tomthouse wrote:
Subject: Spinnaker, reacher, screecher or hooter for Christmas
The Hooter (Reacher) is a roller furling, apparent-wind-generating head sail that attaches to the end of a Spinnaker Pole Assembly. I find that they are fun, easy and versatile. The sail is designed to sail to weather in light air and sail off the wind in any air. I think that a Hooter is approximately 88 sq ft for the Wave, 190-225 sq ft of 2.0-2.5 oz Mylar with light scrim reinforecement.
I also think that a furling hooter is much easier to put away when it needed.... than struggling with snuffing a spin when you need to.
One sail is more for reaching (hooter) and can even go upwind a little, and the other is for deeper down wind sailing... So you can't ask which has more perfomance... they have different purposes.
That being said... hooters furl up and make dousing a snap... no bag, just furl and it is done.
I've furled reachers, windseekers, screachers and asym spins on my F24. Furling made single handing racing possible. However, they are a far cry from "a snap" in all conditions. Screachers and Code Zero's, for example, had to be furled going downwind or they wouldn't furl very well nor stay furled when you go to weather--when racing this is an issue since if you find yourself with too much headsail up while honkin' on a close reach-you gotta fall off to furl-usually being left behind in the spray by your competitor. The issue is the torque is applied only at the bottom of the furling system and if you have a long luff, the torque doesn't reach the top until the bottom has been furled quite a few turns. Furling asym spins is even more difficult and I ended up with a pretty reliable system, but it took a lot of engineering (check out Roll-Gen; I had to create my own similar system since I did it way back in the 90s).
The Weta furls it's asymspin, it comes with a single line furler--nearly every owner has replaced that furler with a continuous line furler.
Now that I'm sailing much smaller boats with much shorter masts, I am a strong proponent of snuffing in lieu of furling. Granted, it is not likely you can snuff a stiff sailcloth successfully (or at least very often) so snuffing is probably limited to mostly downwind sails...I do snuff a jib, though, on my Triak, but it is made of soft polyester (Surlast) and needs to be replaced annually and it is only about 1 square meter--snuffing mylar (code zero material) is not likely to survive. Snuffing a spinnaker is pretty cool. No repacking after every hoist. You do have to have the boat and wind oriented correctly when snuffing a big sail--I made the mistake of trying to snuff my symspin (18' by 18' by 15') on the Getaway with the wind from the side--ended up shrimping.
Anyway, it is fun to find what works for you-but it can be pretty expensive to do trial by error.