Me and a friend of mine went down to Sweden this week and bought the Stealth F16 from user pontus_lofgren on this site. The boat is still in Sweden, but will be taken to Norway in the future.

This is our first sailboat and since we are beginners, we had some challenges rigging the cat.
Any tips on rigging the gennaker? When we pull it down, it seems merely to clog and choke the snuffer at the intake. As a compromise, we now have the pulldown cord threaded trough the lower loop at the sail, then knit at the middle loop, but then, one of us has to go to the snuffer and pack the last 2 meters of the top of the gennaker into the snuffer.

Hi,

I am not familar with teh Stealth F16, but in the Tiger mauanl you will find a typical layout:
tiger_gb.pdf

Cheers and have fun with your new boat,

Klaus

Are there loops or rings at the retrieval patches in the spi, or grommets/holes? Depending on how you rig the spi, you can spread the grommets out a bit with knots or balls on the retrieval line. Usually this is not neccesary once you get the feeling for how to go through with the procedure.

There are a load of tricks to make snuffing easier, but the patches do tend to bunch up. It is important to snuff with a bit of pressure/wind in the spi, and do it as fast as you can. You ideally want to pull the spi _down_ into the snuffer, not _up_ into the snuffer. Friction is your enemy, and Holmenkol (yes, really. Internal joke for us norwegians) Seal'n Glide will help a bit if you go to the expense.

I guess the Stealth owners to chime in once they are done with their afternoon tea

It sounds like you may have one of the following problems, non of which are "stealth" problems, just usual problems with taking the kite down

1, not "going for it"; you need to pull the kite down as fast as possible, this means you should never pull it "up" into the snuffler, just "down" or mabe across into it.

2, Too much friction in the system(making 1 more difficult) - spray everything -sail, snuffler hoop and the spi it self the the stuff Rolf mentions above.

3, The halyard / downhaul is snagging within the sail as it comes down; if you have a sail that has grommets in it (holes) it may be that the sail is bunching too much; a good trick is to put rope thru the holes with a small stainless hoop one end and a stopper ball the other so the downhaul goes thru the hoops. This means the downhaul is just ONE side of the sail and has less drag.

Take some pictures when you try this on land (it's good to practice this on a light wind day on land, so you have time to actually whach what is happening.

Also, make sure you tape EVERYTHING that MIGHT catch; tape up all the terminals of any wire rigging in the area, tape up any fittings. Spray this all too!

So you are done with the tea now Simon?

These guys are the first F16 sailors in Norway (hope to launch our first homebuild this summer), so we need to take good care of them.

Haha holmenkol seal n glide. Thanks for the tip Rolf!


The landenberger spi has the loops, not the grommets.

When we tried the spi and had problems getting it into the snuffer I think the problem was twofold, we didn't have enough wind in the right direction, and we didn't do it fast enough. Maybe we will try with the downhaul in all the holes next time, and do it faster.
The Seal'nGlide stuff seems a little extreme? Not something to use on a regular basis?

I'm the other new stealth owner in Norway btw.

I'm assuming your spi has three patches on it: The retrieval lines goes through the snuffer bag, out the snuffer ring, through the bottom and middle patch and is attached to the top patch.

When you pull on the retrieval line you end up pulling all three patches together through the snuffer ring, bunching up everything and making it hard to pull on.

The solution is to force the patches to be spaced out by a small amount, sufficient to avoid the bunch up. In my experience the snuffer ring on the stealth is big enough to let two patches going at once. I've tried to completely separate the three patches, but I found then that my snuffer bag was too short and a bit of sail was always sticking out.

Anyway, depending on the way the retrieval line attaches to the spi you have multiple solutions possible. I have two spi, one has nylon loops, the other one has small rings. I use a different technique on both.

For the ring version I use a long bowline knot on the top patch, the knot cannot go through the ring on the middle patch and as such creates some space between the top patch and the two below. This sufficient to prevent bunching, the two bottom patches are going in the snuffer at the same time and the top one follows.

On the loop version I tied a loop of dyneema to the middle loop, and thread the retrieval line through it. So when I pull on the retrieval line the top and bottom patches enter at the same time, and the middle patch, pulled by the dyneema loop, follows soon after.