Just curious! do any of the mosquito owners who are running spinnakers with a moulded fibreglass "mouth" on the bow end of their "chute" ever get any rope cuts to the fibreglass mouth from the halyard/retriever rope running over it on the set and particularly on the retrieval?
Darryl J barrett

Hi Darryl,
Can`t say much for the Auzzie chute, I`m not familiar with the one they use, but in South Africa we use a plastic chute made for a keelboat, and we cut it down the center, remove a piece and glue it back together with pvc solvent. Works like a dream.
The rope shouldn`t chafe the plastic chute too much, since when you retrieve, the first thing you do is release the halyard, so there is very little tension in the retrieval line. The line runs through the patches in the spinn, so it bunches the spinnaker up before pulling it into the chute, so the line actually has very little contact with the chute under tension, since once the kite starts to come into the chute, it`s the spinnaker which will chafe against the chute mouth rather than the line itself. We`ve had this system up for about 2 years now, and none of us have any serious chafe-marks that warrant chute replacement.
Attached is a pic of the chute we are using.

Cheers
Steve

Hi Darryl

I would second what Steve says. We don't get any marks on our chute mouths, because once the halyard is free, we are really only taking up slack on the retrieval line until the spinnaker itself starts to go into the chute.

Gary did once cut a groove in his chute last season when he had problems getting the chute down after a capsize. Everything was tangled and there was a lot of tension on the retrieval line. This is the only time I know of this happening.

Tim

Hi Guys, it's been a long time in between drinks been a little busy else where. How are you all finding that the Mossie handles now with the spinnaker to its performance previously without? From my experience years ago they tended not to like a lot of down wind pressure on the bows, we usually had to back off quite a bit when the wind got up, particularly in relation to some of the other more forgiving bowed cats that appeared (ie NACRA 5.2 and their later ilk) I would have thought that the spinnaker would have allowed for more stability (particularly for and aft) than without it and enable you to drive it more downwind?

Hi Darryl

In the mid-90s the Mosquito hull shapes changed quite a bit with the hulls being built a lot fuller than the old boats and the bows in particular being filled out a lot. The end result was that the new boats floated a lot higher out of the water than the old ones and can drive the bows in a lot more before you have to back off.

Having said that, the tendency for the bow to go down is what limits the maximum speed of the Mosquito. As you said, we have to back off eventually or it will just go down, but without the spinnaker this doesn't really happen until the boat is almost getting blown off the water by the trampoline. With the spinnaker up the extra speed means we do hit the limit a bit earlier and in a 20 knot breeze sometimes have to flog the spinnaker in the gusts.

Our spinnakers are not like skiff spinnakers. They are made to sail very tight to the breeze (the main is pinned right in on the downwind legs with all telltales streaming) and they don't give the sort of lift that the skiffs get, so we don't really get the bows out.

Tim

Hi Tim & Darryl, here`s my take on how it all works :
The spinnaker doesn`t have a tendency to make the nose dive for the following reasons:
- When sailing with the spinn, you sheet everything in tight as if you were going upwind, and sail your apparent wind, in effect you are "beating" into the apparent wind, your course to true wind direction is of course a broad-reach to a run. Because of this the resultant force is trying to make you capsize sideways more than go nose-over. In the MANY capsizes with spinnaker that I`ve had(And I`m the undisputed champ here) , I`ve never pitchpoled, but lost it sideways only, simply overpowered.
When you could have trouble with going nose-over is in short, steep chop where the back beam hits a wave, the nose goes down & submerges, the boat slows or even stops, then the spinaker`s power pulls you over if you don`t throw the sheets away quick enough. I think this is what Tim means when he says letting it flog.
I`ve had the bows go under until the front beam is submerged, foam all over the trampoline, just bear off hard, DON`T ease the spinnaker or main, and she pops out without a hassle. I`ve found easing the spinnaker only powers it up more, so I tend to keep it in or even sheet in when overpowered (break the airflow over the spinnaker, stalls it & depowers).
I find the Mozzie very forgiving even when you do stuff the bow hard, she has a tendency to slow down a lot, but seldom pitchpoles.
What we found is that it`s safer to hoist the kite than to go downwind without it, even in 20 knots, up to 22, seems to lock the boat into a groove, just have to watch the waves carefully.
Attached pic : 10-15knots, Mozzie F16 SA Solo Champs. I`m flying a hull in my own little private gust.

Cheers
Steve

Steve,
Nice pic.....looks like you are all Cat Rigged.
Do you have more cat rigged Mossies with kites than sloop rigged.
Just Curious

Regards,
Phill

Hi Phill,
That pic was taken at our solo champs, hence everyone cat-rigged. At most regattas most of the guys with spinnakers sail 2-up, sometimes the top 2 guys sail solo (when their crew get tired or fed-up), but not often.
At Nationals we haven`t had a cat-rigged boat enter in a few years, all sloop, now with spinnakers. I don`t think a cat-rigged spinnaker boat will be competitive against sloop sailors of equal skill. There are just too many things for one person to do if they are competing against a good sloop crew, who can play downhaul, outhaul, weight position, main traveller & mainsheet, mast rotation on a downwind leg. The top 2 skippers here can get away with sailing solo in a mixed fleet & still do well, but they don`t sail away from the rest of us quite as much as when they have crew. Also, in 15 knots plus the extra weight helps a lot, you can put more power on & hold the boat down.
When sailing solo, you have to decide which of the 2 sails deserves more attention, so the mainsheet & traveller end up cleated while the spinnaker is adjusted, while with 4 hands on the boat, you can constantly trim everything for max. speed.
And as skipper, you don`t have to work so damn hard, man I was finished after that regatta !
In the attached pic I`m about to score one of my 4 "touchdowns". Not good for speed - I capsized twice on one downwind leg, and twice after that, winning the "capsize king" trophy for that regatta.

We used to have the mossie set up quite dfferently for cat rigged as opposed to sloop rigged, Has any one thought of setting a mossie up just for cat rigged sailing? They could tailor the spinnaker specifically for that purpose ie they do not require as much sail area to be able to generate the power that is necessary for "two" up sailing, and if they used a slightly smaller and flatter spinnaker it may give them more control and enable them to actually put more "speed" into the water

Hi Darryl,
As you will know, you can have your sails cut however you like within class rules, in South Africa the spinnaker is adopted as class equipment as of September 2003, and we have only max. luff, leech & foot measurements, so you can build a really full/flat spinnaker, make it smaller than max, etc. You could even do that with the main, I believe in Australia some sailors in the Mozzie & Taipan classes have mainsails cut to suit their weight. While this might give you an ideal setup for one situation, it would make resale difficult here, a spinnaker cut smaller & flatter would limit it`s use for solo sailing, which we don`t do a lot of.
Instead, we are standardising almost everything - all new sails are from the same sailmaker which helps us to negotiate better prices, and ensures equal performance boats, the epoxy boats are so similar in performance to the wooden boats that it makes neither obsolete, allowing more choice. We`re getting boards & blades from the epoxy-boat builder, but you can still build your own.
I think the end result of all this is that we`re much closer to a one-design class than a pure development class, which is good, as stability ensures that a wealthy sailor won`t buy his way to the front. You could build a carbon Mozzie, but it`d have to weigh the same as a wooden one, so why bother ?
Sorry for the long answer, but my point is that similarity breeds similar performance, which is the goal of the F16 class as well as the Mozzie class. If everyone had different sails cut it would start an arms race which can only be supported by classes like the Tornado & A-class. For the rest of us, it`s not sustainable.

The difference in the set up of a cat rigged mossie as compared to the sloop was pimarily for the reasons that the cut of the mainsail for sloop was wrong and cut to full for one up cat rigged the diamonds and rigging as well was, from memory set differently. This still kept the class "legal" but it made sailing cat rigged much more "comfortable". They were a very nice cat to sail one up (after all thats the way they were originally designed) and I have fond memories from them (even with the early propensity for them as sloop to fold the bows inwards under the extra loads of the jib and a crew) Still we soon sorted that one out.

Hi Darryl, Tim, anyone else interested.
Darryl, short answer to your questions :
"How are you all finding that the Mossie handles now with the spinnaker to its performance previously without? "

Performance wise, see attached pic, it explains it all.

"I would have thought that the spinnaker would have allowed for more stability (particularly for and aft) than without it and enable you to drive it more downwind? "

That`s exactly what we`ve found.

Hope that helps,
Cheers
Steve

Thank's Steve, thats exactly what I wanted to hear, "if it looks better, and it goes better, and people think it is better then it usually IS better" Hopefully it could breath new life into the mossies world wide. I feel that the only way to go for the resurection of cat sailing globally IS down the formula path, lets hope it's the "way of the future"
Darryl.

They have been experimenting with a "bigger" working sail rig for the mossies here. Personally I'm not sure that it is the way to go. I look back on a few other classes that went down that path a few years ago and it caused a lot of problems in them which they have never recovered from. Adding a bigger rig where the mast, rigging, sails, boom etc have to be replaced has nearly always proved highly detrimental to the class (not to mention expensive). Now improving the performance of the class by simply "adding" another sail and leaving the rest of the boat alone seems to be a much better way of improvement for all.

Hi Darryl,
I think there`s always the temptation to upgrade to stay cometitive with newer designs, there are 2 schools of thought here : Stay One-design, don`t change a thing, ie Hobie 16, Dart 18 etc, or go development class ie A-class, Tornado, Mosquito & others. The first group are successful because there`s no continuous development costs to stay with the pack, you can buy a 1979 Dart 18, go to the Worlds and still be a top 10 finisher (Johnny McGillivray did just that at the `99 Dart Worlds, but then he`s a Hobie sailor ). Hobie have their own style, and enough cash to back it, and that works too. I think these classes are losing some support to more exciting, faster classes & this will only increase as more high-tech, lightweight & exciting boats are introduced to the market. Of course, these newer boats will have to get their marketing right, or they won`t succeed.
On to development classes : To stay competitive in most classes you need to buy new sails every 5 years (or even less in the case of Dacron). By looking into upgrading the design of the sails every so often, a long-lived class (ie Mozzie in this case) can extend it`s lifespan in the market, but there are limitations, with regard to what the platform can support in terms of rig design,as well as what is financially feasible to the boat-owner. That`s why 16ft-ers are becoming more full in hull shape, not because i`ts a better low-drag design hull, but because the designers are putting 18ft rigs on 16ft boats. The Mozzie hull shape is so similar to Tornado, which is regarded as one of the best hull designs (by some, not all will agree), but because it`s a scaled-down T, it has less hull volume than the newer 16ft cats, so it won`t hold the same kind of rig power well, except in light airs. This, I believe, has been tested by Bob Wilson in the Mozzie class in Aus with limited success, and is evidence that a taller rig with more sail area doesn`t improve the boats heavy-air performance much. A few years ago some Auzzies put a squaretop sail on the existing mast length, with no apparent increase in performance, which killed that initiative. An interesting thing is that if you took a Tornado & scaled it down to 16ft, it would look like a Mozzie, but be 22cm wider and have 20% LESS sail area than the current Moz design.
The problem with changing the rig design is that not everyone does it at the same time, not everyone can afford it, and you lose some sailors along the way. It took us 18 months to get the spinnaker into general use by 80% of the fleet, for the first year there were only 6 of us. Four years after the lightweight hulls were first built here, and we still have older boats that are now not competitive, we accommodate them by having separate classes, but these sailors are saving cash to change up to newer boats. If we were to spring a new rig design on them now they would just pack it in and go buy a Hobie, or quit sailing. Development classes are a good thing, provided that development occurs within strict one-design rules.

There, I`ve had my say, and it took a while.

Have a look at how the Mozzie is developing in SA on our web-site :
http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/tuffex/boat_report.htm

Keep those pictures coming Steve !

They're beautiful and just what we need to make the mozzie webpage on F16 website more sexy.

Wouter

Hi Steve,
found your dicussion on sailing one up and sail sizes interesting.As you know in AUS. we are using a larger spinnaker than S.A. and finding it OK one up.I think it is realy a matter of getting use to it once you have it set up right and sail with it all the time it is hard to go back to two up.Crew getting in the way sitting on ropes etc.
I guess what has me hooked on one up F16 sailing is the power to weight ratio,once you take the crew of it is amazing how light a wind you can drive apparent in and with practice still handle it in 25kts plus.As far as sail shapes and makers are concerned we are very flexible,I think this is part of what has allowed the mozzie to survive in Aus. as development of sails has allowed us to keep up with newer classes.Old Mozzie sailors still sailing say it is amazing how much faster the Mozzie is compared to 20 years ago and from my experience with my old Mozzie putting a second hand up to date sail on it improved performance by 50%.Although currently I am using a main I believe is seven years old,with some rig adjustment (much tighter diamonds than other cat rigged boats) it doesnt have to turn into the biggest wallet winning.

cheers,Gary.

Hi Gary,
"I guess what has me hooked on one up F16 sailing is the power to weight ratio,once you take the crew of it is amazing how light a wind you can drive apparent in and with practice still handle it in 25kts plus".

While I agree with you on it being amazing that you can "go wild" in light wind & work the apparent wind, I`m amazed that you can hold it all together in "25kts plus". In those conditions we are looking at not sailing at all, even sloop, it just becomes boat-breaking weather. The conditions you describe are when we have a very nasty 3ft chop with water being blown off the top, it`s windsurfing time with 4,5sqm sails, not cat weather. Perhaps where you sail it`s a bit calmer (sea conditions) but in anything over 22 knots it gets a bit wild here.
With regard to your spinnakers being bigger than ours, I`m a bit confused, since when Tim Shepperd was getting the spinnaker size sorted he consulted with Kevin Webb in SA about the luff, leech & foot lengths, and I was under the impression we were on the same figures give or take a few mm, and that any extra area could only be in how much roundness you put into the luff/leech/foot, which we`ve found is actually slower - I had a spinnaker with more luff round than the others and consequently a bit bigger, it never helped me as I couldn`t carry the kite as high as the others, which meant I couldn`t come up high, build as much apparent & then go down with it, the result was that the smaller, flatter spinnakers were faster than me, even in light breeze. I`ve had the luff re-cut, and now my kite is about equal to the others. I think the Americans & Europeans can teach us a bit here, they`ve gone through the spinnaker route & developed the assymetric, look at how flat the Inter-20 spinnaker is cut and how little luff curve it carries.
From what I`ve seen it seems the only Mozzie sailors in Auz who have put spinnakers on so far are cat-rigged, which means no real comparison between the two has been made. I`d be interested in seeing one of you who is competitive as a sloop sailor go up against the cat-rigged boats, I think you might find in certain conditions sloop is quicker, and boat-handling is much easier. There`s also the aspect of playing the mainsail downwind, which is hard to do with only 2 hands, and which we are playing with at the moment.
There`s always so much to learn & something new to try !!

Cheers
Steve

Hi Steve

With regard to the spinnaker size, we started off using the same limiting parameters of the pole length and the hoist height, and we were both sheeting from the sidestays (although I remember you wanted to experiment with sheeting further back). So I expected our spinnakers to be pretty much close to the same size, but when you voted in a set of rules for the spinnaker you included sail dimensions which appeared to be smaller than our spinnakers. I have just retrieved the set of spinnaker rules that Kevin Webb sent to me so I'll get the tape measure out and re-check.

We are planning to include a set of spinnaker rules into the Mosquito rules next year as an appendix, but at present I'm not planning to put in any sail measurement restrictions. We have restricted the three corner points on the boat which seems enough to me, and is also simpler than specifying the head and tack positions and the 3 dimensions of the sail as well (3 rules as opposed to 5). I'm open to persuasion if there is a good reason to have sail measurements but I haven't heard it yet.

We have cats and sloops with spinnakers here - about half-and-half, but so far the cats are dominant on the race course. No-one has come close to Gary in any conditions (except for me on a good day).
I also tried sailing sloop for part of last season and I found I needed 15 knots or more to stand any chance of keeping up with the performance I would have expected cat rigged. I'm sure if I stuck with it for longer the strong wind performance would be very good indeed (mainly because of the extra upwind speed), but right now I can't see how the sloop can ever be competitive below 15 knots. Time will tell.

Tim

Hi Steve,
"While I agree with you on it being amazing that you can "go wild" in light wind & work the apparent wind, I`m amazed that you can hold it all together in "25kts plus". In those conditions we are looking at not sailing at all, even sloop, it just becomes boat-breaking weather. The conditions you describe are when we have a very nasty 3ft chop with water being blown off the top, it`s windsurfing time with 4,5sqm sails, not cat weather. Perhaps where you sail it`s a bit calmer (sea conditions) but in anything over 22 knots it gets a bit wild here."

I have now sailed in a variety of sea states cat rigged, luckily starting with fairly flat water in strong winds but in some parts of the lakes where I live it sounds very similar to the sea state you describe.The biggest sea state I have sailed in with spinnaker was at Torquay on the south west coast of Vic. you may have heard of it as a surfing (Bells beach) or sailboard venue.At the end of Jan.04 they held a reggatta mostly Hobie cats but we got 5 mossies there 2 with spinnakers 1 cat 1 sloop. During the 3 days, winds got up to 25 kts. with seas up to 2m. with breaking waves around the course with larger faces. On the first day (lightest wind) I capsized under spinnaker as soon as it filled.With caution I survived the rest of the reggatta without capsize and passed Hobie Tigers under spinnaker as they capsized or sailed the wrong angles. I dont want to give the wrong impression here it was suvival conditions one run I buried the boat to the mast twice and let the kite flog half a dozen times but it was exhilerating.A couple of Hobies dropped their rigs but as far as I can recall all the mossies survived without major breakage.

Cheers Gary.