Since the Fox has been a marketing failure in the US and Hobie says they are continuing with the Miracle 20, I've been thinking about what changes could be made to the Hobie 20 to bring it up to speed and enable it to compete, boat for boat with I20s, for example. Here are the two changes that I think would be most cost effective and make the biggest improvement.
1. Add a spinnaker with snuffer. My thought is to go around 300 sq. ft. (the older "accessory" spinnaker Hobie offered was about 300-320 sq. ft.) , NOT the smaller Tiger spin, which seems too small for a 20 footer.

2. Hobie should build an insert to put in the dagger board wells to re-size them for more modern, high aspect dagger boards similar to the I20. The low aspect H20 dagger boards have a lot of drag.

It seems to me that these two mods would invigorate the H20 and make it very competitive with more current 20 footers. I know it would still have all the shin buster pieces on the tramp and wouldn't have a self tacking jib, but we would get the extra power off wind and up wind match any 20 foot boat.

Hobie gets to sell retrofit kits for dagger boards, spinnaker kits and maybe even more new boats.

What do all you design experts think?

David
H20 781 (obviously)