How much faster is the Pearl under sail than a stock boat?

Boy, that's tough to quantify this early in the program.  The short answer is A LOT, by sailing without ballast, the boat is about 1200# lighter than a stock boat, and weight is almost always the enemy.  We are still fine tuning, learning, and changing things, not to mention that we don't even have the proper spinnaker yet, so she keeps getting faster..

In timed tests on Lake Union the Pearl has  been around 50 seconds per mile faster upwind in light to moderate breeze without water ballast  than a stock boat with ballast, and 70 or 80 seconds per mile faster downwind in the same conditions, and that was without spinnakers on either boat, so we would expect a much bigger difference if we had the advantage of the  much larger spinnaker!

So far it seems that the biggest performance improvement upwind may actually be in stronger winds.  Under these conditions we sail with the keel down AND water ballast, making the boat VERY stiff.  We have sailed in about 18Kts of breeze on Puget Sound with the ballast full and the boat was going to weather like a freight train!  Fast, stable, and really easy to sail, we were easily able to sail away from boats that we know we would have had trouble beating in a stock boat.  We did a horizon job on a San Juan 24 in about 45 minutes!

Stay tuned for more detailed info on sailing performance as we come up with it.