Generally the internet is a poor sailing coach. Adding to the problem of making a Catalina fly is the fact that she is a mast head rig. That does mean a masthead rig is slow its just different and the sail trim focus is a 180° shift from a fractional rig.
The sail maker sites and the internet is flooded with tuning and trim guides for the fractional rig but everything they say has to really taken with a grain of salt and almost universally ignored beyond very general comments when you are sailing a masthead rig. Primarily fractional rig sail trim focuses on the mainsail flow being boosted by the jib while a masthead rig is headsail power augmented by the mainsail. When you treat is wrong it still goes but it cant point and runs slow. Ive tried to impress this on my brother an IP38 owner but he has read too many traditional boating magazines which have him permanently wired wrong. The standing joke is I try not to tell him how to sail his boat anymore but he eventually catches me glancing toward soothing thats trimmed wrong and hell say, What? We do the no its nothing banter a couple of times and then we negotiate a bet based on speed increase I can make on his boat by trimming the sails. I can usually nail a knot without question and I taken her more than 2 knots beyond what he thought was hull speed. If you read traditional boating magazines they will convince there is one simplified hull speed formula that always applies, there is not. What we all accept has hull speed is based on a common heavy traditional boat construction. That same hull speed formula can be expanded to include displacement and tailored to a C27 and all of a sudden youre dogging it. On a side note the newest technology on-board when Pyewacket II broke Merlin's 20-year-old Transpacific Yacht Race record was a computerized nag program the announced when they were dogging it. They shaved a full day off because the computer kept track of how good theyd done under the same conditions in the past and told them when they were failing short of what they had actually achieved not an artificial design number. In part, this is why one-design racing is so effective at teaching how to trim a boat. As soon as one skipper finds an edge under a particular set of conditions everyone strives for the new understanding of what works. My brother was never going to do that so instead I gave him a set of Don Guillettes Sail Trim Charts. See http://www.sailtrimproducts.com/index.html Im not sure he ever got it but he went to Mexico and back while having a great time. I on the other hand used mine while in a one-design fleet and jumped from mid pack to beating our local national champion over about six month period. I think its a very handy reference and it sure beats using waiting for a forum reply. Phil Agur <http://www.catalina27.org/public_pages/profile270.htm> s/v Wing Tip C270 LE #184 MMSI 366901790
