
Leetle Cat Gets a Tune Up!
Three rather wondrous boats emerged late last summer from Trudeau Yacht Yard; the Twenty, the Knockabout, and the Leetle Cat. Each had distinctive features and responded to specific user requests.
The Leetle Cat was the last to hit the water, and like all Trudeau boats, it was modeled after a particular real-life boat: The Beetle Cat. The Beetle Cat has a unique history, and since my home port is SL’s Nantucket Yacht Club, I have to admit I’m pretty partial to it.

Nearly 100 years ago, the Beetle family of New Bedford were held in awe for their production of sturdy whaling boats, the kind that made history of Nantucket sleigh rides.

How incredible were those sailors in their work-boats? Go read Philbrick’s In The Heart of the Sea, or if you are on the other side of the Atlantic try Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty, both tales of incredible journeys by determined sailors crossing oceans in frail dinghies from centuries past.

Anyway, let’s get back to them Beetle Cats! The Beetle family invented them around 1920; they were intended as a small boat that would help children learn to sail. No surprise, the Beetle Cats quickly became incredibly popular, and (also no surprise) rather huge fleets of kids who never grew up continue to race them, often pretty outrageously.

Fully aware of the history, Jacqueline Trudeau initially positioned the LCats as teaching boats, proven in the real world and ideally suited for Second Life as well. As shown above, these are the first, and to date the only Trudeau boats with a centerboard!
Although intended as a teaching boat, LCats almost immediately ended up on the racecourse (I blame Epicurus Emmons For that perverted vision (grin)). They’ve since proved themselves to be extremely popular and great one design competition boats.
if you have any doubt, go take a look at Waypoint Yacht Club’s Leetle Cat Regatta, where 18 boats crossed the start line together! A truly wondrous event that was as much fun to watch on the SL World Map as it was from the waterline.
The LCats were so popular, in fact, that a host of opinions and ideas landed up in the TCYR suggestion box. J Trudeau’s been hard at work on a Leetle Cat refit, and this week those upgrades hit the water!

The plot above shows speed over ground for the new Leetle Cat 3.2. the green curve is with centerboard down, and, as expected, it clearly shows enhanced upwind performance with the centerboard deployed. The blue curve on the other hand shows the same result with the centerboard up. Somewhere over 110° apparent the stabilizing benefit of the centerboard is outweighed by drag, and the boat travels significantly faster with the centerboard up.
Since the LCat was originally designed as a teaching boat, the centerboard effects detailed above are somewhat exaggerated compared to real life. For example, at 160° there is a 50% boost in SOG with the centerboard pulled.
The numbers shown above are comparable to the plots for the earlier LCat, although we don’t yet have PHRF scores.
The graph below puts the LCat in context, showing where it sits speed-wise compared to its sister ships the Knockabout and the Twenty (with the upcoming J-Class boat thrown on top). As you can see, the LCat is substantially faster than either KA or T20. In real life without a jib the LCat will be slower of course, but once again Trudeau Classic Yachts took the liberty to tweak the speed for ease of use as a teaching boat. I’ve yet to hear anybody complain the LCat s too fast, though!

Everyone who now owns an LCat will of course gets the v3.20 upgrade for free. don’t worry, the new boats are just as pretty as the old ones, they’re just a lot smarter, lighter, and more friendly. (Oh! and before I forget, there is a big surprise you’ll discover as soon as you open the box, one I guarantee you’ll love… I promised not to tell what it is, so you’re going to have to discover it yourself (OK OK, you can give me an IM too if you can’t wait).
Anyway, here’s a partial list of the ‘more mundane’ feature upgrades:
a new, more efficient wind shadow system
a revised, lo-prim HUD;
an option to pick your own internal communications channel, and
a simplified “settings” notecard system that is easier to use and offers a sailor a higher degree of mistake-proof control over the boat’s interface.
You can also find a copy of the LCat FAQ here.
As I mentioned above, the initial performance plots look pretty similar to the curves I reported for the LCat awhile back. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will race the same, however. In the upcoming weeks I’ll chart the windshadow and reefing plots too, and we’ll all figure out together if the upgrades impact function in a crowded race fleet.

As a prelude to this great release, last week I watched the fleet from Waypoint Yacht Club put the absolute-last beta through its final tests. At the crack of dawn in SL, the intrepid Waypoint fleet quietly converged on the Atlantic raceline. They were the last quality check, sailing the same boats the Schiffsratten had tested a few days earlier, and deemed worthy of their high standards.
Taku Raymaker commanded a small band of experienced skippers that included Massy Johin, macro Nacht, reia Setsuko, Kei Cioc, and Nuggy Negulesco. They did a simple, upwind-downwind Test Drive and pulled out all the stops, pushing the new hardware to its limit.
In the first race, macro Nacht had all the tricks and held all the cards. I only have the unofficial times shouted by the line, but by that oft uncertain index, macro crossed the line with a perfect 00:00, followed eleven seconds later by reia Setsuko. Massy Johin was right in there, less than five meters astern, crossing the line at +00:00:27.

As I mentioned, the Waypoint push-the-limits LCat race was pretty early in the morning on the side of the globe, and I started my day wearing jammies and fumbling for a cup of coffee with one eye open. However, as soon as Commodore Raymaker started that two minute countdown, my eye bounced open and I gripped my mug with white knuckes…
In case you hadn’t noticed… the Waypoint Fleet are pretty incredible. They know how to race!!!
Trying my best not to spill my coffee, I rubbed my eyes and leaned into the monitor, watching macro rip ahead, taking the clean air and making the best of it. That’s macro in the above right picture, rounding the yellow mark with the rest of the fleet off in the distance over his left shoulder. macro did a flawless lap, coming in well ahead of the rest of the fleet.
Right behind macro, however, a real duel broke out between Kei Cioc and Massy Johin, two marvelous skippers.
Many of the best sailors in SL are real-life sailors who bring their experience and skill to the racelines here. That’s not the case for Kei Cioc, however. When I last spoke with Kei (with Taku’s help!), he told me he had never sailed a boat In real life. His skill at the helm is all the more remarkable since it is entirely the product of his focus and determination to learn sailing essentials within SL’s constraints.
All Kei’s effort has certainly paid off this past year! He was a finalist in the 2008 World Fizz Cup and more recently he’s proven extremely dangerous in a variety of One design classes. A quick look at the race standings for the last several weeks shows Kei racking up repeated first and second place finishes in Fizz 3, Leetle Cat, ACA33, Mirror… And practically anything else that floats.
On the morning in question, however, Massy Johin was pressing Kei hard; as you can see in the top frame of the image below, the boats were parallel and overlapped as they descended on the yellow mark and entered the two-boat-length zone. Up to that moment, Massy was in a commanding position, holding windward advantage and hugging Kei to keep him shadowed. As soon as they reached the mark and entered the two length zone, however, Kei saw the chance to break free from Massy’s stranglehold.
Kei had ‘inside rights’ in the zone and in the top frame below you can see him tack sharply in an effort to carve a sharp hairpin turn around the race buoy. You also see Massy correctly following the rules and going wide to give Kei room. Let me give a shout-out here to Massy Johin for that; in the midst of the havoc and excitement of such a close race, it takes a cool head, an experienced hand, and remarkable situational awareness to stay wide and not foul the inside boat. Nice job Massy!

If Kei negotiated the mark correctly from that inside position, he had the chance to gain a few second advantage over his opponent as they both came out of the turn. A couple seconds can mean everything here, since the return trip from yellow is a near-run. Unless Kei could gain time and cleanly break free, Massy would come around the mark and end up sitting right on Kei’s stern. From that vantage point Massy could unreef his main and let the sheet run all way out, blanketing Kei and starving him of air. Massy would be in control, biding his time, waiting for the opportune moment to blow past his opponent and sprint for the finish.
Both of these sailors are remarkably skilled. They were aware of their options, and waited for the precise instant to best play their hand.
From that inside position, Kei had to go first and went for it, cutting it extremely sharp. Although his maneuver seemed flawless from my vertex perch above the mark, Kei failed to leave extra room at yellow (shown in bottom frame of image above). The tetrahedral buoys in Blake have a collision mesh that extends outside the edges of the visible buoy. Kei evidently forgot. He roared into the circle, forcefully cutting the turn to keep maximum momentum as he aimed along the edge of the visible mark. Instead of streaming by and exploding free for home, Kei slammed straight into the invisible edge of the buoy, bringing his boat to an instantaneous dead stop (bottom frame above). I got whiplash just watching… and spilled my coffee.
From his wide position, Massy Johin was able to steer clear of Kei’s wreckage, then throw out full sail and steam Northwest on a full-out sprint to the finish.
The rest of the fleet streamed in after, and Kei limped over the line too, No worse for the wear and tear. Waypoint’s conclusion about the new Leetle Cat upgrade?
As Taku collected data and I went to find more coffee, the fleet offered the only opinion that ultimately really matters. With one voice all the skippers began shouting “NEXT RACE!!!”
