Sails

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I’ve always known the importance of having good sails. As a low-budget boat punk, I prioritize making sure I can get where I’m going with the help of the wind, as opposed to under power. It isn’t necessarily my goal to be engineless, or basically engineless. It just happens that ...read more

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It’s easy to assume accurate mainsail trim is only of concern to racers, but nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from increasing boatspeed, a well-trimmed main will reduce heel, minimize weather helm and decrease leeway. The result is shorter, more comfortable passage ...read more

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I pretty much took rigs for granted when I first started sailing on other people’s boats. After all, unlike exciting, moving, tweakable things like sails and running rigging, masts and booms were just there—a part of the structure of the boat. I took no part in their maintenance ...read more

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In the second of a two-part series on light-air sails, Rupert Holmes looks at how today’s furling gear has revolutionized sail handling off the wind. Read part 1 here. It’s easy to look at long-distance racing yachts of 60ft and above with multiple downwind sails set on roller ...read more

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In this first part of a two-part series on light-air downwind sails, Rupert Holmes looks at the different types of Code 0’s and A-sails now available to cruisers. To learn more about how to handle these kinds of sails. Read part 2 here. The list of potential downwind sails for ...read more

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If you own an older boat, you’re likely familiar with the quirks that come with aging rigging and equipment. Many budget sailors like myself make do with these imperfections on their boats by finding workarounds or perhaps living in ignorance of how well their boat could sail if ...read more

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In-mast furling systems have come a long way. Forget the hollow-leeched, baggy triangles we first saw decades ago; a well-specced modern in-mast system can offer more sail area than a traditional slab-reefed mainsail, so the performance gap has narrowed significantly. ...read more

SailRepairKit

Despite your best efforts, there will inevitably be times when your sail gets damaged while at sea and needs to be repaired. First, no matter what the job, you will need to do a quick damage assessment, a task that requires a flat wooden surface, sharp scissors and a helping ...read more

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Taking care of your canvas doesn’t just save you money, it’s central to good seamanship Knowing how to take care of your sails and how to repair them while at sea is an important part of overall seamanship. The last thing any sailor needs is to get caught on a lee shore with ...read more

Without battens, the sail is easy to set and douse and does not get caught in the lazyjacks

For the past seven years my wife, Jody, and I have been cruising aboard Blue Pelican, our Pearson 424 ketch. We spent most of those years sailing the East Coast of the United States and the Caribbean, but in 2015 we transited the Panama Canal and sailed Blue Pelican across the ...read more

The new genoa lead in action—a successful upgrade (left); The low-friction ring sheet lead in action (middle); Two new genoa cars had to be purchased (right)

I’ve always been less than enthusiastic about changing my genoa sheet leads on different points of sail. I know I should move the lead forward to improve its shape when I’m reefing or sailing off the wind. However, when I’m sailing singlehanded it is a bind to release the genoa ...read more

The low-friction cars on this sail allow it to flake down nicely

It used to be simple. In the old days, your sailmaker offered you one kind of mainsail, and sailors were generally happy with the result. You got a sail with a moderate roach, four battens to support that roach, a few reefs and some sail-trim devices, like a cunningham or a ...read more

Downwind sailing is hard on mainsails

Look after your sails, and they’ll look after you Dacron sailcloth has two natural enemies—sunlight and chafe, both of which are found in abundance on the typical sailboat. There is not much you can do to stave off damage from ultraviolet light except to keep the mainsail ...read more

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Here is a sad truth relating to older boats: the more desirable the piece of equipment you want to install, the harder it is to remove its predecessor. Eyeing the scarred, ugly genoa sheet tracks on our project Norlin 34 plastic classic, I had the feeling I was in for a ...read more

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After purchasing new sails last year and installing a Tides Marine mainsail track, we decided it was time to upgrade the 45-year-old roller-reefing boom on our Allied Seabreeze 35 project boat Keewaydin. The old boom was in working order (for the most part), but I was suspicious ...read more

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The last thing you want from your furling gear is for it to jam up in a rising breeze—or ever. I must be some kind of roller-reefing Jonah, because it’s happened a few times on boats I’ve been sailing aboard. On two of those occasions, halyard wrap was to blame. Halyard wrap ...read more

Every boat, no matter how big or small, is the sum of its parts, and even on the smallest boat there are plenty of parts. Each fitting, cringle, turnbuckle or block is there for a reason. Any piece of sailing hardware that is not perfect for the job, not well maintained and not ...read more

I have always liked lazyjacks in theory, but in practice I’ve found them to be a total pain in the backside. Even so mundane a task as hoisting a mainsail takes on a new dimension when you’ve got to time it just right so the batten ends don’t get caught in the lazyjacks; and if ...read more

When the boom overlaps the bimini top, here’s a simple way to gain instant access to it from the cockpit When I bought my aft-cockpit ketch, Silverheels, she had no bimini top at all. While I attended to other upgrades in preparation for tropical cruising, I pondered how I ...read more

Now that Beneteau is experimenting with wingsails, is this proven concept about to take flight? Has the wingsail finally come of age? After last year’s breathtaking America’s Cup series, and the news from boatbuilding giant Beneteau that it is experimenting with wings as an ...read more

Seamanship: “All of the arts and skills of boathandling, ranging from maintenance and repairs, to piloting, sail handling, marlinspike work, rigging and all aspects of boat operation.” This definition of “seamanship” became particularly apropos one day while we were anchored ...read more

I’d always dreamed of using a spinnaker to propel our Tartan 31, Solace, along on a light-air summer’s day, but the thought of wrestling with an unruly kite (prior to running it over, of course!) was never appealing. Then one day I read about the benefits of rope-luff sails and ...read more

Traditionally, all sailboat mainsails were reefed by simply pulling down the reefing lines through cringles in the luff and leech of the mainsail, then securing the reefing pennants—often permanently attached to the mainsail—to the boom to tidy the sail up. Then, in the late ...read more

Most boats today have a single permanently hoisted headsail with a roller-reefing unit on the headstay. This arrangement works well, but becomes problematic when there is more wind than the sail on the furler can handle. Three common solutions include sailing with the headsail ...read more

Nothing will ruin your cruise faster than a damaged or torn sail. With the BoatWorks sail-repair kit on board, you’ll be able to make emergency repairs and keep on sailing. Ours cost less than $100 to assemble but could save us hundreds in repair bills. A. Curved and straight ...read more

Although many of us say we like to live by the KISS principle, sometimes it’s not so easy to Keep It Simple, Stupid. On sailboats, this is evident in the endless quest to make sailhandling more efficient. Well, it’s my endless quest, anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out that way, ...read more

Though most sailing innovations are born on racing boats, cruisers can take credit for pioneering and popularizing the concept of the modern furling headsail. After cruisers tested and perfected these systems about 30 years ago, they were widely adopted on certain types of ...read more

One of the great ironies of sailing is that as hard as it can be to get your mainsail up, it can often be just as hard to get it back down. This goes double when tucking in a reef with a slab-reefing system—one reason why so many sailors are willing to sacrifice sailing ...read more

Every boat, no matter how big or small, is the sum of its parts, and even on the smallest boat there are plenty of parts. Each fitting, cringle, turnbuckle or block is there for a reason. Any piece of sailing hardware that is not perfect for the job, not well maintained and not ...read more

Near the end of the 2010 boating season I noticed that the old Profurl roller-furling unit on my Tanton 39 cutter Lunacy was no longer working properly. The furler, which probably dates back to the early 1990s, was getting increasingly difficult to use. When rotating the drum, ...read more

I love the fact that an old boat can give you as much sailing pleasure as an expensive new one. The only proviso for me is that the sail handling systems be absolutely top-notch. Replacing hardware like mainsheet travelers, genoa lead cars, boom vangs and lead blocks with new, ...read more

If you are one of the many thousands of sailors who own a boat built before lines-led-aft became ubiquitous, and you want to be able to sail your boat without leaving the cockpit, leading halyards and reefing lines aft can be a relatively easy upgrade. Planning the projectStep ...read more

Easy Upgrades: #1 of a series Every fractionally rigged boat will have (or should have) a means of adjusting backstay tension. Its main purpose is to flatten and depower the mainsail in stronger winds, putting off the time at which a reef will be required. Because very few ...read more

If your sails are made from laminated materials there’s a good chance that you’ve struggled with ways to keep mildew from getting a toehold in the fabric. "Many of the sails made today are constructed with laminated materials," says Jeff Andersen, President of the New ...read more

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