Kirt wasn't able to use his skunk, because the patches on his spinnaker were two big and stiff. I also got a skunk and set it up for the first time last weekend. My patches were a little smaller and the whole unit worked great. There are a couple challenges with the skunk sitting off center on the pole, the unit tends to twist when deploying and pulling down the chute. I tied a could of lines from the skunk to the bridle wires for stability and that seemed to work well. I used the bag that was built for the Tornadoe so the 17m2 chute was not problem to get in. We rigged similiar to a snuffer with a continuous line for the halyard and snuffer line, so you never have the pile of line after pulling up the chute. I put a grommet in the tramp about a third of the way back to run the halyard through and into the rear of the bag.

Having the skunk mid pole looks like an advantage to me because when dowsing, the chute tends to hang mid-pole. My crew uses a snuffer on his boat and he was really impressed with the ease of deploying and snuffing.



The negatives I have heard are that it is optimized for weight so much that it might be a little fragile, but I didn't have any problems with that.



Talking to Lars he said the patches work best using webbing instead of grommets. They were having trouble with the grommets grinding into the skunk. I think Randy Smyth was going to take Kirts spin and re-do his patches. If anyone has more questions I can take some pictures of the set up and post.



Chuck