Endevour trophy runners and riders

Originally posted by Hector Originally posted by Guest#260 Shame the field is so weak; No Estaugh, Pinnell, Carveth, Howarth ... no Fireball, 49er, RS800, RS400 and so on ... Thats very dismissive of those class representatives who won the right to go by actually winning their own Championship....

Not to mention the fact that the above would certainly have been a very strong list 5-10 years ago, but times change... Quite possibly there are folk there who wiill be the equivalent of the above in this century. Also high performance specialists have never done well in the event, which is basically finds the quickest sailor in the kind of boat used in the list...

Oh yes please, i left all mine at home the other day....

Edited by HannahJ

I thought the boats were OK, better than I expected in fact.  They have not been designed or marketed as a high performance boat, but rather as an affordable, 'stick a cover on and forget-about-it' club racer.  I think viewed in that way they are pretty good.  It is easy to see where compromises have been made, the boat is a bit heavy, a bit flexible and some of the components are a bit 'cheap', but that does mean that Topper can sell them for just over £5100 (I believe) which I am sure many potential owners will feel is a fair trade-off. 

There are many good aspects to the design too.  The cockpit is sufficiently deep to be comfortable. The sails were big enough to provide a few exciting moments in Saturday's gusting F4 conditions and the racing was as tight as any I have enjoyed for a long time.

The spinnaker pole is the sort of initial production problem that you would expect Topper to address.  I believe the Endeavour was the first time that the Xenons had been raced in any significant wind and at least 4 spinnaker poles snapped, which is not great, but there are very few SMODs that have not had to make small tweaks to the design after the initial launch.  If I was buying one I would ask when they were going to beef up the pole.

I can't compare to the Vision or Laser 2000 as I have not sailed them, but in summay, the Xenon seemed like a good deal.

 

I was there racing.

The guys were very slick in the gybes and going from set to set instantly.
I just think that the alley went under heavy racing loads. There were
reasonable gusts on the race track. Gybe on to the gust and hit the new
gybe aggressively and bang. Combine that with reasonable crew weight
that is dam slick and with a boat that weighs 118-kg and you have your
answer.

2 snapped poles on one day???? Never heard or seem of that happening before. Must be the curse of using green tape! Does sound quite a dodgy advert for the boat though, although it may not have been designed for that punishment and aimed more towards less intense racing.