Sorry Damon, but since you don't seem to think it is a problem selling our privacy, time and screen space, I don't have a problem helping others block it...

Unfortunately popup killers still allow the sites to be paid for the practice as the software must retrieve the ad before knowing it is an ad. As a user you can block ads before the request is made and help deter this shady model...

For the TheBeachcats.com, assuming Windows/MS IE you should:
Browser:Tools:Internet Options:Privacy Tab:Edit (override area): add "thebeachcats.com", "fastclick.net" and set to "always block". This will block the tracking cookies but not the site content.

Now you can block fastclick ads from displaying by adding an entry in your "hosts" file with
"127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net"
In W95/98 this text file should be C:\windows\hosts
In NT,2k,xp c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
On a MAC use format "media.fastclick.net CNAME 127.0.0.1" (save this through the TCP/IP control panel).
This will stop access to that site by re-directing it to your local machine... you will see a 404 error screen where the ad would have been.

Read more at:
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/spam/adblock.shtml
http://ssmedia.com/utilities/hosts/

Both sites have a full list of ad providers you can block locally and significantly speen up your browsing if on a slow connection.

I don't even know how to respond to all that, so I won't.

I apologize to the original poster, Luiz, for helping mess up his topic about a kids catamaran. And to Rick White, for the off-topic discussion of TheBeachcats.com.

Thanks go to grob (Gareth), for sending me an email that helped me track down the remaining slider ads and remove them.

All I was trying to do, was point out a boat I thought sounded like Luiz's description. I should have ignored the ensuing comments about my site.

Yeah man, don't let them get ya down.

I don't think anybody that complains about popups or banner ads has ever had to front the bill for a bandwidth intensive site.

Its not free people.

Luiz, risk is far away from being my goal when I sail. Speed is just part of it, not the whole thing. The skills that are needed and how to develop them are quite more interesting. Intellingent is to do what you enjoy, if I would like speed I would go to a motor boat, if I would like risk I would do bungee jumps. Diversity is good too, I do like cats, just got one, but I'm not quiting monohulls and I'm not interested on theaching my kids to prefer one oe the other, I will be happy if they prefer motorboats or snowboards.
Hey, I think a kid cat is a great idea, not just because it might be faster, I was just trying to comment that it should be a good one, Optimists are good boats, not easy improve them.

Seems to me you would have more tied up in a optimist based kids cat than a production cat with spinnaker...

http://mystereowners.org/mystere/ 3-4k. Some very good used ones for less than 3k.

It is a good point and it made me think

The small cats we are talking about are roughly the same width as their monohull siblings. The Max arm lenght will be 6.5 ft instead of 5 ft for the Laser or 5.5 for the Sunfish (For monohulls center of bouyancy to center of mass of a 6 ft man hiking) There is not that much difference in righting arm

These rigs are unstayed. They deflect before they break.

These rigs are way overbuilt but not stiff, they bend

At a gut level, just based on my experience, I don't think I could break a Laser rig if I put it on my Tornado

As a computer Junkie for more than 20 years I would not recommend the addition to the hosts file that is posted here. 127.0.0.1 is the internal IP address for yourself and naming it "media.fastclick.net" seams like a bad idea to me. You are in effect confusing your IP Stack into thinking that you are called "media.fastclick.net" There are ways to block the popups without compromising your own security. I would not do this, and My recommendation would be to investigate this kind of thing thoroughly

I've always thought that the design on the site below would be an excellent kid-cat, and would lend itself to a Sunfish or Laser rig for simplicity and reuse. Start beginners on an easy and low power rig, update to sloop for more experienced kids. It looks very simple and inexpensive to build, in the spirit of the original Optimist pram. A sailing club could build a bunch of these on the cheap and voila, a pre-Hobie-16 age youngster cat sailing program. Get a couple of clubs to do it in a region and whole new thing could be born.

Awhile ago I posted a challenge for the designers that lurk around to come up with something like this, and nobody responded. But maybe because this existing boat might already be the ticket.

http://www.stevproj.com/SpecPurp.html - scroll down a bit, there's more than one design on the page.