I can have a trapeze, nothing technical is preventing it, but it won't. Reasons, it is neither simple not inexpensive. Additionally the sailarea will be relatively small, so it won't be used very often. In short the return against the investment is not interesting enough.

An additional reason is that singlehanded trapezing is considered a skill. My idea for the F12 was to have a boat that was regarded unintimidating and easy to sail/setup so that it would be a good entry into cat sailing and apparent wind sailing for absolutely novices (both kids, youths, teenagers and adults)






You yourself said many times that racing is not everything. Now I've been earlier involved in a class of cats that certainly qualify are race oriented. They are lean and fast but can be mean at times. This time I wanted to offset that by having a well performing boat that was easy and very well behaved, plus very economical to purchase and operate. For the group of sailors who are not interested in racing , but far more in an enjoyable hobby.

Of course the boat doesn't have to be low performant or against racing, it only needs to avoid making compromises if racing would demand those, against simplicity and easy of sailing/rigging. The trapeze is such a thing I believe.





I think it would be a great trainer for everybody, including owners of real racers like myself. Time-on-the-water is the must important ingredient for succes. I would like to have a boat myself that I can rig and derig under 5 minutes, so I can go sailing in those little hours were rigging up to big one is too must effort or too time consuming.

For the same reason my design won't have a spinnaker, it can but it won't as a class.

Additionally, because of its simplicity it will be very easy to learn "the ropes" on. What I'm trying to so is design a go-cart for sailing. Yes a go-cart is not a nascar or F1 race car but quite a few drivers started out in these things when they were young and moved up later on. Go-carts are relatively inexpensive (compared to the larger bolides) and easy to operate as they have no clutch and no gear box. And a go-cart race course can be setup on a very small piece of land. Overhere we have race tracks inside inner city former warehouses and storage buildings. Hugely popular.





Not trying to overpromote my design but that is actually what my design allows. At this time the exact same platform with mast foot design will take :

-1- The class 5 landyacht rig
-2- The laser 1 rig
-3- The windsurfer rig
-4- The gaff rig
-5- The lugger rig (= very interesting for extreme simplicity and low cost)

and it will even take the sprit and lateen sail setups but both or these are not as efficient as the ones named earlier.

All these rigs can be used because the platform allows the use of an unstayed mast.

A lateen sail will be rather difficlt to fit to this F12.





Well , my idea was to base the class rules upon the most performant setup that can be had. Then all the simpler and less performant versions can be part of the class as they will never have any speed advantage not matter how well they are build.




I don't think this particular posting was a "round and round" type of posting.

Wouter