aysmmetric moth

With the greatest of respect (and that's not meant in a sarcastic way   :-)  , I wonder if any "soft water" boat could not go faster down the squares in most conditions with more sail area.

I'm not sure that beating an A Class downwind is incredibly difficult, and there are non-spinnaker boats that are similar in pace or faster to an A which go much, much faster when they get a kite on. We're not much slower than the As on our Taipan, but we certainly get wiped off the board by a sistership with a little 17.5m2 kite downwind.

Certainly the boost even moderate speed or fast cats get from kites is enormous. The A Class and F18s get creamed downwind by the little old Mosquito cat now the Mossies carry spinnakers in F16 form. The Mossie rates about 14 % slower all-round in standard form, but they are all over the world's best A Class sailors and world-class F18 guys off the breeze under kite. Many of the A class guys readily concede that their lack of spinnakers is a major problem downwind, and some Mossie guys are adding kites on converted A Class cats with good results. I think Steve Clark has said that Cogito would be faster downwind with a kite.

Off the top of my head I'd wonder whether an 18 sans kite wouldn't blast off an A Class cat downwind too, yet the 18 goes a lot faster under kite than it does under jib and main (partly 'cause it tends to be wrong way up withoout kite, but still...).

On boards we can knock off the As downwind in a breeze, and I still reckon a nice little flat kite would be a major boost. So couldn't the foiler just go lower under kite and get a deeper angle at the same pace?

PS on a different subject re foilers....foiling Int Canoes....possible or not? I assume it is, others say no.






Edited by Chris 249

Originally posted by Chris 249 With the greatest of respect (and that's not meant in a sarcastic way   :-)  , I wonder if any "soft water" boat could not go faster down the squares in most conditions with more sail area.

Well there's two sorts of fast aren't there. There's fast as in straight line speed through the water, and fast as in vmg round the course. There are people who think they're directly related, but they're not.

My personal opinion is that fast through the water is the fun bit in speed. VMG wins races, but doesn't deliver more fun sailing.

Now having seen Adam May and Rohan Veal hurtling downwind on a hot angle with the main well pinned in I have some doubts as to whether much more is achieveable on "fast through the water" by adding a kite. If you put a kite on it would for sure go much deeper and achieve more vmg round the course. But would it be going faster through the water? In this case I doubt it.

And if the fun part of sailing a particular boat is its speed, then its probably more fun to sail a hot angle with a vmg of 10 knots and 20knots through the water than it is to sail a deep angle with a vmg of 12 knots and 15knots through the water. And if you've got a boat that is a delight to sail downwind and a bit of a bore upwind then optimising the boat for vmg not speed, so you spend proportionally less time sailing downwind and more upwind is, I suggest, not the ideal result in terms of the fun factor.

JimC

we know it wont be a moth anymore, its just a bit of fun really, we're just gonig to beef everyting up with carbon and see what happends. If it breaks then it breaks and we will just have to sell the remaining pieces!

indeed, you'll really want to reinforce the point at the bow all the way down cause all of the older ply hulls undergo a lot of stress in general there.

how you going to store the kite and hoist from etc etc