DRAGONFLY Trimarans User Forum

Hi all,

Can anyone help me out with some sailing or boat tuning advice please?

When powered up, my DF800 has a lot of weather helm when sailing upwind. As a dinghy racer, this feels horrible and slow, as well as straining arms and tiller! Is there any way to improve things? The rudder and centreboard are fully down.

Does rig tension affect this?

Thanks, Phil

The easiest is to pull the centerboard up a bit, like 10cm of the board downhaul worth.

The three different DF 800 I have sailed have all been neutral. No force in helm going upwind (or anywhere)

So you have the check position of rudder and centerboard - are they really pulled down to correct position? Start with rudder - it is easiest to access. Force in rudder is usually a signal that rudder downhaul is lose. If that don't do the trick, check centerboard. You may have to move the knot on the centerboard line. (there is a old thread about that in this forum)

Secondly, sails. Did you sail with only main? (don't think so) DF800 go hardly upwind without jib. There are ways to sheet the boat into bad balance (don't think you did that)

We had some problems with our daggerboard- sometimes it stuck either in up position or down position so i opened up the table- everything was ok and i have no idea what was causing the original problem.
At the same time I remembered this topic and noticed that our daggerboard is not going all the way down. I opened the knot on the downhaul line (green line) inside the daggerboard box and moved it a bit lower/closer to daggerboard now keel goes few centimeters deeper. I'm not sure if the knot has always been in wrong position or was the the downhaul line just streched..