According to these guys anyway.
Looks like a good thing to me.
Wonder what Shaggy thinks.

Me likey. A lot.
I haven't sailed the Sunfast, but I did get to spend a couple of days flaffing about with a similar build (Pogo 30) in the Bay of Biscay. I love the concept, and as we all know, getting your full crew together all the time can be difficult. I seriously looked at buying a 30 as I liked going sailing at inconvenient times. It wasn't unusual to rock up to the boat after work solo and not get back in till 2-3am. The 40' was awesome, but the loads are a lot different, 200m2 of sail cloth is a lot harder than 100m2.
On these 30's, it's easy to set and douse a kite by yourself, or putting in or shaking out a reef. Helming is more like a dinghy than a keelboat as the draft, hull form and twin rudders give you loads of grip and feel. Lots of volume forward, so even running under kite you're decks are a lot drier than the fine entry of the IOR era. The shorter length meant some hobby horsing in the Biscay short sharp chop, but that's more a waterline length issue than a design issue.
Easy, fast and fun sailing. With headroom. What's not to like?

Regards ratings, I've always worried ratings holds back development. When I was looking at buying, I looked at a lot of boats. It wasn't a conscious thing, but my list of boats whittled down to what looked to be the opposite of a competitive IRC design.
I liked:
-form stablity;
-wide beam;
-hard chines;
-big fat headed roachy main;
-big SA/D ratio;
All of which IRC hates.

So I ended up buying the opposite of a ratings optimised design. Remembering how much of a joy it was to sail, irrespective of the conditions, I'd do the same thing again tomorrow.

So without ratings what sort of racing would we have in Australia? There is nowhere near enough boats of any one type to get a fleet together, and no sign whatsoever that we would ever get enough people to buy into any one type. So if we had no ratings to allow disparate boats to race together, we would have almost no racing.

Check out what really happens in Europe, as distinct to what is publicised. By far the dominant form of racing remains racing under ratings. That's even more so in the rest of the world, where you don't get the huge concentration of people that allows even a small minority to attract critical mass.

It's great that Shaggy loves this style of boat, but that's just one personal preference among other equally valid ones. Personally, if I want to go fast and have a powered-up boat I don't do it in anything that drags lead, because any mono is going to be slower than an equivalent multi. I also prefer a simple boat that performs well in light airs and upwind, but that's only my personal preference. I'm currently getting the boat togeher for offshore racing and if I only had the option of an "Open" style boat, I wouldn't own one.

Without ratings, everyone who wants to be competitive has to sail a fairly stereotyped design, like the ones we see in the Open classes. With ratings, people can choose a far wider variety of designs, from typical production boats to TP52s, S&S 34s, Sun Fasts, old IOR boats like Love and War, and 1920s and older designs like some of the ones doing well in the UK.

From what I've been able to find out, many of these designs are fast for their length in certain conditions, but extremely expensive for their length because of their big rigs and hulls. If you increase stability with a beamy hull, then you must increase cost, all else being equal. You need bigger sails, bigger winches, stronger spars, etc. A lot of these boats are quite specialised and not particularly fast for their cost in "normal" conditions; for example the Mini 6.5 seems to be about as fast as the Elliott 7 of similar length around a normal harbour and the Ellliott is far cheaper, easier to trail, less complex and probably has more interior space. The Mini Protos have a French speed rating of 24 whereas a good conventional sportsboat is significantly faster for the price and complexity - 27.5 for a Melges 24, 25 for a Seascape 27 which is far cheaper and has far more interior. Yes, the Opens are great downwind in a breeze but they are not so good in other conditions. The J/99, which is a fairly conventional boat, still does very well against the Sun Fasts that are much more in the "Open" style and are slower than the 99s in many conditions.

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Chris 249 said..
So without ratings what sort of racing would we have in Australia? There is nowhere near enough boats of any one type to get a fleet together, and no sign whatsoever that we would ever get enough people to buy into any one type. So if we had no ratings to allow disparate boats to race together, we would have almost no racing.

I completely agree.
As you alluded to, I was talking about my likes, not what is best for the sport. Same thing in racing, I like mixed fleets rather than one-design, as I selfishly just like nerding out on all the different types of boats .

They are a sick boat. Will there be enough for a dedicated division in S2H this year?

Would seem doable to buy one for a couple of years then sell on, and I'd rather buy sails for a 30 footer than 36....

"There is nowhere near enough boats of any one type to get a fleet together, and no sign whatsoever that we would ever get enough people to buy into any one type"

It's been done in the past. The Sydney 38 division in the Hobart race has been my best experience in that race. One design boat for boat racing is a huge motivator.
It actually may well be time for someone to promote another competitive one design.

I agree with Ringle
The 38 division in the Hobart race and other races was some of the best and most { relativly} affordable closest boat on boat racing I have done in the ocean.
Even this years southport race three 38s side by side at the finish great racing
They are the S&S 34 of our day
But they are not sexy enough for a lot of owners and it is hard to buy boat speed in that class
You have to be good sailors to sail them well and get the most out of the boat.
Anyway the class has one less boat now
Vale the Goat

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Ringle said..
"There is nowhere near enough boats of any one type to get a fleet together, and no sign whatsoever that we would ever get enough people to buy into any one type"

It's been done in the past. The Sydney 38 division in the Hobart race has been my best experience in that race. One design boat for boat racing is a huge motivator.
It actually may well be time for someone to promote another competitive one design.

You're right, I should have defined "fleet together" better; I was thinking of getting a fleet, or fleets, of offshore racing boats so big that "ratings don't matter" to lots of sailors. The format they're talking about is something that IMHO will only be very much a minority interest. It's not "the future", it's one of many different futures for many different sailors. There's almost certainly already Open 60 or Class 40 sailors who don't care about ratings but that doesn't mean that such classes are "the future" or that such sailors will ever become a major percentage of the world's offshore sailors.

The same thing arguably applies to offshore one designs in general. Much as many of us love them, ratings will still matter and OOD is not "the future". While the S38s could get occasional OD racing in two cities and get their own sub division inside other events, my impression was that most people in the class considered that their IRC rating did matter because they weren't into OD racing to the extent that "ratings didn't matter"; they certainly seemed to have been very happy when they did well under rating and I'm sure some owners and the builders said that the fact that the boat was competitive under IRC mattered quite a bit to them.

It would be great to see more offshore OD classes, but even places with bigger populations and stronger OOD fleets have never come close to the stage where "ratings don't matter any more" for anything but a very small proportion of sailors. For example there's good box rule and OD racing in France, but the OSIRIS rating system has 4,500 boats and is vastly more popular than the box rule and OOD yachts, without even bringing IRC into it. The US has some good OOD fleets but they've never looked like being so big that rating doesn't matter. There's very rarely enough offshore one designs to allow them to have offshore events without relying on boats that race on rating to get enough entries to run an event. Until the Hobart, Gold Coast, Fastnet, Bermuda Gladstone etc are only sailed in OD or box classes, then ratings WILL matter.

The first offshore one design (in hull shape - they allowed different rigs) was the Illingworth/Giles RANSA 24 in the 1940s, so it's not a new concept and not "the future". The OOD numbers probably peaked in the '80s when there were huge fleets of Sigma 33s in the UK, J/30s and J/35s in the USA, various Jeanneaus etc in France, etc, so while it's a great way to go racing it's not new and it's an idea that has boomed and faded before. There seems to be zero chance of OODs ever becoming "the future"rather than just one option in the future.

History also indicates that it's hard to get people who are normally sailing one particular design to switch to another design for a world title, as they are proposing in the vid. The people who are experienced in that design tend to build up so much more expertise in it that other people moving into the class just for a worlds will normally just get thrashed. You don't get S80 sailors just chartering a J/24 and doing the worlds, or many Impulse, Laser or Contender sailors chartering a boat for an OK or Finn worlds, so for how long will you get people chartering Sun Fasts for the worlds, and how many other classes and locations will ever have a suitable fleet for charter?

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shaggybaxter said..

Chris 249 said..
So without ratings what sort of racing would we have in Australia? There is nowhere near enough boats of any one type to get a fleet together, and no sign whatsoever that we would ever get enough people to buy into any one type. So if we had no ratings to allow disparate boats to race together, we would have almost no racing.

I completely agree.
As you alluded to, I was talking about my likes, not what is best for the sport. Same thing in racing, I like mixed fleets rather than one-design, as I selfishly just like nerding out on all the different types of boats .

I'm into the same thing; watching the way different boats work in different conditions in fascinating - as long as I have strict one designs for the really serious racing!