We have been working on our rig setup, particularly confirming that we have the right stiffening on our top mast. When we first set the mainsail we have excessive bend in the top section which meant we couldn’t get leech tension. This was due to the RS800 mast being designed from the ‘auto rig’ concept from the late 1990’s.
We added a layer of 100g unidirectional carbon fibre, to remove the excessive mast bend in the top section. As a result we are now able to fully power the rig up and remove most of the ‘speed creases’ we were seeing. We were surprised on this outing to be raking the rig earlier than we expected, and how quickly we can power the boat up.
The wind was a pretty consistent around the 10 knot range with possibly 1/2 to 1 knot of tide behind us.
Port Tack:
Starboard Tack:
- Freebooter Upwind Tuning
- Freebooter – Two sail reach in 16-20 knots of wind
- Data Driven Decision Making – I14 Handicaps – The RYA’s response and the Rickmansworth results
- Classic I14 – Where we are & how we got here – The Mast
- Data Driven Decision Making – How to develop a fair handicap for all 14s, especially those in the Vintage and Classic fleets