Sails?

13 nautical miles

Today was a sail with two purposes: Give some guests a taste of sailing and try out the new magicfurl on our asymmetric spinakker. Currently we have 5 sails in our wardrobe: main, mizzen, genoa, mizzen staysail and asymmetric spinakker. The asymmetric had a sock for dousing the sail, but because it was old and worn every time we used it it ripped the sail. 

Tim had seen magicfurl from Crusader Sails and thought this would be the answer. So we bought it... but... it needed a bowsprit and the cost of that was quite high so we decided to cut down our spinakker pole and make a bowsprit out of that.

We took a section out of the middle of it and then used a shackle to clamp it to the deck. The loop it goes through was constructed out of a piece of stainless steel we inherited with the boat. The bobstay is a 3:1 block and tackle which we also inherited with the boat, albeit with new rope. 

The magicfurl itself was fitted to the end of the spinakker pole with a couple of shackles.

We cut the spinakker pole carefully with an angle grinder and then remounted the joining piece that was formed from the two parts of the original pole. 

What we did though was to mount the two end pieces at 90 degrees to each other so that the end over the water was vertical to take the magicfurl and the end on the deck was horizontal to clip into a shackle attached to a loop on the deck holding it in place. We also added a cleat on the side for the bobstay line.

Basically at the start of the day you run out the bowsprit and hoist the asymmetric and then whenever you need it you unfurl and furl with the magicfurl... sitting comfortably on the liferaft on the foredeck.

It looked beautiful and added a knot of speed to our sailing.

The deeper red ring is from a patch to the sail put there by the previous owner. In fact it's a pain as it's double thickness and so tends to bunch up on the magicfurl.

Sailing with a bowsprit seems to give the boat class. One of the old masters and it keeps the asymmetric away from the furling genoa, which was the main purpose of the project. 

It was much easier running out the bowsprit and unfurling and furling the asymmetric that the previous method with the sock. 

We found you could just fly the asymmetric at 80 degrees apparent wind and really only filled well at 90 degrees apparent wind. We will be testing more in the future.

We did find that we had to be careful furling it - not put too much pressure on the sheet or it reverse furled. When this happened we had to clear the problem the following day.

The day sailing was very enjoyable.

Our guests brought food and drink - we provided the boat.

Hopefully more photos later from the day.

So what of future sails? 

A mule...  (proper name is 'main backstaysail') something like the the inverted triangular sail on Good Fortune. Some people suggest adding a half wishbone pole to it. Some people rave about it. Or we could go bigger with a Fisherman's staysail or a gollywobbler or gollyker. But Tim showed me something more interesting and we have lost the link: a pair of dihedral sails for downwind sailing. He also talked about a kite sail (and a kite cam, but that is very different). We might also need a riding sail... this hobby is interesting in the various options. I am very glad we have a ketch which gives us opportunities to play with the rig.