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SAILS
Q I’m 80 years old and would like to continue sailing locally for a few years yet. With this in mind I recently replaced the engine and sails on my 24ft Arden Clansman. The engine is great but the sails are a complete disaster. The mainsail itself is extremely heavy and inflexible, it is difficult to raise and has to be pulled down when dropped. I also bought a packaway system as my wife was fed up with the loss of vision ahead when I dropped the sail and I find that unless the boat is headed directly into the wind you cannot either raise or lower the sail as it tends to get caught on the lazyjacks. And it’s not always safe or convenient to head into the wind for lowering into the lazyjacks. My reasoning now would be to replace the mainsail with a much lighter one and do away with the packaway system, but obviously I’ll have wasted a great deal of money. Can you suggest any other solution?
WILF CHAPLIN REPLIES: A new sail will often feel very stiff in comparison to an older one, and that will make it feel quite heavy, however with a mainsail on a 24-footer even the difference between the heaviest cloth that a loft may have used and the lightest will only give a difference of a couple of kilos in the finished weight of the sail, so I doubt it’s the actual weight of the sail that’s making it hard to hoist. The fact the sail also needs to be pulled down when being dropped points me at one of two other likely problems, both to do with friction. First I’d do a check of the halyard run, making sure the masthead sheave and any turning blocks the halyard passes through are running smoothly, even under load. If this is all good the next thing to look at is the luff hardware on the mainsail.
You don’t say if you have full length battens of not, but either way the slides on the luff of the sail need to fit the mast correctly, with sufficient clearance to move freely but not be so loose that they can ‘capsize’ in the groove and jam. With the lazyjacks, provided the sail is coming down OK usually they don’t interfere with the drop in any meaningful way, so if you could drop the sail without them, you should be able to drop it on the same point of sail with them, with them serving to deflect the flakes of falling sail towards the boom. For hoisting you do need to be a little more precise about coming head to wind than you do without them, to ensure that the battens don’t catch under the lazyjacks as the sail goes up. Once you’ve solved the problem about why the sail is hard to raise you may find it’s easier to find the sea room needed to keep her head to wind for long enough to get the batten ends past the lazyjacks.
