"mister b" wrote

in these times, he'll drop his main and roll the jib way in well below
100%...his boat still moves well to windward...so I'm confused about the
claims of poor shape/performance when rolled way in...he says it's BS and
has the empirical evidence at hand...I guess it depends on context.


Is he just moving well to windward or is he beating to reach an objective to
windward? A jib rolled way down (I think you meant 50%) will still drive
the boat to windward but it won't point very well or be as fast as with
smaller sail not rolled down as much. I could get my boat to make steady
progress to windward with the old 150% genoa rolled down to nearly that
amount but it was pretty discouraging to look at the GPS track on a long
beat.

The thing that got me thinking about the smaller, compromize Genoa I had
built was noticing how much faster the boat was to windward with the small
working jib in fresh breezes. The performance difference between the 150%
and the working jib (about a 110% overlap) even in light air and on reaches
was much less than the difference in sail area would indicate.

--
Roger Long