I know of one occasion where the dolphin striker broke on a Marstrom due to manufacturing fault but the beam didn't break. But I haven't seen anyone bold enough to remove it!

I called it the "A-class" snail but it's NOT class legal, so you haven't missed anything.....

Some good and bad things about the snail after using it for several years. I haven't that much experience with a normal snuffer so I can't give a good comparision between them.

The "snail" is optimized for unirigs, if you have a sloop use a snuffer instead.

The twin forestays is no big issue, I have a small plastic pipe about 0.2 meter long between the stays close to the mast fitting to avoid that the spi gets stuck between the forestays. Marstrom uses small plastic tubes on the lower part of the forestays to reduce friction during the jibes.

+ Low windage
+ Takes care of the spi sheet by winding up the sheet around the drum.
+ The weight of the spi gets close to the mast.
+ No excess wearing on the spi, but many others that haven't used the snail complains about it?!

- The current version of snail can sometimes mess up inside with the lines, this is solved with the M20/A-class version.
- The mounting of the snail close to the mast means that the spi gets hoisted close to the mast and sometimes the spi halyard can get on the "wrong" side of the spreaders.
- When taking it down you must keep the the halyard quite tight until the patch reaches the spi snail, then you can pull as fast as possible with both hands.
- A bit too "high tech" for some users.

/hakan