Starting in on sailing/catamaran flat deck F1 kayak, it always surprises me how much there is to think about with these things.
A standard F1 with a sail will naturally track onto a beam reach which can be pretty scary in high winds. I will add a rudder if I need to but I will try everything else first before doing that.
One of the things I’m trying to get better directional stability is to move the sail center of effort forward by pushing the first deck beam (where the mast step mounts) as far forward as I dare without leaving too long of an unsupported span between deck beams, or too narrow of an area for the stays, or pulling the boom so far forward that I can’t use the deck beam at the front of the cockpit to mount the sail tie down.
The attachment hardware for the sail tiedown has to be mounted in exact locations so the stowed sail doesn’t interfere with the spray skirt or the paddle stroke, so I have to make sure I am thinking about that when designing the deck beam at the front of the cockpit.
I’m giving myself two options for the forward catamaran board location, One directly ahead of the cockpit that I hope will work and one much further forward that I know will work. I need to make sure that all the control lines the sail and the spare paddle won’t interfere with either position.
I’m checking to make sure that the deck stringers won’t interfere with toe clearance. These are going to have a lot of stuff mounted to them cell I’m checking that scantlings match common fastener lengths, so I don’t end up in a situation where screw tips are poking out the bottom but the next size down is too short.
It’s an interesting puzzle although sometimes hard to make final decisions and move forward.
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