I found it pretty entlightning when I sailed and raced my F16 against a club member both when he had a Prindle 16 and a Blade F16. On the F16's we are now pretty evenly matched (him having had a season on the boat). When he was sailing his Prindle 16 he was always very close behind. If you made one or two mistakes then he would be along side you.

Yes a boardless cat will point a little lower then a boarded cat (except in very light winds where board don't do much at all, Andreas) but the difference in performance was surprisingly small. And we have to factor in that the Prindle 16 (deep V-ed hull) was both heavier and undercanvassed relative to the F16.

I now have some additional information about the sideways slip angle of both setup and the difference is only 2-3 degrees when going upwind and no difference on all other courses.

So my point here is why have daggerboards over skegs or deep V hull when the difference in performance is too small to really matter to the target group of kids/youths and their parents (who are not hardcore racing freaks). I mean what is 2min difference after a full hour of racing anyway ? A huge difference for Olympic sailors but all but negligliable for youths and their parents.

That leaves us the ease of tacking, but really seriously consider this a mute point as well for the following reasons. When you make a boat shorter it becomes dispropotionally easier to tack. This is easily proven by what many will call "useless mathematics". But if that doesn't interest you then do this experiment yourself. Get a long timber planck, hold it in water as a hull and try to turn it. Now cut the planck in halve and do it again. Notice how large the difference in resistance to turning is ! The difference is a factor of 4. And there are other reinforcing principles at work that make this ratio larger still.

Without going deeper into (mathematical and modelling) details I give you the final conclusion. By going to a 12 foot hull length and 65 kg platform weight with a kid as crew the resistance to turning the boat with respect to say an F18 is only 1/7th of the force related to the BOARDED F18's.

Of course the rudder area on the 12 foot will be smaller as well as will be the leverage it has, but even if we scale those as well then the difference factor is still at least a 1/2th.

How much more difficult will a deep V hull or hulls with skegs turn with respect to a round bottomed hull with daggerboards, a factor of 2 or maybe a factor of 3 (these are huge factors by the way). So if we simply entlarge the rudder of the 12 foot a little bit then we are garanteed to achieve parity in easy of tacking and turning with respect to the boarded F18 even when using skegs or deep V-ed hulls !

Now I can also make energetic comparisons showing that the Deep V or Skegged 12 foot hulls will not decellerated more then the F18 during a tack because of the above principles.

So ny final point is, how much more easily do we want the 12 foot to tack and turn, If a F18 feel is good enough then why justify the daggerboards ?

So my vote would go to the skegs or deep V-ed hull and normal kick-up rudders. And loose the large taper at the end of the rudder board. Just a small taper there will be enough.

Wouter