Pete Melvin, one half of the Huntington Beach, CA-based design house Morrelli & Melvin and a former A-Class World champion, regained his title in Sanguinet, on southwest France's Bassin Arcachon last week. An A-Class catamaran, to refresh our memories, is the singlehanded catamaran class the origins of which date back to the late 1950s when, to satisfy demand, ISAF's predecessor, the IYRU, conjured up four back-of-cigarette-packet catamaran class box rules (the two man B-Class became the Tornado, the C-Class the solid wingsail affair used in the Little America's Cup, while the larger D-Class is a rarer beast altogether). The A-Class box is 5.49m (18ft) long, 2.3m (7ft 6.5in) wide with a sail area of 13.94sqm (150sqft) while a more recent amendment to the rule has been a minimum weight restriction of just 75kg. In comparison the much more modern two man Formula 18 has a beam of 2.6m (8ft 6in), upwind sail area of 21.15sqm, but weighs a wopping 180kg - two and a half times as much. Even a Formula 18-HT has a minimum weight of 120kg. Despite being so hi-tech and advanced the World Championship had to be limited to 100 boats and this has been the case for the last couple of occasions the event has been held in Europe, where there are strong fleets in Germany, Italy and France but oddly not in the UK. Elsewhere in the world Australia has a big fleet while Melvin says numbers are growing in the US. &At the recent World Championship in France Melvin (right) was sailing the extreme new Nacra A2 he and Gino Morrelli co-designed with Jeremy Laundergan. This was the machine's first outing to Europe, despite being launched in the US a year ago and bravely, for a boat so extreme, being marketed by Performance Catamarans who are behind the Nacra range of dinghy cats. However due to fine tolerances required to build a vessel of this kind, Morrelli and Melvin are actually getting their hands dirty and are constructing the A2 themselves at the Morrelli & Melvin Production Development facility in Santa Ana, California. To get down to 75kg everything is built in carbon fibre using a resin infusion system as Pete Melvin explains: "Being an 18ft catamaran that is a pretty hard target to hit so everything has to be done to a professional standard. Everything is carbon, the mast, boom, beams, hulls, foils. My boat had 3.5kg of weight on it to bring it up." Design-wise the A2 has wave piercing bows that first featured in the A-Class back in 1999 with the Flyer. "It was much faster upwind especially in chop and breeze and the reason it is fast is that the boat doesn't pitch nearly as much - it just penetrates through the waves," says Melvin. "It ends up being quite a bit faster. This design is our take on a wave piercer. It is more radical - the bow is lower and more raked back." Any boat with a wave piercing hull sounds akin to a submarine, and therefore very wet to sail, but Melvin says this isn't really the case. "You are standing out on the trapeze, 10ft from the leeward hull, so it doesn't really make any difference. It is not a shape you'd use for a cruising catamaran that's for sure. But it works well for this type of race boat. It would not work well for a larger racing catamaran or trimaran because the sailor weighs as much as the boat does so you can shift the CoG aft quickly and keep the bow out. It would be a disaster on a larger race boat." The mast is a wing built by Hall Spars, Ben Hall being actively involved in the class. Melvin says that the size and shape of the masts have become pretty standard over the last 10 years. While it would be possible to build a C-Class style solid wing rig for an A-Class no one has yet done this. The reason why this hasn't happened in the A-Class - aside from expense and know-how - is probably due to the minimum weight restriction. "The rigs are so light - the mast rigged weighs about 10kg," says Melvin. "That would be really hard to do with a [solid] wing and I think everyone realises also that it would pretty much ruin the class if someone did that. The boats are so elegantly simple and easy to sail and the class is doing pretty well because of that fact." To date Morrelli & Melvin have pumped out 15 Nacra A2s mostly in the US but are ramping up production as there is certain to be demand in both Europe and Australia for the boat following Melvin's victory. At present the boat costs $19,000 in the US while European distributors Jan de Boer catamarans in Holland haven't finalised a price yet. The World Championship held in the protected waters of Arcachon's giant almost fully enclosed harbour was in 4-10 knots. "It was much lighter than the brochure called for and pretty smooth water," says Melvin. "So it ended up being pretty tactical kind of sailing with lots of shifts and puffs and that sort of thing. With 100 boats on the line the starts were really tricky trying to get out clean without a disaster. Typically on the starts we would have three or four recalls and they would resort to a 20% penalty flag for the first few recalls and then a black flag. My competitors got snared up in that mess and had to keep a bad score and I was able to keep my nose clean and not get a bad score and never had the pressure of using my throw out early in the series." As the results below show Melvin never won a race but equally never scored worse than ninth to win by a considerable margin over defending world champion, Australia's Glenn Ashby. "I never tried to start right near one of the ends which can be kind of risky, but spectacular if you pull it off. I was fairly conservative and tried not to have any disasters and slowly I floated to the top because of that." Results:
Pos	Sail No	Helm	R1	R2	R3	R4	R5	R6	R7	R8	Pts Net
1	USA 69	MELVIN Pete	2	2	8	4	2	2	2	9	22
2	AUS 1	ASHBY Glenn	3	BFD	16	2	7	1	1	1	31
3	AUS 767	BREWIN Steven	1	1	17	1	4	21	7	2	33
4	SUI 179	TOBLER Michael	6	17	3	13	6	3	15	4	50
5	AUS 802	ANDERSSON Scott	9	16	2	5	5	14	10	30	61
6	ITA 10	PETRUCCI Valerio	7	13	5	3	DNF	19	8	11	66
7	FRA 22	NAGY Robert	8	4	OCS	20	12	8	9	5	66
8	SUI 188	WALLMER Sascha	58	12	12	16	10	7	5	27	89
9	SUI 195	FAVRE Charle	17	7	33	12	14	10	6	24	90
10	SUI 175	DU BOIS Luc	DNS	9	26	11	13	6	3	34	102
11	ITA 5	VACCARI Manuel	10	14	14	17	47	25	26	12	118
12	NZL 232	PHILPOTT Murray	42	DNF	10	7	9	5	12	35	120
13	ESP 11	CALAVIA ARIAS Manuel	31	BFD	1	19	11	28	13	22	125
14	ITA 31	BLANCATO Luigi	15	19	13	10	54	26	20	25	128
15	AUS 889	PARKER Graeme	26	8	18	14	35	12	29	23	130
16	AUS 308	LANDENBERGER Andrew	43	36	20	24	1	4	14	32	131
17	FRA 400	ESCARRET Gilles	30	15	4	33	19	58	19	13	133
18	ESP 13	GADEA SIERRA Antonio	54	11	6	30	8	42	32	18	147
19	ITA 1	BABBI Egidio	4	25	36	9	DNF	40	11	26	151
20	SUI 149	DU BOIS Herve	29	5	29	43	42	18	16	19	158
21	NED 64	VAN EMPEL Erik	21	21	25	44	15	16	23	38	159
22	NED 73	HOEKSTRA Sjoerd	36	10	22	29	43	37	4	36	174
23	GER 576	BAIER Bob	59	37	7	23	3	24	27	73	180
24	BRA 5	FREITAS Clinio	81	23	11	31	22	22	31	40	180
25	FRA 402	DOUSSE Jeanjacques	28	31	28	57	56	9	18	33	203
26	SMR 1	MINI Gianluca	69	39	49	64	24	11	17	3	207
27	SUI 186	OUDOT Benjamin	13	26	21	21	27	55	50	DNC	213
28	ITA 12	CASADEI Roberto	24	38	31	36	45	51	38	6	218
29	SWE 1	MARSTRÖM Göran	11	34	30	18	46	39	40	49	218
30	AUS 17	GOODALL Greg	22	20	64	25	40	34	47	31	219