I am needing a fin for my Prodigy for fun sailing here on Maui ... Is it a Powerbox ...?? What size do you suggest 250cm ? Thanks



On Thursday, November 15, 2001 at 7:47:42 AM UTC-10, Ellen Faller wrote:

Ray,
I tried one of the Prodigy's at the Nationals, and I have to say that
what you've said was pretty much what I thought at the time. It was fine
to sail, and did what it was designed to do well. But compared to other boards, it did nothing special, and it was not special enough to make me
want to spend money on one.
One other drawback (to me in my world) is that it is a just that, a specialized board for racing and not something I would want to spend my "free" time on just BAFing, or enjoying for recreational sailing. What I
DO like about Formula is that I can enjoy the boards for pure fun as
well as for racing and can mix focussed race tuning (spoken as if I
really did spend time at this...) with sailing for fun, relaxation and release (by far the most time). If I'm out sailing for 4 hours, I can
"train" for as little as 5 minutes, or as much as 3.75 hours on the
Formula, but even when I'm playing, I'm learning the board.
Ellen
rkuntz wrote:

It's my understanding of hull dynamics that in subplaning conditions, the hull speed of a
long narrow hull exceeds that of a short wide one, i.e. until the Prodigy planes, the IMCO
always wins on all points of sail, after it begins planning that the Prodigy's hull speed
exceeds that of the IMCO on beats and reaches, upwind performance depends on pointing
angle and the velocity made good of the Prodigy, sometimes it wins, sometimes it doesn't.

Frank Weston notes elsewhere that a two board racing quiver looks attractive. A long
board for subplanning light wind conditions and a wide formula type board for planning
conditions. In my view the Prodigy is unlikely to be competative in either mode.

All in all the Prodigy is probably 5 years too late to the market.

of course just my 2c

Ray

Andreas Macke wrote:

Will Harper <[email protected]> wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...

As for it being slower than an IMCO in less than 15 I would say no, but it
maybe slower in less than 5 or maybe even 10, though I doubt it. It will plane
in about 10, maybe less, so the IMCO is dust as soon as the Prodigy planes,
which is way sooner than the IMCO, I would imagine.

Because of the weight, of course it will be slower than a Formula board when
planing, but the bottom line is that it's way faster than a Formula in less
than 10, and way faster than an IMCO in more than 10.
The glass is half full, or half empty, depends on how you look at it.

w

The continued development on Formula gear is squeezing that niche more and more. With a board like the * 175 and a sail > 10, you're planing
and getting great angles in less than ten knots, probably more like 8, even if you are heavy. Looking at the new 100cm boards and the now feasible 12m sails, that's likely to come down at least another knot. Give it another couple years, and we'll probably be at a point where 6knots are fully raceable on Formula gear. At that point, the raison d'etre for something like the Prodigy is getting very hard to see. Of course, it might have helped if they had used some more modern construction to get the weight down, but I guess that wouldn't have
hit the target market's requirements.

Which comes down to the heart of the matter. Supposedly, the Prodigy
is targeted to be an IMCO successor, so it's supposed to be an improvement on that concept. In that regard, it does well - it's
faster in most conditions (except for the very lightest air), it's a little more inclusive (i.e., heavier sailors will be marginally less screwed competing on Prodigy than on IMCO), and it looks a little more modern (never underestimate the importance of such merely
psychological factors).

Unfortunately for Mistral, the Prodigy as an improvement over the IMCO
is akin to building a better, more user-friendly, sexier sliderule shortly after the introduction of cheap and ubiquitous digital
electronic calculators. Sure, there are some niches in which the sliderule will blow away the calculator (such as when you're out of batteries), but in most conditions, it's really no contest.

What does that mean for the Olympics? Nothing! Olympic sailing is dominated by a yachting mind set steeped in one-design mentality. The game is the challenge of racing others on the exact same gear, no
matter how crappy that gear may be (I don't think anyone ever said
that the Finn is fun to sail). And the fact that sailing is such a
minor part of the Olympic revenue picture has relegated venue
selection into the realm of what's convenient for organizers, as
opposed to where there might be wind (the Athens games could simply
hold the sailing events in the Greek isles as opposed to Athens; some
of the best summer breezes, only a half-hour flight, and very
picturesque surroundings - but that won't happen, and the fleet will
bob around in 0-2 instead).

So if Mistral's goal was to build a board that could replace the IMCO
as the next Olympic class in the current Olympic windsurfing paradigm, they did a great job. Too bad that's so irrelevant to the sport of windsurfing itself...

Andreas

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