Carl,

Alex or myself have never been offered to join the technical committee, It would make it more difficult for the existing cartel to contuct their business if that happened...

I do believe that 1.5mil is a better cloth, and its perfectly durable and the owners of these sails will all say so. What I have a massive issue with is that there is a rule change that is proposed by the class secretary without any authourisation or request by the world council. Plus we have a technical committee that are attempting to force us to use cloth that suits them and not the class members. Its totally nuts to have the proposed list, take a look at what they are proposing:-

Dimension Polyant PE05, 3.0mil Pentex is NOT AVAILABLE, you can however request a special run of 1000m, costing around 20,000 Euro, enough to make around 50 mainsails which is more than any small loft will do in a year and a serious impact on a small lofts cashflow.

Challenge MPX06, 3.0mil Pentex is NOT AVAILABLE, I have spoken to the local distributor and it is not stocked anymore in Europe and is a special order in the USA.

Pryde F18 X Ply, 3.0mil Polyester, I have no idea where to order this, what the specifications are or what it even looks like. I certainly can't find a distributor in Europe to order from so I assume I have to order from the factory and pay the shipping for small quantities which will dramatically increase the cost.

Contender Apen 06 3.0mil Pentex, You can order this from your local distributor.


So, out of a list of 4 possible cloths proposed by the Technical committee, we find that its only possible to obtain one of these unless you front up with 20k Euro to order a special run from Dimension Polyant.

Great work hey!!