Date: 4/4/2001
Name: Mark Weinheimer
email: mark.sails@pamlico-nc.com
subject:class sails
Here in Eastern NC, racing in Fleet 8, we have 12-18 boats racing on a regular basis. This racing is done almost entirely with working sails. This is not because we don't know how to use spinnakers, are scared, or don't want to spend the money for the kite and genoa and associated gear. The primary reason is that we sail short courses, affording lots of races, close fleet racing, and very tactical challenges. Most of our recent additions to the fleet have come from big boat PHRF racing, where you need 5-9 people on a regular basis, as much money as you can pour through the hole, and lots of time to move the boat around. We know all about sets and douses, jib changes and three mile legs. We race working sails because it is more cerebral than physical. Sometimes it feels like the larger part of the national fleet is treated like second class citizens because we choose not use a spinnaker. Stars, Comets, Windmills, Vanguards, and Snipes aren't "trainer boats" because they don't have kites. Neither is the Working Sails division in the SJ fleet. One stumbling block in this area for more people moving to all sails is the archaic method of sizing the sails. If you want to be maximize for the PHRF rule, the class genoa is short on the hoist, short on the overlap, and woven rather than laminated material. The class spinnaker is also smaller than the legal maximum allowed. So if you want to go to the trouble of rigging the boat for spinnaker to race class and PHRF, you need two kites and two genoas or accept a disadvantage in PHRF. This point is really neither here or there as far as the thrust of the issue, however. It seems the basis of the proposal to eliminate the genoa from the inventory is to get people to "move up" to spinnaker. I contend this is fallacious reasoning. Certainly some people in working sails are beginners. It is a less complicated boat to sail, since it has only two sails. This does not make it a less demanding boat to sail well, however, and since we are all racing the same stagecoach, speed
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