Who was out this weekend?.....

James, totally entertaining thread on boards!  Sorry you had a rough time in the motherland...

Check your facts, Redback. The V's at Wilsonian currently sail off a PN 22 points lower than a Laser 3000, as recommended by the CA.

According to my calcs, a trapeze plus the lighter crew it enables would permit the 59er to sail off a PN 30-odd points lower than in fat-boy hiking mode. I think the latter mode is not quite up to the 905 rating it currently has, but the real problem for the fatties for whom the boat was originally intended, is that the PN might come down if whippets start sailing the boat with a wire. The trap won't be as much use to the heavier crews.

Stop press: Ovington are now suggesting:

"920  for 59er Non Trapeze with class rule 150kg crew weight ( if crew is sub 150kg they must have 75% of the difference in correctors).

887 for 59er with trapeze and no min crew weight."

Seems fair to me. One for trhe next Sailing Committee...

The 29er makes huge sacrifices of stability with a narrow waterline beam, so in general it's always going to have the legs on the stable 3k in displacement conditions. It's also got bigger sails, esp. kite. But I have noticed that on flat water we can sometimes plane earlier than them (e.g. last Sunday); unfortunately that happens less than 5% of the time we're sailing. Most of the time on the water we're beating and/or in displacement mode, where the 29er has the edge.

Medway quite windy and certainly grey and cold.  Not one of our best days - we swam a lot - we just weren't together. I suspect we were a bit aprehensive - the 4000 can't be sailed tentatively and the courses were such that we could almost lay the downwind marks by going deep.  Coversely by going high we'd have to gybe a lot due to the shallows.  So we chose the deep option and often came into a gybe a bit slow.

A recent tweak of the settings gave us good upwind speed although losing it downwind meant we didn't have a benchmark for our upwind performance.

We hadn't intended to sail as we were both off on trips - we didn't know we'd both be in Prague and so you can imagine our surprise when we bumped into each other.  Then realising we'd both be back before Sunday we decided to race - but I guess we were still hung over!