The Hull

The new Mistress Mark 3 is lighter, stronger, stiffer and faster.

The new Mistress Mark 3 is a combination of ideas used from the original Mistress and Adam May's Mistress Mark 2. I liked the hard chined Mark 2 and so when it came to building the prototype Mark 3 we filled out the last 3 foot of the boat to have hard chines. The more we looked at it in the weeks when we were fairing it in, the more I felt that the concept of the hard chines was a good one, so in the end we ended up with a fully hard-chined boat, (designing on the job!).

Mistress Mark 3 hull upturned

showing the hard chines

Similarly to the Mark 2, we made the bow finer and the transom wider to effectively allow the boat to be sat a little bit further back than the original Mistress.

The freeboard was cut down to the bare minimum basically to give a better look, reduce windage and drop a little bit of weight.

Removing the flares also had a weight saving. One of the things I gave maximum thought to was putting kick rails into the boat, but after a hard think I decided that if we remounted the tampolines 35mm down from the gunnel we effectively made our kick rails.

The construction of the boat also changed. We built a big oven in the workshop in order to build the boats out of Pre-preg rather than Resin infusion.

Mistress Mark 3 hull

Alex Adams sailing at Horsens, Denmark 2006