Majan, defining modern Oman

Launched after four months of assembly in Oman’s southern most port of Salalah and named Majan after the ancient name of the Sultanate, Oman Sail’s new A100 flagship is one of the most advanced racing multihulls on the planet.

Around the 3rd millenium BC, Oman appears in various documents as ‘Majan’, a land whose seafaring people carried mainly copper, which was in great demand at the time.

This new Oman Sail flagship is the first member of a the new Arabian 100 One-Design class (identical boats) that will provide the perfect platform for the development of high-level sailing campaigns in the region. One-Design fleets allow for the creation of exciting and public-friendly competitions, without any complicated handicap systems, generating close-combat racing whilst remaining in a context of controlled costs. The main objective behind the creation of that new class is not to take on the ‘classic’ European events, but to develop a thriving racing scene in the Gulf Region and around the Indian Ocean.  Capable of speeds in excess of 40 knots (74 km/h), this giant trimaran is clearly among the fastest ocean racers ever conceived, and as round-the-world hero Mohsin Al Busaidi commented after the first heavy weather outing: “The acceleration of Majan is incredible, we moved from 20-30 knots in one gust of wind. We now look forward to showing the world what she can do!”

Skippered by Paul Stanbridge, who raced around the world and took part in the America’s Cup,  Majan will initially sail with a crew of six. 50% of the sailors are Omani offshore trainees joined by three international professional crew and a cameraman providing the one-on-one training that the recruits require at this early stage of their career. The first chapter of her journey was a ‘Tour of Arabia’ from Muscat, which included stops in UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar (read page 24) before she joined the Dubai-Muscat race back to Muscat in late November.

Building Majan

Assembled in Salalah under the shelter of a state-of-the-art build facility, Majan was the first ever high-technology sailing craft to be launched in the Sultanate of Oman. For the Oman Sail campaign, that process represented the perfect opportunity to train selected apprentices, embed them in the technical squad and “showcase” the build in order to inspire new vocations.

“We had two full time Omani trainees, Mohammed Al Ghainami and Salim Ambusaidi”, explains Neil Graham who lead the Offshore Challenges Sailing Team group of specialists in charge of the A100 project. “They were eager to learn, and the guys spent a lot of time building up their knowledge and skills, they were an integral part of our team right from the start.” As one of the most advanced ocean racing multihulls ever built, Majan certainly provided a variety of interesting technical case studies, and both trainees intervened in different areas, in order to get a global view of the skills involved: composite lamination, deck hardware fitting, rigging, electronics… Being a good shore team member means having an understanding of how all the elements of the boat work together, even if at some stage each individual will develop his own area of expertise.

Often derived from aeronautics, the technology involved in high-performance multihull building allows for light yet strong structures, thanks to the use of carbon fibre, lightweight metals such as titanium, and computer-assisted engineering. To weather the Southern Ocean’s fiercest storms, Majan’s structure combines lightness with speed and strength by relying on a honeycomb core (weighing only 2 kilos per square metre) trapped between two carbon fibre skins, giving the configuration its nickname of “sandwich”.

Majan in figures
Length: 105 ft - 32 metres
Width: 54 ft - 16.50 metres
Mast height: 115 ft - 35 metres
Maximum sail area (approx): 5,920 square feet - 550 square metres

Majan A100 sisterships, track record
• IDEC, Francis Joyon: fastest solo circumnavigation in 57 days, 13 hours, 34 minutes and 06 seconds.
• Sodeb’O, Thomas Coville: greatest distance covered singlehanded over 24 hours - 628.5 nautical miles (awaiting WSSRC ratification)



Up close and personal with the Musandam trimaran

Musandam will also be setting out on the Indian Ocean 5 Capes Race course as part of their training programme for their Omani recruits.

Often compared to giant birds, ocean-racing multihulls are graceful machines whose impressive wingspan allows them to almost literally fly over the waves. They simply are the fastest ocean-going sailing boats on the planet.

A multihull is effectively a natural raft - and so does not rely on ballast such as a heavy lead keel to keep it upright as a monohull would. As a result, a racing multihull is lighter than an equivalent-sized racing monohull and therefore faster in almost all wind conditions sometimes by as much as 50%. Musandam weighs 8.3 tonnes, just like the lightest IMOCA Open 60 Vendée Globe monohulls, that are 15 feet shorter but have to carry a keel weighing almost 4 tonnes itself! Yet there is a downside, and if a mutlihull is flipped over or pitchpoles turning upside down, there is no comeback, the boat cannot be righted.  A monohull can suffer a knockdown, laying the boat flat on its side, and in extreme circumstances a total 360 degree roll and still be righted by using the leverage of the canting keel. For this reason, multihulls are deemed as precision tools requiring highly qualified and cold-blooded operatives.

Musandam was originally conceived to be sailed singlhanded, and her designer, British multihull legend Nigel Irens, opted for a platform offering a lot of longitudinal stability. This was mainly to reduce the risk of nose-diving (and associated pitch-poling hazards) while sailing downwind on the massive waves of the Southern Ocean. Effectively, Musandam has often been compared to a “4x4 of the high seas”, a boat capable of safely maintaining high speeds even in rough conditions. This characteristic differentiates ocean-going and short course racing multihulls: the former have to be forgiving and can maintain high average speeds over a long period, whereas the latter display radical architectural options allowing for unrivaled performances within a narrower wind / sea state range (to a certain extent, the Masirah Extreme 40 is a good example of that category).

Built in carbon fibre with foam and Nomex honeycomb used as core materials (the core is effectively trapped between the inner and outer carbon skins), Musandam combines structural stiffness and impact-absorbing zones, notably the sides of the floats which are very likely to be hit by waves. The platform is fitted with a 30.60 metres carbon mast, as high as 6,5 stacked-up typically English double-decker bus and can hold up to 380 square metres of sails surface, the equivalent of 10 Olympic boxing rings.

Comfort is not exactly a word one could expect to find in the owner’s manual, and the galley is in fact reduced to the most basic gas camping stove on which water is heated to prepare freeze-dried meals. The onboard dessalinator provides fresh water from sea water (up to 1.5 litres per hour), and there is no central heating - outside temperature is only 3 to 4 degrees above 0 Celsius in some parts of the Southern Ocean! Accomodation is extremely spartan, with a single bunk and a total cabin area of approximately 5 squre metres, not even the size of an average kitchen.

Musandam is fitted with a state-of-the-art satellite communications system allowing the crew to download weather information, surf the internet, send and receive e-mails… and of course make phone calls! The navstation itself is much more similar to aircraft instrument panels than to traditional chart tables. Satellite positioning, electronic charts, route plotting devices, wind instrument displays and communications devices are placed on a vertical panel in the middle of the central hull.

Musandam in Facts & Figures

Technical specifications
Length: 22.9m (75 ft)
Beam: 16.2m
Weight: 8.3 tonnes - slightly lighter than the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque chandelier, which at 8.5 tonnes is the largest known in the world
Mast height: 30.6m - 6.5 London double-decker buses piled up on top of each other
Total surface area: 419.79 sq. m - approximately 1/10th of the area covered by the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque praying room carpet, which is the world’s largest hand-woven carpet.

Sails
Mainsail 160 sqm - would take up more ground space than 31 large size official Oman flags
Genoa 106sqm - would take up more ground space than 10 average mid-size 4x4s
Solent   jib 70sqm - would take up more ground space than 20 king size beds
Large gennaker 213sqm - bigger than a singles tennis court (a singles tennis court is 195.6 sqm)

Ropes
There is a total of 1.5 km of fibre ropes aboard Musandam, some of which are up to 15 times stronger than steel on a weight to weight basis. The halyard used to hoist the mainsail, for example, is strong enough to tow three Range Rovers!

Designers: Nigel Irens / Benoît Cabaret (Nigel Irens Design, UK)
Builders: Boatspeed, Australia
Launch date: 8th January 2004

Track record (highlights)
• Singlehanded Round-The-World record - February 2005 - 71 Days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, 33 seconds (record stood until February 2007)
• SNSM (St Nazaire to St Malo) crewed record, maxi-multihulls class - 1 Day, 3 hours. 23 minutes, 29 seconds - still stands.

For more information about Oman Sail go to
http://www.omansail.com