Has anybody tried it... successfully ?

Putting a kite on a cat for propulsion .

http://www.hobie-cat.net/site_gb/index.php?actu,catakite2

I think Jacob's Ladder held the C class record for a while flying a stack of kites.

Cheshirecatman

A couple of links:

http://www.cobrakite.com/jaclad.html

http://www.sail-world.com/UK/Kiteboarders-welcome-but-not-wanted-in-Record-Book/51186

Cheshirecatman

I have toyed around with the same idea for canoes. Very little area needed to move something that small. Based on the idea of fishing, the deployment and recovery of the unit is the hassle point among fishing tackel, bait bucket... etc.

For a cat, It seems like a minimum of a two man job. Looks like it takes two hands to control the foils and one man to steer. How close will it point?

Chris Green could tell you about a fellow I met, who put a rather large parasail on a cat sailboat. He had a dentists looking chair mounted on it to control the parasail from.

Chris drove, they gave it a go a few times at the TX City Dike, years ago.

Then I heard he bought Michael Yosts N6.0, modified it, and had it out in California somewhere last I heard.

He sold me the mast, which I then used on my N6.0 in the avatar. It had broken a speader bar, and toasted the mast.

It's now still on the boat, with the current owner.

Anyways, I forgort his name, but he was really getting into the modding and parasail thing.

I hope Chris Green will chime in.....

I have one on Myspace.com I'am not sure how to get the link over here??? HMMMM !!
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2047841
try this...

COOOLLLLLL it works,,,,,, enjoy

That looked like a Super Cat 20, with 4 guys on it, it was hauling butt! Where is it now?

Thats cool.
The fact that there is 4 crew and they are all hanging on like their lives depended on it, makes you wonder what sort of mis-haps they have had before this stage!

BALLAST MAN - there is a job for me out there!

You saw the picture of the Ladder Foil kite lifting the other cat straight up, I'll bet that's what happened! If you watch the video closely you can see the front end lifting up many times. I don't know which would be worse, a high speed pitchpole on a regular cat, or getting lifted and dropped on a kite cat.

These guys did the same thing on a Hobie Tiger, I saw them at our F18 Nationals (not racing obviously!).
http://www.airplaykitesailing.com/catamaran.php?lang=en


It would be interesting to see how high it could point (upwind, not vertically!), with the constant development of kites it could do quite well.
Kiteboarders are already outpointing windsurfers in course races.

this stuff is pretty interesting. In the picture Tony showed, they appear to have a traveler on the front beam - presumably to help add leverage to prevent the kite from flipping the boat sideways.

That Supercat in that video was hauling butt! And those guys do look terrified. I did see a few frames where I thought they might be trying to go to weather and it looked really slow.

Are kiteboarders really going to weather that well now? I had no idea they were able to go to weather so well.

The kite shapes are still improving, with the new wide and flat kites you can go upwind quite well and are
very good at depowering so you can sail a single kite in a wide range of conditions.
Its also the board that makes a big difference, this is one the boards that goes upwind really well:
http://www.sbckiteboard.com/editors_choice?news_id=595&uniqid=406

Speaking of boards, I didn't see any daggerboards on any of the kite cats. Wouldn't daggers help them go to weather, or are the going to try to get the kite alone to pull them to weather? I would think you could do better with dagger boards but maybe there is some other reason they are not using them.

Because of the small volume of the boards; they ride them on the rails; thus daggers are not needed; also; as the boards are not level, the daggers if they have them will create lift and just flip the board.

I sailed the first breed of short board windsurfers in the UK about 30 years ago; we quickly threw away the daggers as they were a nightmare and we were just getting thrown off the boards when the plates/daggers created lift and flipped the boards.

Scooby, I was talking about the boards in the cat hulls.

poor cat. don't let a cat experience that.. hehe. maybe a monkey can manage but not the cat. lol. ive been imagining it and it's weird to see a cat that high.

I am not mr saftey hall monitor.. but you would think they would consider wearing a pfd under these conditions....

Agreed on the PFD