Hey guys, I'm fairly new to boat building (though not to composite design/construction, sailing, windsurfing, etc.)

I've been looking at various small boat designs, in particular those for light racing cats (F16 looks like a very interesting class), and wondering about the mast designs which are most common...and why.

The Olympic class planing bathtub pictured in my avatar has a traditional non-rotating tracked mast into which a sail is hoisted with a halyard. No news there. My windsurfing gear uses a simple round tube of a mast onto which the sail's luff sleeve slides like a sock. No news either. And I'm reading that newer high performance cats use rotating elliptical tracked masts -- sharp low drag leading edge, tricky to use, and they probably stall more frequently than traditional blunt masts.

A hypothesis: The windsurfer style mast/sail with a sock (OK, luff sleeve) would seem to offer almost as low a drag profile as the more fancy and expensive rotating masts, at lower cost and weight. For small racing dinghies and cats, the difficulty of rigging and hoisting a sail should be fairly minor if one uses a universal joint at the mast base to permit rigging in the horizontal position and uphauling the sail after that. (How about a water start?) Boom, spreader(s), shrouds, and jib/spi halyards can be attached at cutouts in the luff sleeve, after downhauling, as is a windsurfer's double boom.

I'm guessing that there are boats with the windsurfer-style sail design around somewhere, and I just haven't found information about them yet. Does anyone in this group know about such vessels? Has any of you guys tried one? Is there some technical reason this just won't work, or a vast international conspiracy suppressing luff sleeves? Inquiring minds are looking for a #$!*ing clue...