one that would suggest the author ( along with other posters on this thread ) would enjoy sailing one design more than development classes.
I think you are stretching something to say that Alex Vallings and I should be sailing one designs.
Its a question of being realistic and thinking through your long term goals. There's rarely any gain without pain, and of course it is no fun if its easy... And if you are going to attempt anything really radical you need to have a shed load of patience and committment. Iteration one may be unlikely to work, but you still need to get through it to reach iteration two. If you give up after iteration one you are unlikley to achieve very much.
For instance I still believe that there's unfinished business with over rotating wing masts, and there's performance to be gained there. However, as a result of work various parties have done with CFD analysis of pole mast performance I now suspect that the performance to be gained is much less than was believed in the days of when people agonised about separation bubbles behind the mast, and I also believe that gust response and dynamic behaviour is far more important than I thought it was (in so far as I knew anything at all) back in the 70s and 80s. I also have to consider my own limited abilities, budget and facilities - and advancing age. So on the one hand it would be very interesting to play with wing masts shaped with something like a self skinning urethane foam leading edge on the Canoe, but on the other hand I don't want to write off two or three of my remaining sailing seasons and a lot of cash I don't have building 4 or 5 development masts in order to go even slower then I do now. And once I've got something that I am convinced is fast I still need to persuade someone with front of fleet talents to take it up, because without that sailing talent a development will never look as good as it really is. Most successful innovations in dinghies come from people who are also front of fleet sailors: look at Cherub history and the great designers the class has thrown up: Spencer, Bethwaite, Murray, Farr, Bowler are I guess the top names. Of those only Spence was not a world class sailor, and not precious few are given the level of vision he had to utterly break the mould and set the entire world sailing scene on a new path. So wingmasts are for someone younger and maybe richer than me I think.
But that doesn't mean I've given up ideas. There are a number of features of the rig I have on IC 257 that are dramatically different from the majority of the fleet. In particular I'm exploring some ideas I have for having significant variations in stiffness below the hounds rather than a simple tube. What I am aiming to achieve is a rig that has the vast majority of gust response characteristics of a two spreader check and caps rig without all the complication and windage of all the extra wires. Maybe its working, maybe its not, but although the potential gains to be made are much less than a wing rig, so are the potential losses, and so my current sailing is less compromised. And If I decide it hasn't worked I can just angle grind the extra carbon off and put the stick back to a parallel tube... Its a lower gain but lower risk experiment, which is what suits me at the moment, but its still more innovatve than anything 99% of the world's sailors are getting up to.
