V Twin

Oh dear Greame

I knew I'd be putting my hand in the fire (!) but I'm only saying it the way I see it (just as you occasionally do).  Is it 'messanger shooting season' so soon  ? ... I'm only saying what many out there think while they egg you on even further with a mixture of encouragement and 'knocking' possibly to amuse the forum.  Of course you don't have to use a Blaze hull (God knows where we'd end up there .... and in most ways I'd rather not see you write a sequel of 'whats wrong with the Blaze by GRF' ;-). 

What got me to comment now after being broadly supportive in the past is the inversion bit ....  However well it turns out performance wise in the end if recovering from inversion is more than tough its curtains for the concept even as a one-off - who wants to worry about recovery every time you get a decent breeze ? - there are classes available that can do that for you already.  (btw we'd had sealed masts on the Blaze almost since the beginning with the halyard returning down the track ... for all the good reasons you know already)  But if you have a spinnaker and/or jib with internal halyards or even a main halyard within the tube sealing effectively will not be easy - all I could suggest if you do persist is trying a small diameter carbon mast that would be lighter but more importantly would have much reduced internal volume available to flood.   A few 'balls' might help a bit but not that much.... 

But do think about grabbing any (OK then not a Blaze) hull where all that  expensive basic proving stuff has been done already, modify it a bit if you must and concentrate on the rig / foils / controls.  The problem with a few dinghy sailors is they are 'hull obsessed' and forget to give the rig at least as much focus, they just love their hulls to bits - as another ex-boarder you know this stuff is at least partly right and it would play to your strengths in my opinion.   There really are some great and suitable hulls already that are let down by heavy, draggy rigs   ... but could be transformed with right rig.

Only my opinion Greame ....

Mike L.

Mike- if you do decide to play with kites on a single hander again, I'd definitely recommend an external kite halyard irrespective of the sealed mast advantages.  

Well in answer to how it went over in the first place as i recall, I kept losing the mainsheet, first by not having a knot in it, then the knot I did tie to the end of the jib sheet (bear in mind they were both going through the same block, which in itself turned out not to be the great idea i at first thought it was).

Edited by G.R.F. - 24 Apr 12 at 12:44pm

Originally posted by G.R.F.   However I still remain minded that the best single hander there never was, is a Blaze with Kite, even if it were only a small one..

fair points, but this is sailing... it's backwards and all that would have happened in a new load of joiners would join in with their 'new class', the incumbents would slowly swell the Phantom ranks (the generous PY at the time making the decision even easier), us newbies would then have found actually asymmetrics on RTC courses suck... and we would be left with nothing but two factions equally struggling for numbers, with the probability of facing the same fate as the Vortex i.e. dead and no longer in production.