Venom was built by ACMY on the Gold Coast earlier this year. This was in important project for us as it was a Group project. We supplied the carbon rig, the standing rigging and all furlers. Lorima designed a beautiful rotating wing mast and carbon fiber boom. Navtec France supplied the very sophisticated PBO standing rigging, Profurl the 8T structural furler and 5.0 Code 0 furlers, and Facnor the 5T internal lock. Plus of course a mix of various Wichard & Tye Tec deck fittings. We had the chance to talk to all 3 parties involved in the built…
Can you explain to us how the project was born, and what the original brief was?
B.K. Jamie first brought Bob to us, but I had sailed with Bob onboard the Grainger 32 “Carbon Credits” and was aware of his interest in building a 40ft + trimaran.
J.M The client came to me wanting a line honours ocean-going trimaran. Him knowing my history of Multihull racing in Australia and specialising in building performance multihulls, the foundations were set.
J.B. We got involved in the process quite early on, before the build was commissioned…we were really only engaged to give some budgetary figures to the potential builder, once the build was confirmed we were engaged straightaway, with a project like this there needs to be an open line of communication between client/designer/builder/sailmaker and ourselves as the riggers to make sure the expectations of the client are met.The original brief from the rig point of view was to have a lightweight bulletproof mast, that would be user-friendly for shorthanded sailing as well as having all the bells and whistles for a racing boat as well….
How far did you push the original design from what we can see today?
B.K Apart from some main hull mods I am pretty sure the final design is very close to what Tony had on his drawing board (Jamie to confirm) apart from the rig height going up! We did discuss lifting foils and the beams and structure were engineered for these so they can be added at a later date if required.
J.M From the first set of drawings, we extended the rig, overall beam and a little tweak to the rocker aft
J.B The original design for the rigs was always quite open, therefore to a degree we had a clean sheet of paper to work with, there is some basic info given by the designers and then with numerous round tables we came up with the final result that all parties agreed on.
What were the biggest challenges you faced during the project? And how did you determine the final rigging package?
B.K. For me designing the Sails and also building them to a finished stage before the rig is even here presented a challenge and is not ideal. We have a few small things I would have done differently but we were ready to fit sails when the boat launched at Bob’s request so he could be sailing and get the boat to South Australia ASAP. I am glad we could help Bob achieve this goal although there is some extra stress involved from the sailmaker’s perspective.
J.M The region sales were discussed from day one and were the major part of the build.
J.B The whole process, once we were engaged, was fairly simple, doing this day in day out makes it fairly easy, to be honest, it was one of the simpler projects we have worked on, when you have a group of people shooting for a common goal and whose thought pattern is the same it makes the process a lot cleaner and simpler….

Lorima carbon mast. Wing mast