QLD
4937 posts
Made by Roger French racing yacht's .
Is this a good thing ?, volume ?, I cant find anything on it .Any info anyone ?
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Windsurfing-package/264196269197?hash=item3d8353248d:g:hwEAAOSwmxVcZT2u:rk:1:pf:0
WA
3621 posts
That'd be a Jim French circa mid eighties. Was a weapon in its day, but that was a long time ago. The Mistral One Design is a better option.
WA
3621 posts
As i recall the Jim French was very early onto the plane but lacked top-end reaching speed and was not too good on the breeze compared with later race boards. It was pretty much the first of the thick boxy-railed race boards, and it was a big jump up from whatever else was around at the time. You either had one or you weren't competitive.
NSW
3570 posts
Ahhh, seeing the mention of the Peter Jackson Classic in that article brings back memories. The Division II boards were normally the fastest class racing board of the time, because the Raceboards needed about 12-15 knots of breeze to be competitive. So the Peter Jackson committee decided that Div 2 boards were banned, although they were cheaper than a competitive Raceboard.
So - how do you define a "Division II board"? Well, it's a board that fits the rules of Division II - but I think a Windsurfer, Dufour WIng or Windruch Clubman fitted into the rules, theoretically. But while the rules were loose in some ways, they were tight in others - so if you stuck a paddlepop stick to your board with duct tape, it was theoretically too long to be a Div II board and was therefore legal to race in the Peter Jackson. Div 2 boards also had to carry little leashes to stop the rig blowing away if the uni came out and had to have their sail number written on the back, if I recall correctly, so by the letter of the law all you had to do was tape over the sail number on the board or take off the VB cord leash and it was no longer a legal Div II board.
Eventually, if I recall correctly, the committee decided that if they thought it looked like a Div 2 board, it was a Div 2 board and was therefore banned. Fair enough - but something like my old and comparatively slow D2 without its leash was therefore banned (I think - it was a long whole ago) but the huge "Dart" boards, which were like giant Div 2 boards but about 14ft long and therefore much faster, were so far outside Div 2 rules that they were allowed to race, and won. So the rules designed to stop comparatively cheap production Div 2 boards from winning, to allow expensive Jim French type custom Raceboards to win, ended up ensuring that the even more expensive giant Div 2 "Darts" won instead. Oh well.
I was one of the four guys who wrote the first "Construction class" rules for AUSA, I think. We had three rules - it had to be a windsurfer, it had to have one person (to keep the tandems out because they were faster in light winds) and it couldn't have anything that was considered too dangerous to other sailors - this was when Fred Haywood was using a trapeze and there was concern about the danger of the wires. It was fun while it lasted, but it was never going to last too long.
