harrier dinghy

Well that's what I reckon it's low tech cheap and cheerful and most laser etc boats built that way

The Blaze sail works very well... Theorise about what you might have done by all means but the boat is both challenging and fast for the rather more capable and is still very accesible for the typical club sailor.  

You could use the same 'logic' to justify hull changes based on theory and from other classes and 'improve' performance further.  And then lose a signifcant proportion of those who might sail it when they struggle in higher breeze !  Or it might be a right dog in light winds.

How many times has it been repeated here that ultimate performance is not what is always really wanted ... if that was the case we'd all simply go back to boards or to multihulls, rotating wing masts etc etc.   If holding onto the dinghy for a moment we can leave that to the development classes if rules allow and the owners can live with the cost and characteristics.   

What we are talking about is that elusive mix of relatively good performance coupled to good or relatively forgiving handling.  You can achieve this in several different ways and fully battened or not is just one parameter.  

Mike L.

PS -  FYI on the Blaze approximately HALF the battens are full width and have been for 13 of the 16 years of the class.  Hence the use of the term 'semi-soft'.    

I suppose we windsurfers can take a fair proportion of the blame for foisting fully battened rigs into play, but to our mitigation, if you've ever tried to cope with a soft sail in strong breeze with the phenomenal shift of power from the front hand to the back hand, that the move in the flow point brings, you'll understand how we embraced full battens.

Since moving to dinghys and single handed ones particularly I've come to the view that I prefer not to have full battens, full battens drive when I don't want drive, they appear to exacerbate head to wind and 'in irons' situations which I attribute rightly or wrongly to the fact they don't transition in time head to wind and the back bit of the sail heads you back up again before it tacks.

I'm not sure even, why dinghies that don't have to deal with big loads of apparent wind even needed to shift to full battens, unstayed rigs, OK, but stayed rigs with the control systems they have, I really don't thing full battens are at all necessary.

Why for example a boat like a Solo uses them is beyond me, not that it's a very big sail. I could see with the trend towards over power during the nineties, boats like the 300, MPS that were chasing higher speeds the logic, but did not alternate versions like the 700 work equally well with a soft rig?

The other reason for full battens is obviously strong winds, but with the difficulties in setting courses and race management those sort of conditions present, events seldom get held in those sort of conditions, so pretty much logic seems to dictate, they are not worth the additional expense and soft or semi soft the logical solution.

As to the short boom and full batten to the clew Idea, I'd also thought of that, it does reduce boom weight, but I was concerned as to how effective the kicker action would continue to be.

Originally posted by Dougaldog Hmmnn.... interesting that the Hornet had a fully battened main back in 1952/3

Hmm yes, but did anyone actually care? Whereas 100's of thousands of windsurfers did, and they didn't know anything about the laws of physics either.

By the way have the rest of the Hornet class ever considered renting out the underhull for advertising purposes, you seem to see a lot of it...

Don't be hard on Grumph - he acknowledged the Solo's fully-battened sail in his posting (clearly pre-dating windsurfers), and for the rest it was very well-reasoned.  I almost felt guilty for having a go at him on the 'Lightning' thread; almost.