Even with her original, 248 sq ft Hasler rig (dead flat, wooden battens) Water Bear was extremely fast in moderate winds; with a professional Australian racing man crewing for me on his day off we outsailed a fully-crewed racing boat of around 37 feet from the Needles channel almost to Portsmouth before the wind fell light and they crept past us. Both reaching and running they couldn't catch us, despite three changes of spinnaker. My Wasp trailing log was off the scale for much of the time (max 10 knot). The boat had been laid up in Poole and had no kit on board apart from the old Seagull outboard in the forward cockpit locker; as on my original delivery trip with Paul Gartside from Malpas (Falmouth), WB would pick up a semi-plane on a wave and accelerate in a rush, slowing as the trough caught up with us, something I've never experienced in any other boat. She qualifies as a ULDB with only 4000lbs on a 28ft waterline, only suffering from excessive wetted area which shows up in the light wind performance. Paul has always thought she has excessive form stability, but the result is a remarkably controllable, solid feel combined with a lightness of touch and responsiveness that is really something special. I'm sure that some additional camber, combined with a small amount of extra canvas gained by extending the foot length would adequately address the light wind shortcomings. The rig does not need more luff length and the short mast has to be seen in the light of her shallow, lightly-ballasted keel and very low freeboard. Sadly, the design was not understood by Alan Burns, who made changes for Nick's OSTAR which were entirely contrary to the essence of the design, adding ugly, heavy, chunky steering gear and a ludicrous hull-pumping system which compromised both the watertight integrity and strength of the compartmentalized, triangulated hull design while adding weight and thus starting to defeat the simplicity of the design concept. To quote Colin Chapman 'Simplify then add lightness', a design philosophy that can be applied to boats as appropriately as to racing cars. When Nick talked about having 3 large anchors on board for the OSTAR (anchoring? in the Atlantic?) I knew the plot was being lost....