Trapeze Points

Look at Stars or Ynglings, trap is out the floor is'nt it?

Not really - they have an upper body harness that takes the weight when hiking flopped over the side. A sort of trap I suppose ...

Rick

The other advantage of high trap mounting points is that you can move aft with less change of body-height/ force pulling you forward.

Contenders seem to have such short wires I'm always surprised to see they can get back at all without facing entirely forward to resist the pull in that direction, but they do. How do you manage it, Contender boys (and BNS)?

I guess it's quite a tall mast with a lot of rake. My trapeze wires come straight down and must be more than a metre behind the mast heel.

On most Contender rigs the trapeze wire is crimped onto the shroud this has 2 advantages: slows down an inversion if you capsize because there is less holes in the mast (important with a boat whoes hull floats so high on it's side) and also means the trapeze make little difference to the sideways mast bend because it's acting on the hounds (important for such a whippy mast).

The only downside of this (although I don't think the trapeze position is important) is that if you're lardy you need loads of rig tension. Otherwise when you go out on the wire in marginal conditions it reduces the tension in the windward shroud allowing the mast to bend off and depower - which means you have to come back in off the wire again!