Hunter is FINALLY thinking about performance in their sail plan.
"Working closely with Steve Pettengill, Hunter Marine's director of product development, UK-Halsey has created a much more powerful mainsail that takes advantage of the B&R rig that is used almost exclusively by Hunter Marine. The B&R rig that uses swept back spreaders and no backstay, which allows powerful mainsails with an over-sized roach and a fat-head or square-top.
This idea was tried by myself over 10 years ago on a Hunter 29.5 that suffered in light air -- the solution was to increase the sail area. A fat-head made with UK-Halsey's Tape-Drive load path construction was born. The main had full battens with Tides Marine fittings and mast track. It was so successful that the local PHRF committee kept increasing the the boat's rating. They recognized how fast the boat had become.
Recently I worked with the Hunter dealer in St. Augustine to upgrade the performance of his personal Hunter 356. The boat was showing signs of becoming competitive with race-quality dacron sails, but he was ready for a major performance leap. First, we built a Tape-Drive fat-head main with full battens for the boat. He liked it so much that he had Steve Pettengill come up and see it. As this was fairly early in the experiment a jib to match had not been ordered yet. When he raced in the Wednesday night Club Series his performance gains were impressive.
At about the same time, Hunter was redesigning and refreshing the 356, now the 36. It followed that a performance version of the new 36 was tried. The mainsail's design was tweaked by changing the head batten angle, and a matching Tape-Drive genoa was built as well. We are now testing the new boat and sails.
The Original hull design [Glen Henderson] and the new look deck [David Humphries] have produced not only a fresh look for Hunter, but a good performing package as well. The UK-Halsey involvement has taken it to another level."
All I can say is 'it's about damn time!!'
"Working closely with Steve Pettengill, Hunter Marine's director of product development, UK-Halsey has created a much more powerful mainsail that takes advantage of the B&R rig that is used almost exclusively by Hunter Marine. The B&R rig that uses swept back spreaders and no backstay, which allows powerful mainsails with an over-sized roach and a fat-head or square-top.
This idea was tried by myself over 10 years ago on a Hunter 29.5 that suffered in light air -- the solution was to increase the sail area. A fat-head made with UK-Halsey's Tape-Drive load path construction was born. The main had full battens with Tides Marine fittings and mast track. It was so successful that the local PHRF committee kept increasing the the boat's rating. They recognized how fast the boat had become.
Recently I worked with the Hunter dealer in St. Augustine to upgrade the performance of his personal Hunter 356. The boat was showing signs of becoming competitive with race-quality dacron sails, but he was ready for a major performance leap. First, we built a Tape-Drive fat-head main with full battens for the boat. He liked it so much that he had Steve Pettengill come up and see it. As this was fairly early in the experiment a jib to match had not been ordered yet. When he raced in the Wednesday night Club Series his performance gains were impressive.
At about the same time, Hunter was redesigning and refreshing the 356, now the 36. It followed that a performance version of the new 36 was tried. The mainsail's design was tweaked by changing the head batten angle, and a matching Tape-Drive genoa was built as well. We are now testing the new boat and sails.
The Original hull design [Glen Henderson] and the new look deck [David Humphries] have produced not only a fresh look for Hunter, but a good performing package as well. The UK-Halsey involvement has taken it to another level."
All I can say is 'it's about damn time!!'
