Hi Guys -

Jeff, do you have the Adventure Wines boat? That's the only one I know of that was ordered with center sheeting and a cleat. Hell of a coincidence if it isn't Ian and Paulo's old boat (USA 222). That thing is fast. Right-click and open in a new tab or window for more detail. HERE is the link to the first event that boat was raced. Ian raced with Bobby Kleinschmit, who has been working on ETNZ for the last couple of years. There are multiple high-res shots in that album that show the center sheeting clearly.



Obviously, because the standard center sheeting system has no cleat, the skipper hand-holds it on the run. As with the beat, not cleating forces the team to work the main much more often, which is faster. Squeezing the main in the puffs when you have the kite up is very effective. The main traveller is a gross adjustment and less effective in trimming. When we overstood the gate, Dennis would put the mainsheet in his tiller hand to keep our backstay, and drop the traveller with the other hand. It never looked like much of a headache from my perspective. I drove for a couple of years (2006-2008), and only infrequently since, and I don't recall ever having a problem dropping the traveller when needed.

AFA the traveller line, I have sometimes used a separate line (tied to the mainsheet), and Trey once made me a gorgeous, tapered mainsheet that was a split-tail on the end for the traveller. We liked that line best and used it up. We just had a figure-8 knot on the traveller side to keep the car from hitting the stops.

Finally, gybing: there's several different ways to run the spin sheets these days, most of which will not be a problem with the center sheeting Jeff pictured above. One of the recent (last two years?) setups that I tried and liked was the one where the spin sheet isn't spliced or tied together, but instead the ends are taken up on bungees run through the tramp. That method of rigging certainly wouldn't be in the way for the skipper or crew.