How fast????

hate to upset you lot but i doubt you are going as fast as you think.  In 25knots and dead flat water our 49er used to top out at about 23knots (gps) and that felt really fast.

The world speed record is now with the windsurfers: 46.2 knots, now i bet that feels fast,  at some points on finian was clocked at 49.1knots down the 500 metre course, now thats scary

James

Yeah, but Redback, it can't be the assymetric that makes a skiff, surely, because in 100+ year history of skiffs, assys have only been around for less than 20 years. What happened when assys were coming in? Were some of the 18s (the assy ones)  skiffs and the rest not skiffs till they changed? Did the 12s and 16s  and 14s suddenly become "non skiffs" until they got assys? They were the same boat as the assy "skiffs" upwind, so where they all "skiffs" upwind and did they become 12' "skiffs" and 12' "non-skiffs" when they set their kites, depending whether they were assy or not?

And three of the classes which remain closest to the "real" skiff formula, the Historical and Classic skiffs, still use "normal" poles (well, as normal as anything that comes in four pieces is!).

Furthermore, if it's an assy that makes a skiff, then the RS 200 and RS 400 and Topaz (IIRC) and mebbe even Assy Canoe are skiffs, and that just ain't so. So it can't just be the assy, even allowing for changes in terminology.

I don't think the 12' skiffs plane to windward, but defining planing properly is a huge can of worms. I KNOW the historical skiffs don't plane to windward.

Most skiffs (16s, 12s, many 14s, Bethwaite 18s) have foredecks so it's not the lack of a foredeck.

Down here, many boats from the Sabot (like an Oppie) upwards have full battens, so it's not full battens.

Finally, not all that many ideas came from the 18; assys and (arguably) flex-tip rigs is about it.

Hurricane, re "i think the word skiff means a boat that is

1 very quick

2 for advanced sailors

3 costs alot to run

anyone else like to add any??"

Does that mean your Hurricane is a skiff? Does it mean an FD is a skiff? After all it's faster than a L 4000 or (IIRC) a B14; it's for advances sailor, and it costs a lot to run. The same applies to the Canoe and the Norfolk Punt and they are definitely not skiffs.

Finally, the "real" skiffs often don't cost the sailors a lot to run, just their sponsors and clubs!

Skiffman, I wasn't having a go at you; it's just that I think it's important to keep the term "skiff" as something that means something, not just a marketing term for boats that some big manufacturer wants people to think are skiffs.

Planing upwind may not be a skiff marker - the 16s and 12s are in Aussie terms "displacement hulls" now - the older boats were designed to plane earlier, the current ones are designed to act sort of like Moths, just slicing upwind without achieving dynamic lift above their static C of G - which is the definition of planing. Whether they are truly planing is very hard to determine. Surely we can't have a definition of "skiff" that chucks out the real skiffs?

And if we apply the definition of more RM than a classic dinghy (which is pretty simple 'cause almost no classic dinghies have more than one person using a hiking aid) AND more sail for length than a normal dinghy, then it's pretty simple. It brings in all those that are definitely skiffs and excludes all those that are definitely dinghies.

I think that there are two main uses for the word "Skiff"

The sothern hemesphere one for all the historical skiff classes previously mentioned on the list

And the Northern hemisphere one which is a marketing term which has taken on the word "Skiff" to describe anything modern that they want people to think is fast a bit like saying you have a "Sports Car" that you use to tow your "Skiff"