[quote=Dogboy]The more modern boats don’t seem to do this, but Hobie racers do it all the time for the reasons you mentioned. If your boat has really efficient, low drag blades, raising and lowering them on each tack probably isn’t necessary.
The downside upwind is that tacking can be quite difficult because you need to add locking down and raising tbe rudders to the tacking process - it makes it much more likely to blow the tack. Also, if you’re pushing the boat really hard (example, if you’re trying to pinch high upwind), the extra load on a single rudder can actually cause it to stall out. If this happens, you have to ease off the mainsheet and bear off far to reattach flow. In a race that will cost you a lot of distance.
Downwind, there’s basically no downside since raising and lowering the rudders doesn’t really hamper the jibing process. The only time we tend to leave both down is when it’s quite windy so drag isn’t really an issue and the main focus is on maintaining control.
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