R Speculation

Originally posted by Rupert I've been told on this very forum that the mast being forwards doesn't cause nosedives.However, as a Lightning sailor, I didn't believe them.

Took me a while to work out why that is, when the immediate logic would appear otherwise, obviously all other things like rocker, wavelength etc taken into consideration, to me it appears to be about the 'moment' of the rig leveraging the nose down, the further forward the more boat behind to counter the moment, boats with a knaff rocker are still going to nose dive, given in a lot of instances it's waves from behind tilting them nose down.

When the waves are lifting you from behind it's called surfing...Don't be scared it's quite normal and can be quite fun

I must admit I always thought that the important thing was getting the centre of effort of the sail in balance with the lateral resistance of the hull (waterline/centreboard etc).  If the mast is relatively too far forward in relation to this then the boat will want to bear away.  I used to have a Solution which also had the mast far forward but (inland) nose diving was never an issue until the wind was ballistic and, even then, only dead down wind.  So, as long as the centre of effort of the sail and lateral resistance are in balance, my uneducated and uninformed opinion is that mast position makes no difference to whether or not a boat will nose dive.

Edited by Dougal - 17 Feb 14 at 10:20am

We all know that hundreds of litres of water in the bow were to blame for that... 

Afterwards there were a few more hundred litres in there too!