Just a thought but looking for the pros and cons, how much advantage does the spinnaker pole give us over a pole less system such as the Swell Shadow.

In the real race world they aren't that much slower than us downwind and have a huge reliability advantage ( how many times have you had a pole or bridle failure ) plus much less windage particularly as they have a trampoline based recovery system that seems to work.

What is swaying my thoughts a bit is that our front beams are getting further back to probably around 2.6 - 2.7 metres from the bow, our poles are limited to 3 metres so is the 40 cms worth the windage and reliability problems