Hey Matt, what was the windspeed at Zandvoort? The reason I'm asking is that i just also wanted to put in a disclaimer about my experiments with the main and kite.

We found on the Viper that the "get the apparent wind going, bear off, ease kite and mainsail and drive lower but keep hull flying technique" good up till about 13-14knots of wind speed. Once the wind speed hits about 15 knots, the viper becomes a whole different animal altogether. Our experience with the viper in about 15 knts with the kite up is that the boat starts to plane just like one of those high performance dinghy and we don't really sail it like a conventional cat anymore. Every time a gust hits, the boat just keeps accelerating like on a skiff and the nose has no inclination at all to dive, as such we just focused more on keeping the boat flat and on a plane rather than going for depth and flying the hull as the loss of speed and distance of the boat coming off a plane and getting it back on was just too great.

To achieve this we focused more on playing the sheets of both the main and spin than trying to steer the boat down for distance. I'm not sure if this is the same for a blade hull as we seem to have more flat section than the blade hull but certainly different wind speeds also seem to require different technique.

Perhaps other Viper sailors or perhaps a F18 capricorn sailor might be able to chime in and explain what I'm talking about because i know the concept of a planing cat is still a little odd in some ways. Or maybe i'm just imagining things <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />