Dimensions

Benefits

About the Boat

The Shadow was designed by Yves Loday and Reg White and launched in 2002. It followed on from the very successful Spitfire and shares some of the design ideas and dinghy like handling. The introduction of the Shadow followed a long development process, while Yves and Reg fine tuned the design and especially the rig.

The mast is a novel lightweight extrusion developed specially for the Shadow and is light enough to put up on your own. The rig, in combination with the light weight, is the key to the boat's exceptional performance for it's size: It's not unusual to keep up with Spitfires, F18s or Hurricanes upwind! The power is really easily controlled and the rig can be accurately tuned to suit a wide range of crew weights.

The spinnaker is relatively small and flat, and is set where a jib would usually be- Avoiding the weight, windage and complexity of a pole. On any asymmetric rig, it's important that the systems works well, so that hoists and drops go smoothly. On a single hander it's absolutely essential! Instead of a chute on the pole, the Shadow's chute is located at the front beam, with a sock under the trampoline. As the sail is small, just a few pulls is all it takes to hoist or drop the kite.

The Shadow hulls use a layer of Kevlar® in the outer skin of the laminate. This makes the hulls very durable, with even the first boats built still looking great after several seasons sailing.

One item that tends to have people saying "What a good idea, why don't all boats have that" is the righting line. This is permanently installed under the trampoline and makes righting the boat faster and easier. It gets tidied away with shock-cord when not in use.

The boat can be sailed competitively by sailors of a wide range of weights: between about 65 and 90 Kg. Although it's a single hander, the boat can be very comfortably sailed two-up for fun.

Class Rules

The Shadow, like the Spitfire, is a strict One Design class, where the true test is between the skill of the sailors, not the boat or the budget. The fundamental objective of the Class Rules is that this concept is maintained. However, the class rules do allow some flexibility in a few areas, and for some items, like blocks and ropes to be replaced with equivalent items of any make.

Click below to open the full class rules.

Shadow Class Measurement Rules Feb 05.pdf

Boat Tests

Don't just believe what the sailors say, here's the report of the Yachts and Yachting boat test:

Yachts and Yachting Shadow test.pdf

If you don't have acrobat reader, you can download it for free at the following link: