I've been looking at F16 spinnakers, some old, some new, and the basic dimensions are radically different. There has been lots of evolution over the last few years.

If you have some measurements for your spin would you post them here, please? Just the basic outline and mid-height width would do, as well as age and maker. The fullness is hard to measure so maybe a qualitative comment on shape and also who made it would help.

I can't find my cert.! If it shows up I'll send the dimensions.

If you can imagine, when we were first starting the class Greg Goodall wanted us to use 21sqm (same as F18!) as max spi area since it was the same "hit" under Texel I believe. Luckily saner minds prevailed but I do have one of those 21sqm spis- I run it on my Freedom 21 mono now and it works well there ;-)

Kirt

With the bigger more voluminous hulls we are now getting, Greg probably wasn't far wrong, simply thinking ahead of the hull shapes of the time. Two up the 17.5 is probably smallish and for most of the time the Uni sailors could cope with a bigger spinny, the only time Uni the present spinny is a handful is in + 20knots gusts.

What has changed most is the shape of the sail which has become more and more flatish much more like a big Genoa. Without the class rules I would suspect they would become much flatter stll.

Do you suppose a roller furling headsail would work? Not for racing, just for easier rigging and pleasure sailing.

That's basically Rick (White's) "Hooter" idea- very flat, even could be used upwind in light air, problem was the increased need for really tight luff tension. AHPC supposedly voided the warranty if you used them due to this issue. Now if you used a pole that had a striker so all the tension was on the pole and at the bow tangs it might be okay. Remember the American Tornado sailors in the last Olympics used the very flat Chupacabra spi- but it was a disaster vs the conventional spis on the course because the wind blew too hard to use it upwind and downwind it was slower-
In the Worrell I ground crewed on we used too large a spi for our Taipan 5.7- the Nacras had larger, but flatter spis so could use at larger angles vs ours- definite advantage in distance racing. There was a boat with one of Rick's Hooters- they were newbies- sail did good reaching but couldn't match the larger spis at deeper angles.

Kirt

Kirt