Alternative to a Contender

As much as the Contender looks pretty cool, is great in a big breeze and a heavy helm delight, it is a weighty beast and breaks one's back pulling it up the slip.    So, the alternatives:

The RS600 is lightweight, a twitchy so and so, equipped with scaffolding and maybe better suited to lighter helms.
Farr 3.7 looks great, light but is really a light weight's boat.
Int Canoe.   Umm, fab but the new ones are serious money and again looks like a light weights boat.

I can't think of any other single sail, trapeze single handers for round the cans racing.  So, what about putting trapeze on a Phantom?    Would it be a bit like a Farr 3.7 but for bigger people?   Or is the hull/sail shape all wrong?

Or a trapeze on a Blaze Halo as it is but bin the scaffolding?

Just pondering things.

RS600 is an excellent big persons boat, and in their heyday they were dominated by helms weighing 85-95kg.

I agree two things, the Contender has the market sewn up, limited as it is but secondly that it is too stupidly heavy, especially on a day like sunday when we had the contenders down and even they got blown off, luckily I had to leave having got the Snipes up the beach (even more stupid weight), I didn't want to bugger my back up lifting all that lead out of a shore dump.

Edited by Woodburner - 22 May 15 at 11:40am

Originally posted by Surfasaurus RS600 is an excellent big persons boat, and in their heyday they were dominated by helms weighing 85-95kg.

Too tippy.   Yep, they can be got to grips with but I'm after a more stable platform.   But interesting to know they are ok for bigger helms.  Thanks.

Originally posted by boatshed Originally posted by Rupert I think the last of those would work well, but really the Contender has the market sewn up for one design racing with trapeze and no spinnaker. Don't have time to do an open meeting schedule.   It's just for hacking around the cans in the club h/c races.

What it means is that choice becomes limited, as no other boat has ever managed to gain true traction, so you can't decide to buy a Delta instead, as they never really sold any. Offhand, I( can't think of the names of other attempts at breaking into the market, but the 600 is the only one which made any impact at all.