mast head floats

Used an L2K with one of the 40L floatations bags at the top. Not good from my point of view, when it is blowing there is a lots of additional sideways force from having the thing ip there.

We didnt actually turn the thing over but I can understand why they are fitted. We also had to tie the board down whcih didn't make for effective 5 essentials (but to be fair the boards in the boats were sloppy and wouldnt stay down anyway).

I like the ones we have at Hunts which are the ones that can be pulled up the mast track with the sail. Not as much bouyancy I grant you but then agains the risk of inversion is very low unless you are unlucky enough to find one of the few deep bits.

The *best* ones are made by Secumar and work on the same
principle as an auto-inflating life jacket. At 140 quid
plus 20 quid per capsize, early reefing is
recommended!

I was wondering whether to hoist a float up the mast
(well, down actually if the boat is turtle) on the
spinnaker halyard in the very rare event of a capsize on
my dart, rather than having a great big bag up there all
the time. Do you think this would work?

-------
Dart 16
Finn

Edited by surf6ne

plus you have the weight of all that milk sloshing around inside you 

Speed Sails made us some nice heavy duty sailcloth sails for our training GP14 fleet, complete with midi jibs, reef points on the main and a pocket at the head of the mainsail coming down the sail about 18 inches.  The design of this pocket is with a Velcro fasteing along the bottom edge of the triangle (hope that makes sense!) so that you can stuff foam in, however we have found that just the air trapped in there is sufficient to stop them turtleing for quite some time.  To be fair, they are older GP's which float lower in the water and therefore are less likely to turtle quickly.

I pass the main halyard through the loop and hoist it to the top of the mast same as Dan.  Like the inner tube idea!

Garry