Impact Sails

 Part of an occasional series of scribbles on the subject of new sails for your Solo and what is available.

*** Disclaimer *** not an expert ***

Popular/successful sails vary over time, but currently there are four "big" sailmakers for the Solo: Pinnell & Bax, Hyde, HD and North. In 2022 the top four boats at the Solo Nationals finished like this:

1. North (Tom Gillard)
2. HD (Steve Cockerill)
3. Hyde (Richard Lovering)
4. P&B (Oliver Davenport)

and it is pretty common for the top sailors to be the ones actually working for the sailmaker in question or in the sailing business. I guess from the sailmakers point of view, there are a limited number of classes for which the sailor gets to choose the make of sail as boats like the Laser/ILCA and all the RS and Hartley boats lock you into one sailmaker, at least for racing, so racing success in a class like the Solo where you can choose your equipment is a great advert.

There is a lot of information available about the top four sails and they are all excellent products, so I am not going to spend too much time on those. If you buy one of them, you will have a fast sail.

There are some other excellent British sailmakers around of course. McNamara Sails are big in (among others) the Cadet and Wayfarer fleets, Lennon Sails in Int14 and Moths, Morgan Sails now making the Solution Class sails, Batt Sails in Squibs, Edge Sails in Larks and Mirrors, Goacher in GP14s and Flying Fifteens and Dynamic Sails in Int14 and Optimist to name a few. All these sailmakers will make you a racing Solo sail too, of course.

This time I am having a look at Impact Marine who are a new name to me, but have been making some terrific GP14 sails recently. I noticed a couple of Solos in the event reports this year with a logo I didn't recognise and did a bit of digging.

The Impact Marine sailmaker is Andy Tunnicliffe who is - like a lot of the sailmakers - a top sailor himself, to be found winning the GP14 Worlds with Ian Dobson and often found in the Solos too (check him out in the Solo website tuning guides). In fact they have just won the 2022 GP14 Nationals and Worlds again!

I sent Impact an email and Andy kindly got back to me with some pictures of the Maxx cross-cut Solo sail they make. The sail looks great, retails at £890 when I checked last and could be a good choice. Here's some pictures.