Dropping the Main, whilst racing?

Cariadco said:
On last weekend's light wind race, I dropped the Main, so the Spinnaker filled perfectly.
A mate has just told me that he thinks that is illegal.

Any views?
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There is nothing to stop you dropping the main. Only thing that you may want to consider is if you are displaying a sail number when it's down. Your spinnaker should have one, but not a non overlapping jib.

I'd question if it was faster though. Almost certainly the fastest way downwind in the light is to head up and sail angles with the pole on the forestay. In which case you very definitely want the main.
 
savageseadog said:
We were trying to free our main from the backstay on a very light weather offshore race. We partly lowered our main to shake it through which gave our nearest competitor the cue to start his engine and retire.
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Must try this, sounds like a good idea.
As far as I know, (I admit my knowledge of the rules is not perfect, just average for one who races and occasionally acts as OOD) there is no rule preventing you from dropping your main, but wonder if there was any advantage in doing so.
 
We didn't drop the main completely, probably only to the second reef and our sail number would still have been visible. We do have an issue with the backstay fouling the leech and such was the lack of wind the main was lowered for about five minutes.
That light weather race probably took 10hours longer than the par duration.
 
Is the sail number actually compulsory? We have a couple of boats who sail without a sail number and at least one who has a different number on main and jib.

Way I read app G is that this only applies to world sailing classes.
 
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Birdseye said:
Is the sail number actually compulsory? We have a couple of boats who sail without a sail number and at least one who has a different number on main and jib.

Way I read app G is that this only applies to world sailing classes.
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We have much the same a couple of boats have different numbers on main and spinnaker, and on without any number, I used to be one of the ‘culprits’ with a different number on the main and spinnaker.
 
I have seen the main dropped a number of times. However, in light airs a simple trick is to sheet the main in such that the air flows from the leech forward to the mast, rather than luff to leech. Then by bringing the pole round further to windward than normal the wind will flow into the spinnaker, then forward around the free leach of the spinnker. This allows the airflow an uninterupted but curved passage over the sails, utilising the flow over the mainsail twice , thus giving max drive as it passes the sails
 
Just one more thing to add, on that particular race, we had true wind at about 160 degs at 4-5 kts and both the Main and the (Large Assymetric 160m sq) were failing to fill and flapping.
We had boat speed of 2kts.
On dropping the Main, the Assymetric took on a full fairly efficient shape, and our speed went upto 4 kts.
We stayed ahead of the main fleet, and all the Sportsboats, that were all starting to catch us.
Dropping the main, in these particular conditions worked beautifully.
 
Cariadco said:
Just one more thing to add, on that particular race, we had true wind at about 160 degs at 4-5 kts and both the Main and the (Large Assymetric 160m sq) were failing to fill and flapping.
We had boat speed of 2kts.
On dropping the Main, the Assymetric took on a full fairly efficient shape, and our speed went upto 4 kts.
We stayed ahead of the main fleet, and all the Sportsboats, that were all starting to catch us.
Dropping the main, in these particular conditions worked beautifully.
Click to expand...

But that's mere empirical evidence, which counts for naught against forumites' prejudices! ;)
 
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