JonSomers

Thanks to all for the advice. Tom, that's fair warning both to me and to anyone else who may read these posts in the future. When laying out any rig for any boat, it's important to know the CE/CLR and aim for just a little weather helm for safety reasons. I'd already done that exercise before I started construction, but thanks for pointing it out since I didn't mention it in my original post.

Greetings, all! I'm about 20 hours into the construction of a Spindrift 11N (and absolutely loving it). I'm glassing the interior joints of the hull today. I'm thinking about rigging her with a lug rig, either a balanced lug or even a Chinese-style junk rig (although not sure how useful the full battens would be in a dink). I was wondering if anyone else on the forum had experience with rigging a Spindrift thus, or words or warning, etc. (It's still early enough in construction that I can change my mind.) A word about goals, since I know some folks are quite devoted to racing Spindrifts: My wife and I have an eye towards buying or building a cruiser and doing some passagemaking in the years ahead. We've heard some pretty high praise for lug rigs, particularly w.r.t. ease of handling and forgivingness. So I thought that a good starting place to get some experience would be to equip a dink with a lug rig and get a feel for whether we like it. If that goes well, a next step might be a tralierable weekender with a lug rig... and so on. My main point for saying this is that speed isn't quite as urgent to me as it might be to some. Thoughts? Suggestions? Warnings? Any and all will be welcome.