Kirt wasn't able to use his skunk, because the patches on his spinnaker were two big and stiff. I also got a skunk and set it up for the first time last weekend. My patches were a little smaller and the whole unit worked great. There are a couple challenges with the skunk sitting off center on the pole, the unit tends to twist when deploying and pulling down the chute. I tied a could of lines from the skunk to the bridle wires for stability and that seemed to work well. I used the bag that was built for the Tornadoe so the 17m2 chute was not problem to get in. We rigged similiar to a snuffer with a continuous line for the halyard and snuffer line, so you never have the pile of line after pulling up the chute. I put a grommet in the tramp about a third of the way back to run the halyard through and into the rear of the bag.
Having the skunk mid pole looks like an advantage to me because when dowsing, the chute tends to hang mid-pole. My crew uses a snuffer on his boat and he was really impressed with the ease of deploying and snuffing.
The negatives I have heard are that it is optimized for weight so much that it might be a little fragile, but I didn't have any problems with that.
Talking to Lars he said the patches work best using webbing instead of grommets. They were having trouble with the grommets grinding into the skunk. I think Randy Smyth was going to take Kirts spin and re-do his patches. If anyone has more questions I can take some pictures of the set up and post.
I'm very interested in seeing detailed pictures of the skunk at the overall setup if you get the chance.
Regards,
Phill
I know that the voices in my head aint real, but they have some pretty good ideas. There is no such thing as a quick fix and I've never had free lunch!
I really liked the "skunk" while sailing- IMO boat pointed better w/ it than the pole end snuffer I had (which was NOT an E-O but was similar, only heavier), however, as Chuck mentioned- my "patches" prevented me from "snuffing" w/o crawling out on bow and shoving spi into the skunk!!- NOT recommended!!
I mounted mine just forward of the bridle wire intersection (ala the Tornados) and used a short piece of line from the pole, behind and under the skunk rear (the part the bag ties on Chuck) to the port bridle wire to keep from twisting and this worked very well (even when I was cramming the spi in by hand on Thursday!!- By the way- Wouter- thanks so much for sharing your Hobie spi bag for the rest of the regatta!). According to the Tornado guys another advantage of the skunk over the E-O is that you actually turn upwind as you "snuff" to "blow" the spi into the skunk while w/ the E-O you must stay downwind or it will tend to "stick" around the middle of the pole as Chuck mentioned.
Disadvantage- the bag goes under the tramp so could "drag" more (but it is center of boat pretty much)- especially if you cram very much in your tramp storage bag! And it takes up almost my whole sailbox! And it's harder to "install" on the boat (currently) than the pole end systems (because of the "stuff" running partway under the tramp- ideally a custom tramp would have a "sleeve" sewn into the bottom the bag would slide into OR the whole "bag" would be incorporated into the tramp). Because it mounts on the side of the pole you can (fairly) easily move it to anywhere you want along the pole from the tip to the base so you can "play" with where YOU want it- not possible w/ the E-O.
Biggest disadvantage I see is the cost (so far) but not being able (easily) to use my $$$ worth of spis made it easy for me to justify-
Randy Smythe has my spis right now to modify them and I will let you know how it works when I get them back-
Send me a private E-mail and I can send pics to whomever (also let me know your mailbox limits please!)-
