If you really want to go wild with sail area downwind, while
generating upward lift instead of adding to pitchpoling moment,
consider an outleader kite.
Some say they're even easier to handle than spinnakers, you get a
honking amount of sail area, and most importantly, they are easily
depowered. And if you have the kite treated with SailKote, it will
completely shed water and pop back up even when dunked.
I'm not sure you could find a safer or easier way to get a massive
increase in downwind sail area on a proa with an unstayed mast.
Perhaps this could eliminate some worries about pitchpoling,
especially because the upward lift will likely be more effective
than any weight you could manage to move aft (depends upon where you
anchor the kite, of course).
That said, I'm not sure I'm interested in seeing how quickly I can
plow through waves downwind, even with an upward lift component. As
Ben mentions, sometimes it's nice to just fly a reasonable amount of
sail and let the boat slice through the sea as designed.
But I'm not a racer looking for speed at all costs. I get how
important that is if racing is your goal.
- Mike
A friend of mine used to race maxis and spent several years as skipper
of Condor. He told me once that they got a lot of lift off the top of
spinnaker which helped keep the bow up when going down wind in heavy
weather. He said that without the spinnaker, the maxis would tend to
bury their bow.
I always thought they were nuts to fly spinnakers in 30 or 40 knots but
what he said makes sense.
Cheers, Paul
On 19/10/2012 2:21 p.m., bjarthur123 wrote:
> but then it occurred to me this morning that proas, harry proas at
> least, don't deploy a spinnaker off the wind. (do russell brown's?)
> same sail area upwind as down then, unless it's light enough you can
> shake out a reef down wind. so if the overall sail plan is sized for
> close hauled work, then the lighter apparent wind on a broad reach
> means you're going to be underpowered. and so you don't need the extra
> righting moment, because you're not going to pitch pole anyway.
>
> i imagine a really hard-core racer would want that spinnaker though...
>
> ben