You are 100 % correct here.

But for some reason most people forget about one of the most important ratio's of all.


! Sailarea per boat !


No uni-rig can effectively canvas as much area as a sloop rig on a, apart from this, identical boat.

So yes if class rules limit the total sail area to an amount that can reasonably be put in a uni-rig then such a setup CAN have advantages. However if class rules allow much more sailarea then can be controlled in a single mainsail then adding a jib becomes very attractive. Classes, like the 18 foot skiffs, that have no limit on overall sail area all have jibs and having one here is an absolute must.

Some sailors and designers are focussed too much on the specific circumstances of their own classes and assume that every design is restricted to some rather low limit in overall sailarea (as their designs are) and then claim that it is always better to put it all in the mainsail. This maybe true in their own class but it is simply not the whole picture.

You can't just remove the Tornado jib and add its whole area to the mainsail; even if you did that and increased the mast significantly then it would still end up being a really bad overall boat. So you have to take away some area from the new mainsail and hope that the improvements in pointing angle are enough to compensate back for losing overall sailarea. In most cases it won't.

A-class, for historic reasons, started with a limit on overall sailarea that actually is significantly lower then a sloop rigged singlehander can realistically carry efficiently. If say they had chosen earlier on to limit area to 18 sq.mtr. then they would al be sailing with selftacking jibs now because of their limit on platform widtht (contrary to 18 squares). Actually this is one example of how the A-cats have their own set of ratio's, unlike those of other designs, that makes their designs as special case. This as an illustration of my often used statement that A-cats are often so much different in their set of balances that things that work there, may easily not work on other platforms.


When we set up the F16 class rules we quickly learned that no more then 16 sq. mtr. could ever be put effectively in a F16 mainsail. We could however put as much as 4 sq. mtr. in a jib if we reduced the mainsail by 1 to 1.5 sq. mtr. Now mainsail area may be more efficient in an absolute sense but it was never going to be 3 to 4 times more efficient. And there were other arguments against not having jibs either, like versatility between 1-up and 2-up.


The M20's can simply carry alot more sailarea with a jib fitted then when just fitted with a mainsail. The crews are now fully going for line-honours and totally forget about handicaps. Actually a M20 with a jib was leading a good portion of the Texel 2006 race ahead of the standard M20's. So even Goran could have chosen to go for the shore because the boats ahead showed him that that was the way to go. The M20's didn't lead the whole Texel 2006 race.

Additionally the time between the standard M20's and the first F18 was the same at 3 hours in the race (oudeschild) as at the end. So in the following 70 minutes the gap remained the same, meaning both boats matched eachother speed for over more then a hour (all the way to the finish). So who is not to say that Gorans lucky break came in the shape of a dying wind halveway through the race.


Wouter