Ok I think I found my donor boat and a game plan and I have a few remaining questions (for Matt)
I found a donor project boat I'm hopefully buying tomorrow and having to ship in 3 pieces. If all works out I'll have an early wave ('1996) with all the parts in tact there with the exception of a few minor bits of hardware. It likely needs a tramp or at least a repair or two the tramp. A little clean up and new stickers too.
The sail needs a repair but the damage just so happens to be the window.....and since that's where I want to reef/cut........no biggie. All in I think I'm going to be at 1500 or so before I get into buying a new sail or a backup comp tip.
So for now I would get this fixed or add a few grommets to reef and hopefully the diminesions work out well enough without painful modification to the sail itself.
Intent after I get tested and fixed is to buy a new zipper reef sail and a second unadjusted comp tip so I can still rig up fully to take other places .
I plan to eliminate the bob for lake sailing but I will affix a float of equivalent displacement hanging downwards from the mast tip. (found other style floats online) That buys me float function for lake to avert scraping bottom mud but leaves me 6" vertically to work with.
So my remaining questions are:
1) What is the zippable reef dimensions? What is the size (vertical luff length) that is eliminated by reefing the stock zip reef sail. Matt - is there a picture of one you can post? I can't find them online with a picture of it. Your other post said to measure one but I don't can the sail yet. You said bottom of sail to 1st batten botom basically? Is that 3 ft or 4 ft?
2) Hypothetically - if I wanted to shorten luff length by 3.5 ft but wanted to not lose as much sail area on the bottom (due to shape) would it be possible to nip some height of the top (thus it gets squared off a tad) as well as remove some off the bottom? Say have a sailmaker take ~1-2 ft form the top of the sail and ~1-2 ft of the bottom? Any thoughts?
3) Jib - could I use a stock wave jib without major issue with the slightly shortened mast? I know that gives me 25 sq ft back of sail area if I lose some on my mod. Plus then I learn to use a jib.
4) What is the average clearance measurement from top of water to bottom of mast when a boat is in the water with no passengers on it? (Trying to add that measurement to needed total mast height and account for the pulley at the top also)
4a) The published 20' mast height excludes the pulley on top right? Or is it including the few inches of the pulley assembly?
5) Any tips on prepping a used boat to ship via yellow truck? Spoke with them and my working theory was plastic wrap mast and tubulars up well, box the loose stuff and rudders, and label each pontoon and wrap the back with the brackets. (How do you guys ship normally?)
Thank you in advance. I can't recall if I mentioned this but I'm working on this with the HOA guy who is on point for lake stuff. If this little personal experiment works out our HOA might buy several new waves for rental/loan on our lake.
Documenting this experiment amongst ourselves to see if this works out well and is feasible beyond my experiment boat. If this works I'd be curious if there an ability to special order the mods I do if they ordered some later.
(Thank you again Matt and others!)