how fast can it go??????

[Rudeman]

In Lake Sailing conditions where there can be no “mega wave assisted” speed records we could hit an absolute max of about 9.2 knots boatspeed downhill with the kite up and even that was riding some modest lake swell.

By and large you are looking in the 8-9 boatspeed range on a properly calibrated knotmetre without waves to take you any faster.

[rogerssp]

14 knots downwind, surfing with chute, double-handed. Whopee!

[grandillusion]

proving the light air efectiveness of the 7.9 we hit 6 knots on a reach in what I would call only enough wind to drink beer in

[s2ochen]

15.13, wing and wing (155% and full mainsail) downwind doing the Trans-Erie 2007.

We were holding 9-10 knots constant, surfing to 12 easily and 14s more then a couple dozen times. The waves were 5'-6' at times and the wind was 25 gusting to 30-35. We had the spinnaker up for a while with the board down... hit a 14 something, but it was faster and more stable with the board up and going wing and wing. (We made almost 30 miles in over 2.5 hours... awesome ride.) We then turned to a close reach thru the night and were seeing gusts over 40 and were going 7-7.5 constant with just a #3 and no mainsail. The worst part was the last 30 miles of the race when all the other boats had finished, the air went to zero and we drifted for 9 hours...

[GLeMay]

I'm not sure how fast we were going, we had an analog knotmeter that read up to 10. We pegged it going down-wind in a race on Lake Pepin on the MN - WI border during a race. The skipper kept yelling to take the kite down because the tiller didn't seem to be doing much; we left it up and the crew moved from side to side to steer the boat. The fist thing I did when I bought the boat was to put on a digital knotmeter to see how fast we could really go; it's read almost 8 (corrected with GPS) that i've seen, but when we're flying I'm usually too busy to look.