The last thread on the "ultimate beach cat design" talked a lot about sail area versus righting moment and why a 10' Tornado has such a huge advantage over the 8' wide boats of the same length (some even carrying more sail area). The generalization that I interpreted out of it was: "if you want more sail area, make the boat wider". O.K., this makes a lot of sense but at what point does that additional sail area begin to make your hull length susceptible to pitch polling. Certainly, I couldn't make my 6.0NA 12 feet wide, add another 100sq ft of sail area, and expect to keep from hearing "eeerrrrr-EEEEEEE...DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!" everytime I turned the thing downwind. What is a reasonable ratio of sail area to boat length? Do the new taller higher aspect ratio sail plans lend themselves to more submarining problems off the wind?
