'Weight on the Wire'

Agree with you Roy.  They key is to know what you can make work for your crew (weight, preferences etc).  There are loads of variables, and of course the aim is to have a setup that allows you to change gears smoothly when you need to.  That is - of course - the difference between top crews and the rest.!

fair point rick but the fireball handicap has dropped in the past ten years was 991 probs about 7 years ago and now its down to 982 which is a fair drop for an established class

New sail cloths and materials have changed the speeds of most classes. The Yardstick system gives reletive speeds between boats, therefore the handicaps don't reflect all the speed changes that have taken place. The most obvious change was from cotton sails to man made fibres, but as most classes changed within a fairly short period of time (less than 10 years, certainly) they all got quicker.

What you would see, though, is that if you took a 1965 Enterprise straight out of the box exactly as she was new in 1965 and raced her against a 2009 one, the 2009 one would be far faster, dispite the Ent having one of the most stable handicaps.

You would probebly even find the same thing with an early 70's Laser, as the sail does seem to have been improved, and the controls are far better.

Of course, this also partly explains why the handicaps of development classes have changed less than you'd think, as they are getting faster against a moving scale.

To answer the original question

16 stone and 6'1"

or did I miss the point??!!??