As part of an efficient sailplan, the staysail allows you to balance the boat and easily change gears as the wind fluctuates by reefing and unreefing the headsail. Yes, hanked, so you can get rid of it when you need to hank on a storm jib. The most efficient rig for long-haul passagemaking is a cutter rig with a staysail hanked on to an inner forestay. And if you are heading off on a passage where there is a good chance of sustained strong winds, you won’t regret changing to the smaller headsail before you set off. Preserve your 130-percent sail and change to the smaller headsail as the breeze increases. Most people don’t like changing sails, but to be prudent and to sail efficiently a second, smaller headsail with an LP (luff perpendicular-the distance from the clew of the sail to the closest point on the luff) of around 105 percent, with the ability to reef the sail to 85 percent and still have an efficient sail shape, is a good idea. You can perhaps get away with a single working sail if you are sailing along the coast, but it’s not good seamanship to cross an ocean with only one headsail. ![]() However, while this approach works well, it can’t perform miracles.īeyond that, any boat going offshore will also need something smaller than a 130 percent headsail to help it contend with severe weather. ![]() As you take a turn on the furler this strip of foam then bulks up around the headstay so that with each successive turn it removes some additional camber from the sail. To combat this problem, many roller-furling cruising headsails include a strip of dense foam (or lengths of rope) that runs along the luff of the sail from the head to the tack. As a consequence, when you roll them up and use them reefed there is no way to take in enough of the camber to make the sail work efficiently to windward. Larger sails, on the other hand, are typically also light-air sails, and in order for them to work in light winds the sail has to be designed with a deep camber. Still, in general a 130- to 135-percent headsail is the most versatile size for cruising boats, largely because the sail shape is flat enough that it can be reefed with some efficiency. With sailing you always have to consider the trade-offs.” If it’s an upwind trip then you need to consider the trade-offs. If there is a lot of reaching the sheeting angle does not matter. When trying to determine what size sail is right for your boat there are a lot of variables, and much of it comes down to the kind of boat you are sailing and the kind of offshore passage you are planning. Non-overlapping headsails are great, you can have a narrow sheeting angle, but often when sailing offshore you don’t want to sail that close to the wind because of the sea conditions. “For the sheeting angle, you need to take the angle from the tack to the clew and see how much it’s offset from the centerline of the boat. Braun is also one of Team Oracle’s lead sail designers, so he knows a bit about sails. ![]() “The problem with a 130-percent headsail when compared against a 150-percent headsail or a non-overlapping headsail is that the 130-percent sail has the worst sheeting angle of the lot,” says North Sails’s JB Braun. The real debate then comes down to trying to decide how large and how much overlap. ![]() In addition, while the center of effort (CE) of the overall sailplan is low, which is good, the boats still need sail area to give them some horsepower, and that goes back to large, overlapping headsails. Specifically, most older cruising boats do not have a lot of stability because they have shallow keels, old fashioned heavy sails and aluminum masts. Of course, there is more to it than that–there always is.
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