INAUGURAL ISSUE

Welcome to Forte Carbon Fiber's first News Flash! Our first issue is about the MiniTransat Acadia’s new, super light mast ~ a mast that pushes standard safety boundaries ~ yet holds firm against punishing racing and weather conditions time after time...

COMING ISSUES

» Retrofit with a Forte Bow Sprit Kit
» New Mast for a 35' Hinkley Pilot
» New Spars for Outward Bound

TALK ABOUT QUICK WEIGHT LOSS...

Forte designed and built a new mast, boom and bow pole for Acadia, a Mini Class prototype, in November 2006. Sailed by Clay Burkhalter and designed by Rod Johnstone, Acadia is a solo, offshore, transatlantic racer.

On request, Clay’s new mast pushes the safety factor envelope further than any other spar we’ve built. Forte ordinarily designs masts with a safety factor 3-4X that required to keep a mast standing under normal sailing conditions. Our robust safety factors allow for slamming load, broaching, crash jibes, capsizing and other punishing events.

Clay asked for a super lightweight spar to boost Acadia’s competitiveness, so we built a 29 lb, 39’ mast with a 1.8X safety factor. Even after applying additional hardware reinforcement patches, the finished Forte mast weighed about 14 lbs less than Acadia’s previous carbon fiber mast, supplied by another manufacturer.

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"My Forte mast is Fantastic. It is light and extremely strong. I have already put it through a number of tests which included two gales in the Bay of Biscay, and on three different occasions have done flying gybes (thanks to autopilot malfunctions) with the spinnaker up, and each time it (the mast) came through unscathed. In the Pornichet Select Race, I gybed in 30 knots of wind, 2 miles from the finish, with a full main and broke one of the running backstays, so no backstays on downwind... everything was okay."

-- Clay Burkhalter, June 19, 2007