Pescatoral Pursuit wrote:
Island sails and controls are rudimentary, and it doesn't sail too well past close reach or broad reach. Its a versatile, fun boat, but a "pure sailer?" I guess it depends how you would define the highly subjective term "pure sailing" but I don't consider it so. By comparison, I would say my humble little Holder 14 is a "pure sailing" vessel.
Thanks for that explanation PP.
I consider ‘pure sailing’ to be sailing without assistance eg miragedrive, outboard etc, and in my experience both AI and TI do that quite well. Sailing without the Miragedrive is like letting off the brake. I can sail close hauled pretty much to 45 deg off the wind OK. To do that though I am hiked out on haka, the Miragedrive is pulled and the drivewell plug inserted. I use a tiller extension and the Harken X-Treme angle fairlead. The TI is a better sailer, though I haven’t tried the AIv2.
With the addition of the spinnaker Hobie have overcome the weakness of sailing downwind with a boom less main.
I love the simplicity of the Island sail controls and I prefer to say ‘less complex’ rather than ‘rudimentary’.
So to me the Islands make great ‘pure sailers’ with just a few simple changes mentioned above.
BTW you can successfully pure sail even the kayaks. The Revo 16 is best with it daggerboard slot but we used to pure sail our Oasis with a drivewell plug modded to take the daggerboard. Great fun but not as comfortable sailing as with the Islands!