Video of the week

Scows are the business. Too bad we only have the Fireball, and well ok the Topper, over here....

Check this one out.
Clicky
The Support boat is having to go some to keep up. Plus would you stand on the foredeck as the guy does......

yes l3000 and l2 are the same hull

Originally posted by Medway Maniac Originally posted by GK.LaserII Not fantastically exciting but it's the only L II video I could find apart from the stuff on the class website... Shame it's a class thats dying. Laser 2 was the nicest boat I ever sailed on a three-sail reach, Fireball, 505 and asymmetrics included. Somehow very light and balanced - the video reflects that well. The kite was the nicest symmetric I ever used, set on just the right length pole. Trouble was, everything bent where and when you didn't want it to! We used a 505 pole, but you couldn't so easily uprate the boom and that telegraph pole of a mast with its diamonds (why?!) and no pre-bend. The 3000 addresses all those issues, but even though we've kept the kite size moderate and avoided the pitfalls of a lot of assys that can only sail windward-leeward, we've lost that unique feeling of lightness of the L2 on a three-sailer, even if the speed of the 3k is greater. But would I go back to handling an L2 symmetric kite to get that feeling back? Probably not, but I'd like to try it on a sorted boat with a proper mast and boom. Maybe a project on an old Laser 3000 - add a D-ring to the mast, couple of clamcleats and fairleads to the gunwale, then an uphaul-downhaul on the mast - but the list is getting longer, and it'd be a shame to spoil an L3k - maybe not, then!

More sofisticated sail controls would be good for the L2, I've put extra blocks on the outhaul and cunningham (Not class legal) so that my Wife can get some purchase. We make sure the Main goes up as tight as poss in light/heavy air. So we manage some decent bend and as yet we haven't bent anything that shouldn't bend even in a force 8 (got caught out and still came in third).

The L2 ain't a perfect boat by a long measure, particularly in a drift but at £1000 for a good sorted second hand boat  I still reckon on a thrill per £ it's the best out there by a very very long way.

 We geta bit lonely down wind but still manage to get to the mark ahead of most other boats. In the last 2 yrs we are the only symmetric boat racing regularly at the club.... Silver ware on the mantle piece

Originally posted by Medway Maniac its diamonds (why?!)

Diamonds have one very big advantage, especially on a shallow hulled boat like the L2 which isn't especially wonderful for vertical stiffness. A single spreader rig with spreaders pushing in relies on the windward shroud tension pushing in on the windward spreader to keep the mast straight.

When both crew are sitting out hard on toes straps then there's lots of tension in the windward shroud. When the crew gets out on the wire the majority of the righting moment comes off the shroud onto the trapeze wire. In fact it will even tension up the lee shroud.
So the result is that as you get out on the wire the windward spreader virtually stops pushing the mid mast to leeward, and the lee spreder starts pushing the mast to windward. The top mast promptly sags off to leeward, the leech goes slack, the power is gone and you have to get in off the wire again...

The conventional solution, it turned out, was to put suicidal rig tension on the boat so that the effect of the crew weight on the spreaders was minimal. The effects of this on the longevity of previously adequately built boats like 470s at the tail end of the seventies was somewhat marked.Arguably the class has never recovered...

The alternative is to use diamonds, which aren't affected by the crew weight on the wire, which means that the mast bend is much more linear and the boat doesn't have to have mayhem rig tension to stay powered up in marginal trapezing weather. It makes a lot of sense.

Also the Cherub that the L2 was based on was a diamonds rigged boat, albeit with a Tasar like wingmast.

Edited by JimC