I don't think I lost the point at all.

A sailboat race is a race around a COURSE. As most will remember I go go against A-cat sailors who claim to be first at the A-mark only to be cheaten out of a victory by OVERALL faster spinnaker boats. In the same line of thought I go against skiffs that do 24 knots downwind only to crawl back up. Seems to me that those VYC ratings can be correct afterall. And that was of course the orginal point as I asked how it could be that those "around a course" handicaps were so slow for the skiffs.

I don't have an axe to grind here I'm still trying to learn why the skiffs are not using the Bethwaite square back rotating masts. The end criterium should be "around the course" performance. And as such the balancing of downwind and upwind performance is important. One poster mentioned that the rotating mast wouldn't carry the mast head spinnaker needed for the downwinds. But what if the true gains are to made upwind ? Would better upwind speed not be worth a smaller spi that the rotating mast can handle.

Looking at the speed difference of (roughly) 9 knots upwind (6.5 knot vmg) and 24 knots downwind (vmg 20 knots) it looks to me, as an engineer, that the upwind is by far the most important leg on these boats and that 5 % additional performance on this leg is worth any "over 15 % performance hit" on the downwind legs. ESPECIALLY when these boats are width limited. The latter point would also favour more efficient rigs and masts (bethwaite squarebacks) then the grunt rigs (round tubes and less earodynamic efficient) they feature now.

It seems to me that I'm actually full on topic here.

In sailboat racing it is all about making the best average around a course, not about maximizing one particular leg at the expense of everything else.

Afterall I can drop my boat of the nearest high rise building and achieve better speeds if it weren't for the problems getting back up again afterwards. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Wouter