Now that I don’t have a boat, I am living off the generosity of my fellow mothies at St. George, whilst waiting to start building my new boat. Once I sold my boat, I instantly snapped up a second hand MSL11 from Grant Weymouth, that Scott Babbage used to fininsh second at the 2005-6 Nationals.

Two races in with the MSL and I must say that I am VERY impressed. I’ll go on the record and say that I am not a fan of Monofilm, even though it does look very cool, but I am used to my sails lasting 20 years+. What I am most impressed with is the amount of dynamic range that the sail has, even on an stiff thorpe mast, which it is definatley not designed for.

So what boat am I using it on? An old Wombat 84 that weighs for or five times what my old boat weighed. This is a really interesting experience in that when I last sailed a fat skiff it was with a 10Kg goldspar mast.

So how does it compare with a modern narrow skiff. Well in roll, it is heaps easier to sail, I almost managed to find the perfect positon to be able to lie down when sailing off the breeze. Where the narrow skiffs excel however is in pitch. With such a wide stern, the fat skiffs don’t handle chop any where near as well as the new boats, and you need to spend most of your time up the back of the boat.

One thingh though, when they do go bow down, you can just keep driving them, because with all the volume of the flares you know it is going to just pop back up again, even if the foredeck is completely under the water.

So how is the performance? Well I carried a GPS data logger on the weekend, and hit a top speed of 10.35knots, with a best 100 meter average of 8.35 knots. The overall stats for the race was an average speed of 5.48 knots, for 9.725km, in 57 minutes. Low n’ slow baby, low n’ slow !