  The chirally improved (CI) fermion action allows us to obtain results for
pion masses down to 320 MeV on (in lattice units) comparatively small lattices
with physical extent of 2.4 fm. We use differently smeared quarks sources to
build sets of several interpolators. The variational method then leads to
excellent ground state masses for most mesons and baryons. The excited state
signals weaken in quality towards smaller quark masses. In particular the
excited baryons come out too high.
