just brought the 1st two wetas into japan, will keep the resort version with dacron sail and roller furling jib in tokyo, as a demo, and have brought the standard version with mylar sails up here in the mountains to be sailed on our local lake
was out the other day and trying to use the gennaker as a super genoa?, as the swiss do on those light air lakes. very nice in light air to get the jib nicely shaped to to the main and then pull the big gennaker around the whole lot and bring it as far back and close to the rear of the boat as possible
even found a convenient cleat on the hull back there to hold it!
and then, just like on those swiss mountain lakes, while i had my head in the boat a big gust came swooping in, grabbed the genny, stuck the ama bow and proder in and then started lifting the stern, fortunately slowly enough that i had time to climb to the highest part of the boat and lever the whole lot back flat again
quickly pulled in the wildly flapping genny with 1 hand and lay across the back of the windward tramp with feet on the hull leeward hull inner and we were off blasting through a channel between island and shore
my 1st spinnaker? boat so i was steering around to find the best point of sail for speed and was pleasantly surprised to find that planning downwind on a skiff-like hull meant i could pretty much go where i liked
so that's what i did and 2 wake boarding boats coming out of the channel were concerned enough about my speed and directions that they both went WELL wide of me
i didn't look that much out of control i hope
around the other side of the island and the white caps were still forming so it was back upwind with just the mylar main and jib. spent a little too much time in the main hull during 1 tack and must have rounded around to a broad reach as suddenly the leeward ama was a full foot underwater!
fortunately the weta beams are like arms in a press up positions so there wasn't a huge amount of drag and i had plenty of time to steer back up to close hauled and scamper back up the tramp and find a seat just behind the stay
from there you are actually further out than if you were on trapeze from the hull
back up to the head of the lake while the wind was still good and then my first long crazy drag downwind under spin
all in all a great learning day and i think future owners of bigger tri's like the multi23, farriers and cosairs wcouldn't go wrong by spending some time building confidence and skills on these baby tri's before splashing out on the bigger sisters. certainly it was less intimidating that soloing my slightly faster but almost twice as heavy nacra 5.2 in similar conditions
found a july2009 video of a guy blasting through auckland harbour on his weta, every now and then you see the plumb amas doing some wave piercing
