No money, no time and really no energy to do so. Still, as I said ever since the first nations cup at Mumbles, I would love to race there once.

At this time my own boat in in storage and won't come out before the next season. For this season I'm the crew on the Blade F16 of a fellow club member and that suits me just fine. I still get my minimal F16 sailing fix !

Wouter

Hmmm, Pete I worked on the Alter Cup, pretty much everyday since setup day. I dont recall any of the F18 gurus complaining about the F16 switching crews etc.

The rating has changed to a single digit, so honestly do not think it should be a big deal.

And yes I was referring to single events. Not all the racing. Register in an event as a UNI and sail the entire event as a UNI, if not risk getting protested. The hardware rules cover this issue. Single suit of sails authorized for the reminder of the event. The rules also state that if you sail single handed you go without a jib, and double handed you go full suit. So if you dump your crew one day you are in fact breaking an F16 rule.

You probably didn't ask for opinions, I did.

Ok, just to throw another hypothetical out there.

How do people feel about crews starting 2up, and then at some point in the regatta deciding to not use the jib. In fact they may even decide to leave it on the beach altogether.

I don't have a problem with this as long as they continue sailing the regatta 2up. how does everyone else feel?

i don't think reducing sail area would be a problem. If one were to make it against the rules, then it would be like saying that if you didn't use the spin on the boat downwind then you are breaking the rules.

yeah, that's how I feel.

The latter part is not true. You are always allowed to sail with fewer sails then that allowed for your setup. In fact this means that a Uni-rigged F16 may be sailed by 2 persons. And indeed they will only be slower for it, so what is the harm to others ? Same for sailing without a spi.

Wouter

It is generally allowed to leave a sail on the beach, or pull down the mainsail and sail under jib+mast only in most classes. Ref. the medal race for 49ers in the olympic games where one 49er finished under jib alone. The F18s even had roller furling jibs earlier to make it easier to change the sail configuration.
Just to be very clear, in the F16 class if you drop the jib and at the same time drop your crew, you have changed configuration and must ask the RC for permission as discussed above. Sailing two-up without a jib on a windy day is fine. Most people would probably prefer to not go out if it is that windy.

All this is pretty common sense and well established practice in all classes I am familiar with.

Totally agree that you do not have to hoist sails.

It might be the case that you had to take the sail OUT with you if your boat was bang-on min weight 2 up as the boat must still weigh in at 107kg.

You guys should check out the US F18 HT rules. They allow multiple main sails for their class.... Since this was the class rule... it was factored into the PN Rating.... god only knows what Texel or SCHR would do with a class that allowed multiple sails. (they would all measure into the rule.... you just have a quiver of them and can change them at will).

I suspect that any noise about F16's concerns their US rating... When the rest of the world is rating F16's much faster... THe US fleet ought not to talk very much about kicking butt ... especially when the US rating updates took a two year break....

and following this up the uspn system will change the rating by 25 % a year towards the proper rating (again presuming a large amount of data in open class races... not F16 races).

Can you elaborate? are you talking about no 2007 Portsmouth numbers being released or F16 specific numbers not being updated?

Is there anyway to find out what regatta's statistics were included in the numbers? or is that classified? I was somewhat surprised the F16 number didn't move since F16s won Area D-South and Area D-North last year and an F16 placed 3rd in area D-South in 2006. Those results may be more indicative of the "potential" rating....

That'll be the day !

There is absolutely nothing there worth copying, they've gotten things wrong in almost every single account.

Sets of multiple sails is EXPENSIVE ! And the performance differences are large enough to force every single serious crew to buy multiple sets; at the very least multiple mainsails; currently at 1500 Euro's the pop without battens. This is they way to price a boat to over 20.000 Euro's and is more effective in doing so than going to full carbon.




Actually Texel is very straightforward in this and I suspect SCHRS is so too. They take the largest sail area allowed, then take the longest luff allowed, calculate the maximum ratio between heeling moment (smallest rig) and righting moment and then calculate the upper performance limit and put it into the lowest rating number possible.





But there is another problem here The rating difference between the US I-20 and the F16 is about the same as the ones under Texel and SCHRS, while the rating difference between the F18's and F16 is far off. You can't correct the latter without creating a problem with the first. And there appear to be some other discrepencies in the the USPN like that.

The F16 rating has been pretty stable of the last sets of years, even well beyond the last 2-year break. I suspect that rating committee has alot more I-20 to F16 data then F18 to F16 data. The first confirming the current rating.

I think the only way to correct this situation is to have more F18 to I-20 data and have the rating problems corrected there first.

A-cat to F16 rating difference under USPN appears to be about the same as Texel predicts; although I do believe the spi makes the spi-boats somewhat faster all-around then this rating suggests.

Wouter