I've recently been reading Frank Bethwaite's book
High Performance Sailing
which brought my attention to 18footers and related
apparent wind
monos. Turns out they've got a big regatta going on this week in Sydney Harbor. If you've got an hour to kill, today's sailing was pretty awesome. Link here. Check the middle of the 3 videos.
The tactics of this style of racing is so similar to ours. I think the pissing contest is all wrong - its not a question of monos versus cats, its slow boats versus fast ones.
I'll tell ya though, I'd much rather be parked between races on a cat than one of these guys any day <img src="<>/cool.gif" alt="cool" title="cool" height="15" width="15" />
Great find!
I loved the ferry boat crossing at 28 minutes into that second video, and the whole downwind run from 28-40 minutes in. And the way that big red 7 boat came from DFL on the start, to round in 3rd! Very cool.