asym chute on the laser

I saw the blog, thanks for the report!

I know a guy who used an old carbon fiber windsurfing mast as a bowsprit, and it worked very well. I think he did end up reinforcing it with some carbon fiber unidirectional cloth, but I remember him saying he didn't have to do that, he just wanted the pole to not bend at all...

No, still haven't done it. It will affect our rating so still deliberating. We can however gybe very easily from the bow, the secret is to gybe the kite before the main.
I've just got a Melges kite to try, it's very big. The luff length is around 11.05m so I calculate that would need a 1.25m sprit to fit!

That seems big! The SB3 kite is 46 m2 which is around 495 ft2 I think. I wouldn't recommend flying it off your spi pole unless it's around 3" diameter. We tried off of our pole which is a little shorter than a class pole at 2.95m and lashed it to the deck and pulpit...it bent horribly and soon got un-rigged!

Do you know the luff length of a Melges kite? The SB3 is 10.6m and seems to fit very well.

A report back on our Laser SB3 asymmetric kite. Absolutely brilliant! We are flying it from a snatch block on the bow roller using the pole downhaul as a tack line. 9.5 knots boat speed this weekend when the symmetrical boats are falling over. It fits the Laser 28 perfectly, though we will be adding a bowsprit this winter. However we can gybe it without by easing the tack line, just need the bow to push the tack to leeward if it gets at all caught on the pulpit.

As you can imagine, a big class fleet in the UK like SB3s don't have a lot of use for older spinnakers, so we got it for an amazing price.

The factory supplied a reaching/cruising chute as an option back in the days and it was the same luff length with much smaller girths. Not quite a chicken chute but one with much smaller shoulders. The standard class chute at the time was an all purpose chute that would sail the courses we used at that time... i.e. triangles were common. Now a days, the standard class chute is the W/L chute

The chute was originally an all purpose but I couldn't go down wind as fast as another Laser in my fleet.  Talking to my sailmaker he said I needed a runner which did the trick.  He also advised to recut the all purpose into a reacher.  I believe he took out center panels and flattened the sail out.  As soon as the wind starts going off the nose and we let out the Jib, its time to consider the reacher.  I like it over the Asym because of the high shoulder.  We can carry in it in high winds on a reach when most boats are taking their chutes down.  It is also a great chicken chute. 

I have a UK Asym that I would like to sell.  Like new, has been used several times.  For PHRF racing I prefer a reaching chute.  If you are interested I can be reached at 716-649-6103

I am going to race my Laser in a couple of single handed distance races this year (a 150 mile race on Lake Michigan) and I wanted to know if anyone has tried to sail the laser with an asym spinnaker either off of a bow sprit or races with a gennaker. I'm going to keep the class chute on the boat and practice working the pole single handed, but I can imagine conditions where that would be ill advised. Any suggestions?