founder John McConaghy back in the early 60’s and coincidentally his second Moth creation was called the Mach II. The Moth has been key to McConaghy pushing the boundaries of development and it is this history that has formed McConaghy’s corporate culture of design / build excellence. Starting with a blank sheet of paper and developing the ultimate Moth with Andrew McDougall gives us a level of control over the final project that is necessary for us to build the definitive Moth. The Moth is an exciting boat and pushes the limits from a development perspective, it’s creating new markets and we wanted to be part of it!”

Andrew McDougall saw the opportunity, “I’ve learned a lot about foils, sails and Moths and grew to understand how to make them faster, we wanted to make the Mach 2 capable of winning the world championships straight out of the box, yet easier to sail than any other Moth. Working with Mark has been a breath of fresh air and I’m really happy with the result!”

McConaghy and McDougall envisage customer boats being built at the rate of several a week from January and perhaps a sign of how important this project is to them both, is they have committed to a two boat testing programme with McDougall and Simon Payne, ex Moth World Champion and the man who’s been brought in to handle global sales and marketing, signing the boats off by competing in the Australian titles in Geelong in January.

“We’ve had an unprecedented demand” says Payne who has been using his own website www.sipayne.blogspot.com to release information about the boat and although the joint venture is keeping the lid on some aspects of the project it’s rumoured that more than 20 boats have already been sold, with many of the top moth sailors already in the queue.

The Mach 2 is alleged to have a hull weight around 8.5kgs, a dreadnought bow like an “A” class cat and McDougall’s second generation foils tested by America's cup designer Jim Bungener, using state of the art computational fluid dynamics.