Square top

Well i managed to get out for a good blast with the new mainsail. It is pretty flat but seems to work well with my stiffer mast. I have made a bolt rope mast about 30% stiffer fore and aft and got Andrew Landenberger to make the sail to suit. It was about 20 knots easing to 15 later, it was very easy to keep in the groove and felt like i had plenty of height up wind.

Reports from the shore said the leech looked fine. Couple of minor tweaks to make but am happy so far. Will possibly go stiffer again.

Thanks for making a great sail Landy, you can find his sails at http://www.landenberger-sailing.com/

By the way it is very light at 2.4kgs

New Mainsail Test

Well i managed to get one of my little projects on the water today. Its a new sail from Andrew Landenberger, "Square top" in profile and on a new mast section with a bolt rope. Masts are now so small i thought it would be interesting to try the bolt rope sail and compare. I did not over rotate it today, but its on the cards.

The mast is significantly stiffer fore and aft and have applied a bit of our 18 footer technology to this development. The sail is light, with a total weight of 2.4kgs ready to sail, have not weighed my pocket luff yet, but rumours have it they are over 4kgs, I will weight it next week and report the facts.

I thought that the overall weight would be less, will report next time. I will get it out on the water a few more times and report on the results, very happy with the first outing though.

10 knot video

Well i finally got some editing software going. I have not had a great deal of sucess, but here is the first video. Bit on the crap side, but will get better with practise. The camera took about hour of footage, had afew issues cutting, editing and combining pieces again, anyway here is a short outtake.
Broke the mainsheet bridle as you can see.

Westerly Woe's

Well i managed to get out for a brief sail yesterday. About 1 hour in 25knot westerly is not good whether is on the harbour or the bay. I managed to forget my GPS but there were some smoking rides, sometimes feeling like i was just a passenger on the green rocket ship.

Well the setting that i was raving about a couple of days before in 10 knots was pretty much usless in 25 knots. The boat was lifting too high, so guess i need more gantry tilt to give the back end lift.

Pretty amazing in that breeze, i think i could have cut off about 1m off the top of my sail and still been fine. Water was very flat and managed to complete 2 gybes from 2, not that well but complete and did about 20 tacks, again not all of them famous but managed to have no swims in 1 hours outing.

Looking forward to lining up against someone to get some relative speed/height comparisons.

Still trying to edit video footage, having some drama with software.