Chapter 16

We Graduate #2

Obviously, fussing with sails is done chiefly when racing. There is every justification for mutiny on a cruise if the skipper is constantly ordering all hands on deck to trim sheets or to set or take in sails. Cruising is supposed to be lazy sort of fun where time is forgotten. Speed is certainly not the essence of sailing pleasure. Light sails and all the gear that goes with them are useful for slicing seconds off the time taken to cover a course. They are about as useless as a sheet-iron towel when you are out for nothing more than a pleasant afternoon's sail. Beyond that, they are fragile, stretch out of shape, require a maze of special rigging, and often cost as much as the entire boat.

The boat rigged for all of the varieties of light canvas needed for racing should have a special halyard for each of the sails so that in shifting from one sail to another, no sail need be taken in until the other is drawing. The multiple halyards and sheets present a problem that only a trained crew can solve. All sorts of stunts to identify the running gear have been tried. Lettered tags work fairly well in daylight. Racing cruisers slamming through the pitch dark have had the gear identified by small metal tags of different shapes; a good idea if the crew has learned the code. Of course, the positions of the different lengths of running rigging and the cleats to which they are belayed follow a standard pattern. Even the crew of the smallest jib-and-mainsail boat should know, unerringly, the location of every line and cleat.

As we graduate into larger boats, we find it necessary to have means of providing additional power for the sweating in of halyards and sheets. Power can always be gained by adding blocks to the tackles, but such multiplication of power involves an equal reduction in the speed of hoisting and sheeting. During a race, a crew can keep busy adjusting sails and the less time taken to set any one sail, the better time the boat will turn in for the course. A jib-headed mainsail must be sheeted very flat when the boat is beating to windward. The same applies to a Genoa. Most sails are hoisted on wire halyards rather than on the older Manila lines rove through two or more sheaves to provide power. Wire running rigging cannot be belayed around a cleat. Sometimes such rigging has a Manila tail spliced to the wire, the Manila being used for hauling and belaying. It is hopeless to believe that a man can haul in wire running rigging by hand. The diameter is too small to grasp. Manila large enough to be grasped comfortably is often out of proportion to its job. For these reasons, the use of hand winches is becoming more and more popular even though they add to the cost of rigging gear and increase the number of toe-breakers on deck.

The larger boats sometimes have electrically driven winches for halyards and sheets. It may come as a shock to those sentimentalists who shudder at the thought of machinery in a sailing boat, but the bitter truth is that some of the larger racing windjammers have more machinery aboard to handle the sails than they would need if they were driven by power.

The standing rigging of a boat is inevitably deficient in one vital point. The thrust of the sails is directed forward, yet the normal standing gear supporting the mast does everything but combat that thrust. Stays lead forward and shrouds lead athwart ships. The mast is thus supported from falling backward and from collapsing over the side. What keeps it from obeying the urge to fall over the bow? Few small craft have anything in the nature of stays leading aft. The forward thrust has to be taken up with the mainsheet, which means that the sail itself is acting as a means to prevent the mast from drooping over the bow like a withered lily. Such a condition is certainly not good engineering.

Obviously, any stays leading aft either must run from the masthead to points on deck clear of the mainsail and main boom, or else must lead back on the sides. In the latter case, the leeward stay must be arranged so that it can be slacked off to get out of the way of the boom. Even when that necessity has been provided, the arrangement is still far from perfect. In the case of an accidental jibe, for example, the entire maneuver may take place in a matter of a second or two. If you have slacked the leeward backstay out of the way and the boom jibes over, you are going to have a gosh-awful mess on your hands when boom and what was the windward backstay meet. Not only is the shock sufficient to break the boom, but Lady Luck will have to be with you to avoid the whole shebang from going over the bow.

Once the spinnaker is set and drawing, the working jib can be either taken in, as shown here, or trimmed opposite to the spinnaker.
 
To provide additional power for the sweating in of halyards and sheets, the use of hand winches is becoming more and more popular.

Intentional jibes are a bit more sedate and you may, with a right smart crew, slack off one backstay and get in on the other before the catastrophe. Side backstays, usually called back runners in polite society but tagged with nasty titles in practice, can be arranged in two ways. The simplest, but certainly not the most practical, is to lead a length of wire rope from the masthead on each side. To the end of the wire, a length of Manila is spliced and run through tackle blocks. The lower block is attached to a ring bolt near the deck edge and about two-thirds of the length of the boat abaft the bow.

In service, the leeward tackle is slacked off and someone must go forward and drag plenty of slack in it so that it does not chafe against the mainsail and ruin its shape. When the boat is on a close beat with the wind coming from fairly well forward, neither runner need be set. Under such conditions, the main boom will be sheeted in and the sheet itself will take much of the strain off the mast. But when the wind is anywhere aft of amidships, the windward back runner must be set up tight and the leeward one slacked off so that it hangs free of the sail and boom. When the boat comes about, there is no need for more than normal speed in shifting the backstays, but during a jibe, a two-man crew is not much use unless each has five sets of arms and can be in three places at the same instant.

To help in such conditions, a backstay can have the lower block attached to a slide on a track fastened to the deck. At the after end of the track is a catch to which the slide can be attached. A length of line is attached to the slide. When you set up the stay—it can truly be called a back runner in this case—you draw the slide aft until it engages the catch. When you have to cast the stay off, you loosen the catch and the whole business slides along its track far enough to be relatively clear of the sail and boom. At least, it is sufficiently clear so that you can take the time to draw the windward runner back to its catch, where it will hold until you have further slacked off the lee runner and can make final adjustments. With this improved form of back runner, a small crew will still keep busy enough to avoid most forms of mischief.

The ultimate improvement in the backstay category is a permanent stay leading from the masthead to a ring bolt in the stern or to a boomkin—the latter being a bowsprit that has lost its way and has ended up projecting aft from the stern. This system is perfect as far as it goes. The stay is always in place and requires no attention at all. But—and here is a great big "but" with hair on its chest—a permanent backstay is impossible unless you have a very modern rig of the type where the main boom ends quite a bit forward of the stern.

It is not sufficient that the stay be rigged so that it will just barely clear the end of the boom when the latter is more or less horizontal. That is the way booms are drawn on boat plans, but no permanent backstay should be tolerated unless it is rigged so that it clears the end of the main boom no matter at what angle the boom may be. Your boom will normally be more or less parallel with the water, but during an accidental jibe, the boom may lift as it swings across. If it should foul the backstay —which has probably sagged a bit as the boom jibed over—you are in more trouble than should happen to your worst enemy. If you have luck, maybe you'll only break the boom. More likely, you'll carry away the backstay. In that case, as the jibe is completed and the boom comes to the end of its wild ride, it will find the mast ready to promptly give up the struggle and collapse forward.

While such a misfortune will probably never present itself, it might be well to mention that a dismasting is serious business. The first step following a dismasting is to either cut away or lash the broken parts. In any sort of rough water, the wreckage alongside creates a grave hazard. If the mess is allowed to surge back and Boomkin (lower right corner of photograph) projects aft beyond the transom of the boat to take lower end of permanent backstay that supports mast.

Back runner slacked off. Its lower end is attached to a slide on a track fastened to the deck. To lighten, slide is pulled aft and engages a catch.
forth, an end is apt to gouge hunks out of the hull, or even poke a hole right through the planking.

The day will probably come when you will capsize a small, open centerboarder. This is a remote chance with a ballasted keel boat, from which remark it might be construed that the keel boat with a hunk of lead on her bottom is a lot safer. This is far from true. The unballasted wooden boat will stay afloat indefinitely even if she is filled with water. She will thus form a means for you and your crew to stay afloat until you get picked up. You will suffer nothing beyond a blow to your vanity and a good wetting down. But if a keel boat capsizes, or heels until she fills, or is swamped by a succession of big waves, the situation is far more serious. The weight of her ballast will sink her unless there are watertight compartments that are well-built and really do their stuff. Summed up: the unballasted center boarder may capsize more often, but when she does a cartwheel, she will stick around to provide you with hanging-on space; the ballasted craft may never upset, but should the day come when she does, she is apt to leave you to either swim or follow her down. Boats built of metal or plastic will remain afloat only if they have built-in buoyancy in the form of either buoyancy tanks or compartments separated from the rest of the boat by completely watertight bulkheads. All openings in such bulkheads must be equipped with doors that can be made watertight by fast-acting dogs.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...