International Canoe Sliding seat: F & A movement?

I've checked the IC rules and can't find any limitations on fore and aft movement of the sliding seat. Does any one know whether the seat is moved fore and aft in practice and how much?
Thanks !

 

Yes, and probably around 4, maybe 5 feet, but to use the last part of the range is rare. In lighter winds it may not be moved at all.

 

======================
Thanks. Just doesn't seem to be that kind of room looking at this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exb6i3E3r-4&feature=related

Is the seat usually positioned for the conditions anticipated or is it moved F & A frequently during a race- or set for upwind and then for downwind?

 

I don't know anything about this but I find it delightful and I think it would be a lot of fun and good mathematics lessons for the kids. Are these vessels/seats production made? Thanks.

 

I think my IC's seat slid about 4 feet. The green boat in the vid looks to have a standard setup and that scales (very roughly) to about 4 1/2 feet. The boat is in storage so I cannot check.

I would sometimes move the seat fore and aft 3 feet or so between every gust and lull, downwind.

BTW how's the research into cats going?

Mark; they are not production boats nor are they kid's boats.

 

========================================================
I have watched numerous IC videos and so far have not seen one where the seat was moved F&A! Don't get it... I've read several descriptions of people who move the seat and others who don't move the seat. Do you have a video showing the seat being moved F&A under sail? Just would like to see it...
-------------------------------------



By the way CT, did you ever figure this out:

 

I never moved my IC hiking plank fore or aft. I did tinker a lot while trying to locate just the right f & a position for the track that fit my weight, mast height, boat configuration and such.. I can see the need for fore/aft mobility when extreme conditions are anticipated, but I never had the occasion to need it. My boat was a Proctor that behaved in a spirited but predictable way. I can not imagine moveing the plank 3 or 4 feet as mentioned above. Maybe the newer models are moving the plank around. IC sailors will do anything to go faster.

 

No, I can't work it out.

It seems like there's two possibilities; either it was there when I read your post and I missed it AND you failed to back up your claim my post was wrong, or it had gone missing for a while. Neither changes the fact that you have failed to substantiate your allegation that my figures were misleading.

This arose from your post, #248, in the "America's Cup; what's next?" thread. You referred to my earlier post in SA. This is what you said;

On SA you said:

"Adding up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes, we find that there were;

932 in doublehanded dinghies (Snipe, V15 etc; 112 in skiff types)
900 in keelboats (Js. Stars etc)
850 in three-handed dinghies (Lightnings etc and counting the C Scow at 2.5 crew because they can drop one at times)
372 in singlehanded dinghies
106 in cats"
----------------
The 106 figure is what caught my eye-completely absurd.


Now, a few days ago when I composed my reply to your post 248, I looked for the proviso about "the top 23 classes" several times in the bit of my SA post that you had quoted. I couldn't see it.

Maybe I missed it, somehow. You and I both know that it was always there in my SA post, because you can't alter SA posts for more than a few minutes and anyway the "top 23 classes" bit was in your post 248 when I checked it again. So there can be no doubt that when you read my SA post, it CLEARLY indicated that my figures came from "adding up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes" minus the Optis.

However, (1) If the "top 23 classes" proviso was always in your post 248, then why carp about my figures when they were correct?

(2) If my proviso about the "top 23 classes" had for some reason gone from your post 248 when I saw it, then don't complain about the fact that I couldn't see it when I replied to your post 248.

However, the fact that you now confirm that my post 248 only referred to "the top 23 classes" leaves the main question to be answered: why in the world are you calling my figures totally absurd?

Where are the cat sailors who are supposedly missing? What is the other cat class that had enough boats to be classed in "the top 23" in terms of US nationals attendance?

Come on Doug - you said you've done the research. Provide the evidence to show that there are significantly more than 106 cat sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 OD classes in the USA, or retract the claim.

I proved my good intentions by replying to you in this thread with the information you requested. Why not reciprocate by providing evidence that there were substantially more cat sailors in the top 23 nationals than I said? Are we on this forum as an exchange of information or not? If you have the information to prove that my claim is wrong (and I've since done more research and have found no reason to retract it) why not show it to us and prove that you were right all along?

 

106(ct's figure) in cats I found 528 sailors at just a small sample of cat nationals or NA's
just the boats-double for two handed boats
--
Top 11(3+ missing) multihull classes:
21 wave 21 sailors
11 Shark 22 sailors
23 F16 46 sailors
54 Hobie 16 NA's 108 sailors
28 F18 56 sailors
23 Hobie 18's 46 sailors
A Class North Americans http://www.usaca.info/index.php?opt...rican-wrap-up&catid=35:announcements&Itemid=2 42 sailors
aqua cat
arc 21
Prindle
Nacra North Americans at Ft Walton trophies in two classes 5 deep-est 40 boats 80 sailors
Catsailor tradewinds "Nationals"regatta 107 sailors
---------------------
Total sailors 528 You said 106 cat sailors-totally absurd! There is also a lot more cat activity that dinghy activity in this part of Florida. From people I've talked to this may be true all across the southeast except in a few big cities.
--Missing here is the tremendous multi sailor participation in larger multihulls like Farriers ect. I remember on regatta up in Ft. Walton with 30-40 boats with at least 4 sailors on each boat. UPDATE: I was wrong--
The 1999 Corsair 'Spring Splash' at Pensacola, Florida (April 29 to May 1) attracted 54 official entries, with several more Corsair trimarans visiting the area just to observe. This was 64% more boats than when I was last able to attend in 1997 and was the largest ever gathering of Farrier trimaran designs in any event world wide. Perhaps even the largest gathering of trimarans anywhere of any type.
Over 200 hundred sailors......
http://www.f-boat.com/pensacola99/index.html
-----------
No more in this thread!

 

This morning I talked to a friend who is an active IC sailor. He said: "Oh sure, the seats slide fore and aft". He says that almost all the boats have that provision. They have a range of movement around 3 to 4 feet. They use something like a genoa track to affect that movement. Long time since I was an IC sailor so I have been out of touch with modern developement. I'll have to pay better attention to current developement.

 

===========================
Thanks-I just don't get why its not obvious in the videos of the boats! I mean it seems like you ought to be able to see 3-4' of movement on a 17' boat!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exb6i3E3r-4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgdo4p90jHo&feature=related

This is the first video where I noticed the result of a seat being moved
but only on two or three boats:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_PUxqP0ssg&feature=related

---------------------
The more I've seen of these videos the more I like this incredible boat-what fun it must be to sail!

 

None of those classes are in the top 23 nationals, Doug, and as I my earlier post specified I was only tallking about the top 23 national titles. And a trimaran has three hulls, so it isn't a catamaran (which is the type of boat under discussion).

This is rather bizarre - you have been at pains to claim that the "top 23 classes" proviso wasn't dropped from the post that sparked this, yet you continue to bring up classes that don't qualify for the top 23 list.

Here's a pro tip, Doug - if a class' nationals was not in the 23 most popular (in terms of starters) in the USA, then (shock, gasp, amazement) I didn't include it in a list of the 23 most popular classes!

Yes, I did not include all cat sailors - but I didn't include all mono sailors either, so bringing up more cat classes is totally beside the point, and can be countered by bringing in more mono classes.

As has been pointed out before, there are certainly more cat sailors in total than the 106 I referred to earlier, but I'm not going to try to teach stats to anyone who doesn't understand that an examination of "the top 23 classes" only includes "the top 23 classes".

 

The seat on my IC can be moved aft about 4ft or so. I rarely move it aft more than a foot or so in moderate conditions, but in when it is ncecessary to move it aft in stronger winds, it is very necessary . It is not possible to move the seat while you are hiking off it, so you have to have a bit of a guess at how far to move it as you round the top mark, so the location of the seat is usually a compromise between what is necessary for the gusts and the lulls. On the new rules boats, most seem to have even more movement, probably because the hullls are narrower and can get driven under more easily than the older one design hulls.

Origionally, the seats were fixed for and aft, but the later moving carriage design showed significant gains in performance downwind measured in tens of boat lengths (this is from my dim memory of reading the history some time ago).

 

Sliding Carriage

The fore and aft sliding carriage was invented by Chris Maas, who in the 1980s showed that moving weight aft is fast when blast reaching in chop because it keeps the bow out. So everyone copied it and it is pretty standard now. Where it needs to be depends upon the point of sail and the sea state, and now the shape of the hull. Some people put it on bearings and hold it in place with a control line, while others prefer a frictive approach where it moves without load but stays put when you load it up, rather like the seat itself. As is typical in ICs there are as many solutions as there are creative sailors.

Chris has since gone on to revolutionize the hull shape under the new development rule and makes some sick boats to the Super String Theory design. They weigh under 50kg ready to sail and it is pretty easy for one person to pick the hull up and carry it around. All for less than the price of a new Moth I might add.

It is a much different ride than a Moth but no less excellent - I enjoy canoe sailing every bit as much as Mothing and in many ways sailing an IC is more difficult/challenging.

 

Thanks Mal and Karl-I appreciate the info. The boat is flat remarkable-I've always liked them but never studied them as much as I have recently.