I may not be a sailing expert (although I have fooled the British
Government, most of the sail training organizations in the U.S., and
the U.S. Coast Guard into thinking so) but I was very intrigued by the
balance issue in my early years.

The centerboard and rudder comprise just about the whole lateral plane
on a dinghy. If you remove the centerboard from a dinghy with a
hinged board and put in a temporary dagger boat, you can make huge
adjustments in the location of the lateral plane. If you study the
effect on rudder angle under controlled conditions you can learn some
very interesting things.

The racing adjustments you are talking about certainly are real and do
work. The difference is one of perspective. When attempting to eke
out very small increments of performance these small reductions in
rudder angle and helm force are significant. You may even see
yourself picking up enough speed, maybe .03%, to close the angle on
the boat next to you. It's sort of like a lot of sail trim
adjustments. Pulling the Cunningham will speed up a racing boat under
some circumstances but it will not convert a "slow" cruising boat into
a "fast" one.

These small changes observed while racing are not the same thing
though as the differences between boats that are considered to have
weather helm over a broad range of conditions and ones that are
considered well balanced. You are also not changing the crude
geometric C.E. / C.L.P. relationships very much but other critical
aerodynamic aspects of the sail plan that are not considered in the
paper on a pin approach.

--

Roger Long



"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 05:03:00 GMT, Gary
wrote:

Careful. The chap you are preaching to is the Chaplain. Google
Roger
Long before you get to far into this. I should have.
===========================================

I'm aware that Roger is an experienced marine architect but that
does
not necessarily make him a sailing expert. I have spent literally
thousands of hours racing keel boats (with some success), so I'm
fairly comfortable discussing what has worked for me. I think we
all
agree that reducing heel angle will help to reduce weather helm but
there are various ways of doing that.