A 7 ft limit does not sound right for UPS. I have had 10 ft lenghts delievered to my house. I think by online metals but try Metals Depot. The shipping calculator says I can have a 10ft pole delivered to my zip code for $16

The reason for the lenght is sail overlap. If you are going to fly a jib and a reacher, you must seperate them. I experimented with a Wave using a jib and 2 larger reachers.

I found that to make a jib and a reacher work I needed minimal overlap (one sail way out in front) or ~4 ft side-to-side. The fastest rig was a tiny jib, on the end of a 10 ft pole, completly in front of a furling reacher.

With the jib completly overlaped by the reacher the performance was mostly worse than with just the reacher.

Personally I would not plan on flying a jib and a reacher. Flying the jib in front of the reacher was scary on a Wave.

Seperate subject, a compression tube. Instead of having wires coming up to hold your pole, you have a tube going down from your existing bridle. If you put a ring on the bottom of the tube just big enough for the pole to slide into, it really simplifies the rigging the boat.

The new rig Tornado uses a compression tube.

http://www.tornado.org/html/new_rig_photos.asp