"When did "Alered" beat the Worlds fastest foiling Moth? Please refresh my failing memory and introduce yourself, assuming I was there, I have probably met you."

It was at the Brass Monkey regatta at the Squaddy; Alerted 35th, Rohan on Amac's boat =52nd (no finishes).

I know you both had gear failure (didn't we all, and yep you do know me....) but from where I was you looked clearly faster in terms of consistent speed. Until Rohan retired in R1, he'd only made up 1 minute in 2 miles on the NS14 and the top Cherubs, you'd come and passed us. Ok, you crashed but so did he, and you were much faster until you both had problems.

R3 was a walkover for the F16s. I think we were all together 1/3 of the way up the beat and by the time I got to the top mark you were well ahead, and he was so far behind his sail numbers couldn't be read.

Of course, it wasn't a great test. The Moth is amazing, as we all know, and the conditions were terrible for it. But the Mothies will talk it up when they beat As and Tornadoes and 49ers, so why can't other people mention it when they get beaten?

Which is not to say that Moths, FWs, As, F16s etc are not stunning machines, I think you're dead right the winner would be the one that had its favoured conditions.

We used to get some FW guys (including one we raced against in raceboards way back when, I think) pacing the KCC fleet at times. In 20 knots or so I'm sure they paced Dave Hart's T and Steve Brewin's A downwind, and they were pretty close to Taipan pace upwind for VMG.

The comment about the FWs and Moths comes from the fact that some FW guys believe that nothing else comes close to them, yet rohan reckons he's as fast upwind, and under 6-8 knots he's much faster all-round.

By the way, re-reading the Brass Monkey thread reminded me that the regatta clearly went to the A Class, with Elvis averaging about 45 knots in Race 1 (check the times...he finished the 6 mile? windward/leeward course in 10 minutes!).

THAT'S fast!!!!!!!!!!! :-)

PS do you get the feeling that any comparisons of all-round speed are getting harder and harder to make these days? Many boats these days seem to have more holes or strong points in their performance than those of 20 years ago. Even when we were racing boards, most of them were more consistent in their performance than an FW board, and shortboards didn't come into it because they couldn't do course races. Even Scow Moths didn't change performance across the wind range like a foiler Moth does, and all fast cats were kiteless.

Just an idea.