New Sails

All week I had been hoping the new sails would arrive in time for the weekend. I'd been watching the tracking on the courier's website. The sails first went to the wrong place, then returned to the correct port of departure eventually making it to Milan and waiting there for a few days...

Finally, on Friday, we are told they arrived. So off I go to collect them. That they had arrived many hours earlier in Cyprus was true, that the courier's Cyprus representative had collected them from the airport and I could thus collect from them was not true. When I arrived at the collection point an hour and a quarter before they closed for the weekend I was told that their driver was at the airport now and he would be back in a hour, with the sails. 'Please come back in an hour' was what the clerk advised. That would leave only 15 minutes before they closed. I wasn't hopeful.

I arrived at the duly appointed time: Everyone was packing up for the weekend and the computers already switched off. The clerk found some paperwork and said, 'Let me see if it has actually arrived'. Yelling in Cypriot across the warehouse gained the information that yes, our package was here. So I signed for it and took the car round to the loading bay. I had taken our Mitsubishi estate car, since I knew the package would be long as the battens for the fully battened main were long. They were in two pieces, since airlines will not fly any package over 2 metres, but had been led to understand that the package was about 1.75 metres, which would just fit into the car. However, it was actually only a few centimetres short of the 2 metres and I was not sure after all this it would fit in the car! We moved the front seat forward as far as it would go and then folded it forward and the package fitted with maybe 1-2 centimetres grace.

Saturday turned out to be God's grace on us weather wise, it was pretty close to dead calm all day. Whatever wind did happen should come from the north so we motored King Malu over to the wet dock which meant she was facing north and started unpacking. Laying it all out on the ground beside the dock we saw for the first time our logo on the sail bags.

The old sails were quite soft and we had been able to fold and bundle them quite easily. The new ones were directly the opposite, especially the genoa, which was made of Dyneema Hyrda Net. This is the balanced weave material that the sailmaker uses for the Performance Cruising Sails. This is the same as Ellen MacArthur uses on here round Britain yacht Skandia.

The sail had been neatly folded to a barrel on the floor of the sail loft in the UK, which made it easy to get on board.

To my surprise it also went up the new Furlex easily. Now we see our logo flying on the corner of a sail. It also furled very easily, the padded luff making it a smooth roll on the Furlex.

Fitting the main with its stack-pack and refitting the old and cleaned mizzen with a new stack-pack would definitely need more than just Tim and me, so my son Daniel and daughter-in-law Becky came down to help. Becky to take photographs and video.

First discussion was the battens: There were flat and round battens... the old main had flat battens, but the new one had round, the flat were for the stack-pack. The technology of sails seems to bear little resemblance to the old sails, which had been on the boat for goodness knows how many years. The round battens were impressive, with locked and threaded screws to tension them meaning the sail could be set to a very much better shape and the battens would also fall into the stack-pack easier when dropping the main.

But... what really concerned me was getting the bolt rope around the stack pack into the slot along the boom. We decided to raise half of the sail up the mast to get it out of the way and then have less marterial to try to deal with along the boom. This proved a good move.

The sailmaker had added a piece of white cloth along the edge that went into the slot. It looked much tougher than the blue of the stack pack, which seemed sensible. However, what we also found was that this material was slippery and made the whole process of getting the sail plus stack-pack onto the boom very much easier.

We then tied the lazy jacks to the stack-pack and dropped the main into it.

The main is a Long Distance Cruising Sail, made by the same sailmaker and to the same specification as Gypsy Moth IV used in the second round the world trip. This is cut from Bainbridge Ocean Sailcloth, not quite as crisp as the Hydra Net, but stiff nevertheless and dropping it into the stack-pack for the first time was interesting to get it to flake correctly and actually fit.

We raised it again and then dropped it and the second time was very much easier.

Finally, we fitted the old, now cleaned mizzen into it's stack-pack on the mizzen boom. We now have three sails to demonstrate Premium Cruising, Long Distance Cruising and old technology cruising sails.

Time for lunch!

After lunch we move King Malu back to her berth, except we couldn't resist taking her out and seeing the new genoa filled with air.

The shape of the new genoa was excellent, it filled and sailed like a dream. The forecast for next Saturday means, if it holds, we can have a long full day sailing to see how the new suite of sails performs.

The wind was too light to get a real feel for the new sail, but the shape was fantastic even in light wind.

Tomorrow, time to do whippings and clean up all the little fiddly bits.