Hi Gary, "I guess what has me hooked on one up F16 sailing is the power to weight ratio,once you take the crew of it is amazing how light a wind you can drive apparent in and with practice still handle it in 25kts plus".
While I agree with you on it being amazing that you can "go wild" in light wind & work the apparent wind, I`m amazed that you can hold it all together in "25kts plus". In those conditions we are looking at not sailing at all, even sloop, it just becomes boat-breaking weather. The conditions you describe are when we have a very nasty 3ft chop with water being blown off the top, it`s windsurfing time with 4,5sqm sails, not cat weather. Perhaps where you sail it`s a bit calmer (sea conditions) but in anything over 22 knots it gets a bit wild here. With regard to your spinnakers being bigger than ours, I`m a bit confused, since when Tim Shepperd was getting the spinnaker size sorted he consulted with Kevin Webb in SA about the luff, leech & foot lengths, and I was under the impression we were on the same figures give or take a few mm, and that any extra area could only be in how much roundness you put into the luff/leech/foot, which we`ve found is actually slower - I had a spinnaker with more luff round than the others and consequently a bit bigger, it never helped me as I couldn`t carry the kite as high as the others, which meant I couldn`t come up high, build as much apparent & then go down with it, the result was that the smaller, flatter spinnakers were faster than me, even in light breeze. I`ve had the luff re-cut, and now my kite is about equal to the others. I think the Americans & Europeans can teach us a bit here, they`ve gone through the spinnaker route & developed the assymetric, look at how flat the Inter-20 spinnaker is cut and how little luff curve it carries. From what I`ve seen it seems the only Mozzie sailors in Auz who have put spinnakers on so far are cat-rigged, which means no real comparison between the two has been made. I`d be interested in seeing one of you who is competitive as a sloop sailor go up against the cat-rigged boats, I think you might find in certain conditions sloop is quicker, and boat-handling is much easier. There`s also the aspect of playing the mainsail downwind, which is hard to do with only 2 hands, and which we are playing with at the moment. There`s always so much to learn & something new to try !!
