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International 14 sailors - did we do your boat justice? You wrote: "in its acceptance of modern construction materials, the trapeze ..." For your interest the history is as follows: Peter Scott, the famous naturalist was the first to use a trapeze in a 14. He used it in the 1930s to win the Prince of Wales Cup by a huge margin.

The class, in typically stuffy British fashion, immediately banned the use of the trapeze. Other classes allowed it long before the International 14 finally let it in. It is my belief this set back the development of the class greatly: e.g. never an Olympic class, never a very large class, etc. It is many years since I sailed a 14 but I am confident this is correct. Certainly in the sixties and seventies the trapeze was allowed in many classes but not 14s.

From Paul Bieker
T-foil to be seen on other classes after this result? I first put the adjustable angle of attack hydrofoils on 14s prior to the last Worlds (the boat that won that regatta used them). A number of guys in the fleet have been developing them from my designs since (I have a patent pending in the US). I think the ingredients which a boat needs to benefit from this hydrofoil configuration are:

- Fairly high displacement/length ratio (i.e. the boat has a wavemaking resistance 'hump').
- High power to weight ratio (the boat is likely to be pushing this 'hump' a significant proportion of the time.
- High enough average speed to efficiently achieve enough lift to effect wavemaking resistance with foils small enough to avoid dramatically increasing wetted surface (big lifting foils also make the steering difficult as there is a coupling between heeling and steering force).

I think that the adjustable angle of attack hydrofoils have applications in boats that do not meet all of these criteria but the configuration would morph to suit the different constraints. I hesitate to call them T-foils because they are in the form of a cross - maybe 'cruciform foils' (accurate but a mouthful) or 'X-foils' (somewhat misleading but sounds pretty mod).

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