Once again, I get the advice - forget reaching during races, just buy a spinnaker.
I have a perfectly good catamaran, that is fast upwind, a blast on a reach, and tactically challenging downwind. I don't need a spinnaker to be happy when I race, I just need some reaches once in a while. What the spinnaker boats experience downwind, we experience on a reach. Don't take away the reaches, then turn around & say the solution is to buy new hardware & a sail, or a new boat. The solution is to put reaches back into race courses. This is certainly fair, for handicap racing, since that is how the handicaps are derived.
Next time they get mad at you for flying a hull over the leeward mark, tell them you are ticked they are heeling thier mast over the weather mark...
Sorry champ (jcasto1),
Did not mean to offend non spinnaker boats. Did not mean give away your non spinnaker boat, but just have a go of a cat with a kite. You'll love it.
Any way, even on our Nacra 5.8, I realy enjoyed the windward/leward races as they were far more tacticly challenging (It is more a racers race). We still had the short reach to the clearance mark but left the long reaches for before/in between and after the races.
Quite simply, most spinnaker boats do not want reaches. May be an option would be to run a triangle course with non spinnaker boats doing one triangle, windward/leward and then another triangle (3 laps) and the spinnaker boats do 4 windward lewards.
You will have to run 2 different divisions or use a course corection handicap.
Just a thought.
Stephen Medwell
Team Tornado 'ALIVE'
AUS-260
Although the Portsmouth site says the numbers are derived from ABC courses, keep in mind that they use real results to base the corrections and ratings. And the majority of the races they'd use results from are W-L I'll bet. So I'm willing to bet that the numbers are truly more consistent with pure W-L racing than ABC courses.
Of course, I might get lumped in with the spin boats now that I have added a spin to my boat. My opinion about W-L was formed well before adding the spinnaker. And to verify what others have said - adding a spinnaker has been a great learning experience and added a new dimension to an old boat, and has been well worth the cost (although I did take the cheap side on things). As for racing results with it, it's a mixed bag, but that may be due to learning curve and older stuff. Our commodore used to race a 5.5 with a chute and then a screacher/hooter - the boat's up to it for sure. The great thing about it is not that you don't ever reach anymore, it's that in addition to the great experience reaching now the downwind legs are even more fun then they used to be! It just adds a new dimension to the whole package - it doesn't eliminate any!
Ever try to put a spinnaker on a Nacra 18 Square? SNAP!! There goes the mast. I know how much fun it is to run a chute. We run a 540 sq. ft. Smyth chute on my Supercat-20 but it is not pratical on short bouy courses so we sail the Supercat on distance races and the 18 Square on bouy races. My vote is for an offset B mark for bouy racing for two reasons:1- unirigs don't do well downwind and 2: It's more fun which is the reason I sail...
Don C.
Remember them? Before Roseanne, we had "Mommy, Mommy." Usually slightly less shocking than "Dead Baby" jokes, they were nonetheless pretty awfull.
Every joke was two sentences, the first one always began "Mommy, Mommy, ..." and the second was Mommy's reply, usually beginning with "Shut up or ...."
So there was:
"Mommy, Mommy, what's that green stuff around daddy's eyes?"
"Shut up and eat around it"
"Mommy, Mommy, I don't wanna see Grandma"
"Shut up and keep digging."
Well the title of this post reminds me of one...
"Mommy, Mommy, I don't like running in circles."
"Shut up or I'll nail your other foot to the floor"
So now we have:
"Mommy, Mommy, I don't like sailing in circles...."
"Shut up or I'll nail your other hull to the mark"
Okay, not exactly funny, but the head movie of somebody spinning madly around the mark.... oh never mind. 