The next time I forget to let off the downhaul DURING the downwind leg I'm sure I'm going to remember that less draft/camber = more speed.
I've only just got into the habit of letting off the downhaul prior to the windward mark so as not to overstretch the luff whilst easing the main and traveller.
Oh well I might as well use one of John Pierce's famous quotes;
"The mainsail doesn't know you're going downwind!"
Hiya Mark, I was talking about the Solid sail. With Solid sails, you can create massive camber if you want to, but it is high drag.
I'm GUESSING Gashby sailed it more like an A class rig (so still fairly tight mainsheet, with about 12-18 inches of traveller eased) and then fly a hull downwind.
We have sails that we can only take from small amounts of camber to flat. A 3 part wing you can tune to give it much more camber and I assume this is what Gashy was doing different. Geep airflow over the sail going faster.
Mark, I totally agree, we have to let our downhaul off to sail down wind as we do not have very tunable sails compared with a Solid sail!
