So we are a little (?!!?) behind the curve with this and after a couple of false starts we’ve got the recipe just right and can offer you guys the fruits of our labour!!

DF65 rig bags, about bloomin’ time!

We’ll be manufacturing in batches and there will be three colours available, blue, black and silver with this initial batch being blue.

Each bag has three spacious pockets and a Velcro closure at the end with some nice trim around the edge. The picture above shows an empty bag (L) and a bag with three rigs in it.

The first batch of bags is ready for you to buy on the shop which can be found at www.sochsails.online

I imagine we’ll be following it up with a DF95 rig bag quite soon, we’ll have some more info about our DF95 goodies very very soon so stay tuned. Meantime here’s another picture.

Three rigs, three pockets, handy!

So a little later than billed there is a website for the inaugural DragonFest event which will be held at West Lancs YC in Southport, NW England between 11th and 15th May.  There are to be 4 days of competition with a layday on the Friday which has been set aside for some DF95 demo racing which will be fun!

Check out the website here – DragonFest Website

We’ve got a little slack time this morning and have finally got around to adding details of the DF95 to our website, not a huge amount of detail, just some timings and mechanics of how we are going to roll the product out from our shop.

Take a look in the menu above and click on “DF95” for further details.

So we’ve been very busy since we last posted. The back end of last month saw Tim and the DF65 crew take a trip to the Nuremberg toy fair for some meetings with Ripmax and Joysway which were fitted into a very busy drinking schedule as it was Tim’s birthday weekend.  John, Mark and Mike kept up well but ultimately they were outclassed by Tim’s ability to consume vast quantities of alcohol, the odd kebab and still find his way back to the hotel at 4am. I’m pretty sure my parents would be proud!!

They tried hard, bless them!

A 4am trip back from Kent saw us sat in the office by 10am sifting through a pile of orders which are now all completed and away to customers worldwide including customers in Australia, Germany, Turkey and the USA.

We seem to have developed quite a following in the USA and this weekend just gone saw the US Winter Nationals where several suits of our sails and several of our sticker sets were in use. We were really quite pleased when we saw the result which had our sails placed in the top spot. We were even more stoked to see our sails also placed second and third as well, a clean sweep for Soch Sails powered boats. What’s interesting is that all three boats also has one of our sticker sets onboard so they looked great and went fast. Congratulations to Baron, Tony and Graham on a great regatta.

Tim was also involved in the first race for the DF95 before travelling out to Germany, in fact he was pleased to have placed third in the first race. We will of course be retailing the DF95 and can confirm that the first boats are on their way to the UK and should land towards the beginning of March. We will be offering more information about availability and cost during this week. If you’d like to pre order a DF95 then please take a look here DF95 pre order

A new working week got off to a belting start today with a flurry of orders dropping into our inbox. Our working week is being condensed into two days this week and whilst we’ll do our best to get your orders out before Wednesday morning we may not get through all of them, particularly the orders involving sail manufacture.

The reason for the condensed week is that we are setting off to the Nuremberg Toy Fair on Wednesday morning. We are making a stop in Kent for two nights and flying out on Friday morning, visiting the fair on Saturday and returning on Sunday. We are being privileged enough to go to the fair to see the world launch of the DF95 which we think is pretty cool and worth a few days off for.

DF95 Prototype oo3 at West Lancs YC

It’s also my birthday on Saturday and if last time is anything to go by we’ll be having a drink or two…or three. I’m looking forward to turning 21.

We will be back in the workshop on Tuesday morning, 2nd February and all orders that are not fulfilled before we leave will be sorted by the end of next week, probably before.

If you need us in a hurry then please email us and we will be collecting those and dealing with them whilst we are out of the office.

So just to recap, we are closed for production between 27th Jan and 2nd Feb but then we’ll crank up the machine again and get orders away.

Well we took a 300 mile round trip yesterday to get some more racing done in the West Lancs Winter series.  Much fun was had by all 15 skippers that took part.  B rig conditions were the order of the day and we had two of our boats on the water, GBR795 was lent out to a skipper who hadn’t fixed his boat in time for the event and I raced GBR899.

899 looking…green! Photo Tony McK

899 was only finished 12 hours before hitting the water and after an initial bit of tuning we hit the sweet spot and picked up a 1st , three seconds and three third places which we were pleased with and we were happy to finish the day in 3rd place overall.  795 won the first race too which was nice!

795 on the breeze. Photo Tony McK

We also took some final measurements for our tuning guide which we have been writing for a week or two now.  It has been QC’d by DF65 National Champ John Tushingham who was happy that it gets a newly built boat to a good base tune which then allows some experimentation by the skipper to tweak the rig to suit the skippers sailing style.

Like our rig building guide it has been written in a simple and easy to understand manner.  All you’ll need is a tape measure and a cup of tea. Check it out here Soch Sails DF65 Tuning Manual V1.3

Well this morning went well, some admin to do for the Boatyard arm of the business saw me lock myself out of not one but two of my bank accounts.  That sorted I set about getting a whole heap of orders out to you guys only to spend an hour in the post office waiting for the power to come back on after it tripped out after dealing with 3 of the 15 parcels.  The scales then refused to fire up so I then had to drive 9 miles to the “other” post office to complete the sending.  Anyhow all the parcels below are on their way to the UK, Sweden, Australia and the USA.

There are some sails to make to complete a few other orders and these will be on their way before the end of this week.

Our new half length hull and deck stickers are proving popular pimping items for your DF65’s and it has caused us to do a little updating on our full length sticker sets too.

The transom well sticker transfers nicely onto the full length set and we have modified the forward and aft ends of the deck sticker as well as the aft end of the hull sticker to be a bit more aesthetically pleasing.  All of our DF65 full length sticker sets will now come with the transom well sticker as standard and more importantly at no extra cost!

See if you can spot the differences below!

Since we launched our full length hull and deck sticker sets in 2015 we have sold a great many of them but they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. We’ve been contacted on a number of occasions asking if we offer a less “faffy” sticker set. Up until this afternoon the answer has sadly been no.

However whilst you guys and girls are getting tarted up for NYE celebrations the Christmas elves have been hard at work (on double time and tots of rum of course!) and have produced another great product to add to the Soch Sails shop.

Looks nice!

The new sticker sets comprise of six easy to apply decals. There is a half length deck sticker, three transom stickers and two half(ish) length hull stickers that have been designed to blend in with the original aft kit decal. As you can see from the photos they give the boat a great look without the need to remove all the original decals and being somewhat shorter than the full length stickers they don’t get stuck to everything other than the boat!!

Deck stickers

Hull Sticker

As with all our other Soch Sails hull & deck sticker sets these new ones are available in a myriad of colours and you can even have your sail number cut into the deck sticker. Unfortunately there isn’t really enough room on the hull sticker to put a decent sized graphic on so we have not offered it as an option.

Available in the shop right now!

We’ll be back to work on Saturday for a day then off to West Lancs YC for the first of the Winter series on Sunday then back into it properly on Monday morning. Any orders placed over the Christmas period will be dealt with and shipped by the end of next week. Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten you, we’re just having a bit of chilled out downtime with the Soch Sails family!

Best wishes from all of us for 2016, may your sails be full and your course be true!

We have been busy again in the run up to Christmas with sails, stickers and boats making their way all over the world in time for Christmas morning, however we are pretty much up to date with just a couple of orders to complete and send out by courier.

Some of this weeks production.

The deadline for overseas parcels to be delivered has passed however if you are a domestic UK customer and you’d like something last minute we will offer you the following deal. 

Orders placed between now and midnight Saturday that we can process will be sent via next day courier on Monday at no extra cost, we’ll do our best to fulfill your order but any orders placed Sunday and beyond will more than likely be processed after Christmas.

Of course we will be spending Christmas doing “Boaty” stuff and have a new IOM to play with. It’s a Vision produced by Phil Playle, arguably the most thorough and competent builder in the world. The boat is available through Mike at CM Yachts here in the UK.  It will be decked out with the usual RMG goodies for sail control, Sails etc rigs and the first three suits of our own Soch Sails.

An unconventional colour choice, but we like!

So it just remains for us to wish all our customers both old and new a very Merry Christmas and a super New Year and we’ll leave you with a picture of the garden here at Soch Sails HQ that we took earlier today… in December

Happy Easter….?

The last month has seen the UK dealing with some pretty grim weather, here in North West Wales we have been the windiest area of the country with regular gusts of 80+ mph and some pretty hefty amounts of rainfall too.

Whilst this hasn’t affected our production it hasn’t allowed us to get out sailing much. Our trip to the Netherlands was great fun and the DF event was super breezy and well attended but since then we haven’t sailed at all aprt from some land yacht testing which has been fun on the slightly less windy days.

A full hit of DF65 sails

The shop remains busy and after a bit of a delay we will be adding our DF65 parts inventory to the shop in easy to manage sections that will contain the majority of parts that you might need.

An RC Laser Olympic pack in build

If you need anything for your DF65 or your RC Laser you should be able to find it in our shop with most items in stock for immediate shipping. Sails are running at 7 – 10 days as a rule but are often produced and shipped faster.