The last step in converting the already exciting Olympic Nacra 17 Class from semi-foiling C-Boards to fully foiling/flying Z-Boards was passed when the class voted to adopt the recommendations from Nacra and World Sailing (ISAF) and the Olympic folks.
The announcement of the vote is on the Nacra 17 Class website
http://www.nacra17class.com/nacra-17-class-members-vote-recommend-full-foiling/
Switching to full foiling is not at all a trivial change, and there was already a lot of discontent from the owners of the 300 or so Nacra 17's that have been sold as far as quality of the build.
Understand that when a class does something like this, the "old" boats (now called MK1 versions) are no longer class legal as a Nacra 17. This of course is mainly of concern right now to teams competing in Olympic related events.
So Nacra needed to have a plan ready other than just asking everyone to buy new boats and completely devaluing their now "worthless" orphan boats.
They offered three options:
[list]
There are a ton of cool details for you engineer types in the 7MB PDF that was used for the meeting, download it here.
http://www.thebeachcats.com/fles/Nacra-17-Foiling-Proposal.pdf
The potential of the Platform Kit to put on the market a bunch of "Nacra 17 Club" boats is interesting. In Nacra's proposal they listed the value of such a boat as €7,500 . If you aren't aware, the Euro is down right not and 7,500 Euros is less than $8,200 which would be amazing for a a one or two year old semi-foiling spinnaker boat.
Some videos of foiling tests of the new platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDIbQ7-VT6A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdrdrZIOio
Foiling Upwind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkCgpMeocx8
Nacra Sailing Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_k3YNsxDEY&list=PLygXafnCwqTXqxeaC03aXROFd6RSKLg1y
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Damon Linkous