Icon

I want a boat that I can sail on the sea, compete with a Merlin round triangle sausage legs, then use it on a small lake and compete with Miracles, Snipes and the odd Scorpion. I dont want old dross, I want a wash through hull, so when we capsize it doesnt take ten minutes to get back up to speed because were full of water. I ve actually bothered to find out how those silly old symmettric kites work so i can design a way around them, or adopt a twin kite approach maybe using dangle poles, maybe something along the lines of the 200 system they canned.

Right now, there is no boat that meets my needs. I like the icon hull, but i also enjoy what a kite does downwind. There are too many boats all catering for bits of what folk want, my idea if I were putting a product out there, which I'm not, would be to make it modular. Want a hiker? buy (a)pack, want a trap boat ? Buy pack (b), want a hiker with a sym kite? Pack © and so on, that hull could do any requirement I reckon hell it could even be a single hander. There again I could be wrong, its not beyond the wit of man to work out a PY, it's not going to be rocket ship fast, it needs a small enough kite to go round the cans on a lake and it doesnt have to have a trap, but it could and then there would have to be another PY.
Another reason we need a fact and measured PY system rather than loads of old buffers vested in keeping things in establshed classes and submiting half arse returns that nobody really bothers with unless, let me guess, they have vested interest or the green eye against a successful class eroding theirs. Whatever, I'm not going to let that stand in the way of progress.
If what I end up with is desirable, then nothing to stop it going into production and yep another boat maybe nobody wants unless RS or Ovington make it, but then that's their choice.
As always with anything I do, it wont be a big secret, and is open to constructive criticism, it just wont be called Icon. Psycon, Tricon, Bicon, Frankencon, whatever, lets just see what we can come up with shall we?

There's nothing that dramatic going on here, except freedom of choice, now nobody can disagree with that can they?

Edited by iGRF - 03 Nov 13 at 7:21pm

Graeme call your one the CONstipated... Same old sh*t, stuck up the same old arse, creating the same old wind... ;-)

Edited by yellowwelly - 03 Nov 13 at 7:47pm

Originally posted by fdsailor Someone has - it's the 59er. Didn't work out for a variety of reasons though, but there is talk in some quarters of it making a return

... but what if he is really is on an interesting track after all the 'puff and stuff' here?

I've kept an interest in the Icon as a simple, straightforward boat with great performance on restricted or open stretches of water. But seeing the turn of this debate, if I were a potential owner, the builder/marketer is now taking an interest in people developing trapezes and kites on what was professed to be a brilliant enough platform anyway. Sounds like anarchy to me.