Leo,

There are details and notes on sail trim that apply to upwind sailing as well in that thread, specifically how mast rotation works. It is a critical adjustment on a racing boat which you probably know, but the T doesn't have a wing mast so its less sensitive to this than the F18, F16 or A-Cat.

If your sail isn't moving after releasing the cunnigham, you may want to try to lubricate the bottom of the sail track.

Have you taken a look at your mainsail trim from a coach boat or at the very least on land with different cunnigham tensions and mast rotation angles? We played with this plus board height adjustments and found an extra 1kt average, 2 kts burst speed at the same upwind angle as before. I won't share exactly what are settings are for this mode as they are confidential and mostly wouldn't apply to your case as the Tornado boards are much smaller than the F18 boards and are somewhat limiting upwind.

Personally I would take a look at your spreader rake as well, Brewin has some good notes on this. I suspect your spreader rake may be too far forward if you are getting a lot of twist, or the opposite if not getting enough: From there (baseline spreader rake), if you move your spreaders back it will put more pre-bend in the bottom off the mast and start the bending lower down the mast. This will flatten the lower part of the sail and move the twist of the sail down lower. Moving the spreaders forward will reduce the pre-bend in the mast and will tighten the lower leech; this will force the sail to twist up higher, earlier. Normally if I have height upwind but want more speed, it is time to rake the spreaders back. If you are low and fast then you will gain height by moving the spreaders forward.

One interesting note is I use almost as much cunnigham in light air as in lots of breeze, in order to force the leech to open. This allows us to run increased mainsheet for additional height at the same speed upwind. Its sensitive as at about 7-8 kts it has to come off completely (often requires a mainsheet ease to get the wrinkles back into the sail), then as the breeze builds closer to 15 kts we end up back near max cunnigham.

Most of my notes are from F18 and A-Cat sailing as my T time is limited to about 4 days. On the T we were running Ullman gear and sailing over 400 lbs so didn't pull cunnigham until approximately 17 kts of breeze, but there it allows you to keep a nice upwind and scoot forward in the gusts rather than keep flying the hull. The other trick I've found in practice is you want enough cunnigham so you are playing with about 1' of mainsheet; if you keep making bigger eases or feel you need to drop the traveller then you need more cunnigham, and if that is already maxed more diamond tension. On the F18 we adjust the diamonds between races if the conditions have changed and I have marks on the mast for this.

Last edited by samc99us; 12/20/18 09:10 AM.

Scorpion F18