Visit us in Genoa to experience the only real simulator of a sailing boat
THE PERFECT GIFT!
Give or treat yourself to a subscription to the print + digital Journal of Sailing and for only 69 euros a year you get the magazine at home plus read it on your PC, smartphone and tablet. With a sea of advantages.
If you would like to try Checkers, the first real simulator of a sailboat, come visit us at our booth at the Genoa Boat Show. Every day from Wednesday, Sept. 30 to Monday, Oct. 5, two appointments at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. at our booth to try out the simulator in the pool, together with Fabrizio Formicola who invented it. That’s what it’s all about.
He has the look of genius, an obsessive attention to detail, and an infectious passion for what he creates. Fabrizio Formicola invented the world’s first real simulator of a sailboat in his laboratory in Milan. I met him at Circolo Vela Bellano (LC), which kindly hosted us, to try out his boat, Dama, on the water and to have him tell me his story. “I have always been passionate about modeling, I built my first sailboat when I was fourteen years old, with my own hands, and to date I have built more than thirty models. Just from land I was introduced to the principles of navigation, and when I first got on a ‘real’ boat for the first time when I was an adult, I already knew what I had to do. In the long run, however, modeling bored me because it doesn’t teach anything practical. Instead, my goal is to faithfully reproduce reality to scale.”
SIMULATE TO LEARN
Thus was born the Dama project, a real-life simulator that reproduces all the maneuvers of a real sailboat on a platform ashore. But that’s not all. A GoPro located on the boat’s stern pulpit sends live video of what is happening on the water to a screen ashore, as if you were actually helming from aboard. “What fascinates me most is reconstructing the real in a way that can be of practical teaching, to bring as many people as possible closer to the world. In fact, Dama has everything on board that you would then find on a sailboat: winches, furling, engine, bilge pump, raft, osteriggi, way lights, drails, backstay, electronic instrumentation. Every maneuver is transmitted via radio waves from the boat to the control platform ashore from which it can be steered: hauling and letting go the jib sheets, the mainsail, furling and unfurling the jib, unloading the bilge pump, turning on the electric motor, and of course steering up to a distance of 500 m with a full-size wheel and a sensitivity on the blade similar to that of a fourteen-meter boat (Dama is 1.4 m long and 34 cm wide).
GENIUS AND CREATIVITY
An innate gift that of “being able to make with one’s hands,” to imagine building something that does not yet exist: “for me, no object is exhausted in the function for which it was built but can have potentially infinite uses. I don’t throw anything away, because I think that an item that is outdated today, tomorrow I might need it to build something. So it occurred to me as I racked my brains in thinking of a system to operate all four winches separately with a system other than the self tailer, without giving up the winch bell. Rummaging through a closet in which I kept some old VHS, I was enlightened: Eureka! I can use the “roll” placed on the VHS tape to slide or lock the sheets!”
THE DAMA. IN WATER
Upon arriving in Bellano, Fabrizio unloaded the boat from the trunk of his car and began rigging it as if it had just come out of the yard: he rigged the shrouds to secure the mast to the deck, ran the genoa sheets and mainsail sheets, and finally hoisted the sails. We were ready to put her in the water, feet on the platform and rudder in hand. Dama took off a bit by motor sailing and then took off by taking advantage of the wind. Sensitivity on the rudder and sail adjustment feel as timely as if we were really on board, the hull responded surprisingly well to every maneuver and, instruments in hand, Checkers sailed at four knots in a true wind of ten, riding the lake’s ripples, which compared to its size had an almost oceanic grandeur. A group of curious people immediately formed around us, waiting to try it out and pestering Fabrizio with a thousand questions, while on the water Checkers was chased by children on Optimists struggling to catch up with her. “There you see,” Fabrizio tells me, “that’s exactly what I wanted. To create enthusiasm around my little creature. After all, I like to see my inventions work. Once I’ve achieved that, I’m happy if others enjoy it. That’s the difference between me and a modeler who would never give up his remote control to another person!” Now Fabrizio’s project is to make a simulator using the real cockpit of a boat from which to maneuver it from land and bring the next hull to sail in seawater as well (at the moment, in fact, Checkers can only sail in fresh water). “Instead, my dream is to self-build an 18-meter aluminum ketch inside which to make my home and workshop, a sort of floating construction site for my creations.” info@minisailing.it
Share:
Are you already a subscriber?
Ultimi annunci
Our social
Sign up for our Newsletter
We give you a gift
Sailing, its stories, all boats, accessories. Sign up now for our free newsletter and receive the best news selected by the Sailing Newspaper editorial staff each week. Plus we give you one month of GdV digitally on PC, Tablet, Smartphone. Enter your email below, agree to the Privacy Policy and click the “sign me up” button. You will receive a code to activate your month of GdV for free!
You may also be interested in.
What you’ll find in the 244 pages of the new February issue of the Sailing Newspaper
The new issue of the Journal of Sailing has been released on newsstands and digitally. This is a very important issue for our publication, because it is the first issue of 2025, the year in which the Journal of Sailing
Celebrating 50 years with you, the birthday lasts through 2025!
It is a privilege to celebrate a 50th birthday with 1,500,000 friends. The 50th anniversary of the Sailing Newspaper The occasion is this 2025, 50-year anniversary of this newspaper, the Journal of Sailing, which was founded in 1975. We are
The 10 most-read news stories of 2024 in the online Giornale della Vela
2024 was a year full of events and news that captured the attention of sailing and boating enthusiasts. From the exciting challenges of the America’s Cup, to the presentation of boats and accessories, to the stories of sailors and personalities.
An invitation for you. Join the Sailing Newspaper community
Greetings from the headquarters of the Journal of Sailing, Milan. Every day the GdV, with its editorial staff of experienced journalists tells you on its website and social media everything that is happening in Italy and around the world with