Blaze X

They are right - if you sit in the wrong position you will be dog slow in light stuff.  Nothing unique there but the Blaze hull has very little rocker indeed for speed in a breeze and if you don't adjust your position accordingly it really will treat you with total indifference in a light winds.   The Blaze is easy to sail in a basic way  - sure .... but if you want to go race fast then perhaps take the speed hints from the boat.  'Uber Slow' is one of them as it tells you very quickly what does not work !  BTW - Weight is far less important than where you put it - get the back end just breaking out of the water ....  or only sail when it blows.

Blaze '720'

 

Comes down to technique in the light stuff. Get it right and you are fast, you need to get it's bum out the water! I tend to sit right near the mast and tack and gybe going through the gap between the main and the kicker.

How much do you weigh out of interest?

Paul

Just a note to say that the spell checker at Y&Y got our name wrong in the racing classes review.  The new Blaze builder is CIRRUS not 'Citrus' - suppose we will survive ...... 

CIRRUS are now producing them with Rondar and the first ones are in the tooling  now with several already committed - see association website or www.cirrusrace.com for details.   We are biased of course so make your own mind up and come along for a trial sail sometime (even if you don't think you'll ever want one !)

Mike - Blaze '720'  

love the Blaze X upwind, you don't get much in the way of pointing, specially if you compare to IC's, Lasers or even Phantoms, but they do lift like no-one's business on the foils, you can feel the 'speed bump' in anything over 10-12 knots, as soon as you're hiking off the wings you just lee bow like crazy and can pop out above most stuff except Merlins or N12's which point like lunatics anyway...you definitely go for speed and keeping the rig powered up rather than trying to outpoint other boats, I've found it's worth ducking starboard tackers if it's anything other than really roundabout to do so because the Blaze loses a lot of momentum in the tack, unlike an RS300 or similar.

Dead downwind is a real technique fest to go very fast and I think that's why the top 10-20 Blaze X sailors are pretty stable - it takes some time to get that right.  On a tight or beam reach, even a novice can get an incredible result out of the Blaze as soon as there's any kind of decent breeze - but again, I'd say practice would really pay here as well

The so called 'new' sail is universal and has been for many years !!  An 'old' sail if you could still find one would be slightly faster in very light stuff and be difficult to controle when it blew.  Its swings and ... well you get the idea.   Well it was bigger and was a product of the 90's obsession with fully battened everything.  Semi soft - 2 full-length upper battens and a couple of shorter ones below is a great compromise and the Blaze can be easily 'feathered' upwind as a result.   This has become very common now and really transforms the handling and gave us fantastic ease of use.

We asked an early 800 sailor why they were 'semi-soft' soon after they appeared - he said he did not know why but that he could feather the sail properly upwind.  Then we built a prototype sail with Jeremy Robinson and ran formal testing for 5 months before switching - result: revived class !  This ability to feather upwind is a great attribute in a single sailed boat as depowering is as important as powering up when you have a tall, powerful 10m rig.

Give me  or the assocaition a call and try one out -  we can do this at the 'Blaze - Burghfield Six-Pack' starting  first Sunday in December  - you get a boat, some practice and one race to try it alongside the locals !

Mike - Blaze 720