I'm going through a stage of owning as little windsurfing stuff as possible (I've moved to a small town-house) and I noticed pryde have a "carbon X-tender" gadget that would make a 400 a 434.

I like the idea of having only 2 masts (a 400 and a 460), but I'm wondering how these x-tender things go and whether anyone's had any experience of them.

also, has anyone had a chance to play around with the new North mast extension with the built-in ratchet adjuster? seems to downhaul (and adjust on-water) in a similar way to a ratchet tie-down.

hoping for some gold-coast wind next weekend!

Matt

North make a suite of stuff designed to work on a single mast. They use an extender too. The difference is that if you use an extender the extended mast & extender combo is softer than what is designed for normal sails. I believe that the North system takes this into account. Not sure though. Its the R type I was looking at. 6.0 to 9.5 all rigging on a 460. They have a similar thing in wave sails.

That North ratchet extender seems to be pretty popular. I have one and the things I dont like about it are -
1) The dh rope slips in the cleat wheels if either the rope is a bit worn or the downhaul tension is too high. I find it slips on my 8.5 with 6:1 wreathing (490 mast), but is fine on my 6.5 with only 4:1 wreathing (430 mast). If it does slip its not the end of the world because you can pull the other end of the rope out of its cleat and dawnhaul the old fasioned way.
2) Downhauling and releasing downhaul is slower than the old way.
3) It has bits that wear out. (Frequent rope changes and occasional wheel cleat changes required)
4) Its difficult to poke the rope through the hole in the base to engage it in the cleat. Not an issue if you have a tack cringle not a pulley and use 4:1 wreathing but if you have to thread the rope through a pulley then you have to push it through this hole that it doesn't want to go through. (Trivial but annoying)

The things I like about it are -
1) Getting very good precision in dh is easy. (Absolute precision isn't possible because of the incremental nature of the ratchet system but its fine enough).
2) Adding dh on the water is easy.
3) It has numbers on the side of it for 6 standard mast lengths that do the maths for you of subtracting the mast length from the luff length written on your sail and pointing you to the appropriate position for the collar.
4) The 4:1 wreathing has the same convenience as the NP "loop n go" extensions. ie You start with the both ends of the dh rope engaged and just push the bight through the tack cringle and loop it over a pulley wheel.