See full version: Choosing the Right Headsail for your Sailboat
On the down side, however, with a low-clewed sail, the leech will twist open as soon as the sheet is eased, so that you have to adjust the lead by moving the sheet car forward to compensate. This , of course, means more work, something cruisers like to avoid.
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. 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. 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. 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 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. However, while this approach works well, it can’t perform miracles. more
“Besides some added performance, a lower clew offers a boat slightly more stability in the sail,” says David Hodges, owner of Ullman Sails in San Francisco. “With a lower clew the headsail is pinned down close to the block, while a higher clew will sometimes have as much as 6ft or more of line between the block and the clew, giving the sail the chance to move around a lot more.”
If you are thinking of going offshore and wondering what sails are right for you, let’s start by getting rid of some of the old ideas. Most modern boats don’t need big overlapping headsails to perform well sailing upwind. There was a time when you needed as much square footage as you could get just to get your boat moving. Boats were heavy, keels long, and the only thing that could get a boat going was sail area. “It all started to change with the advent of light masts and even lighter rigging,” says Tyler Doyle, head of Doyle CFD, which specializes in computational fluid dynamics. “With lighter masts yacht designers have been able to increase mast height without too much effect on righting moment, and a high-aspect sailplan with a jib that overlaps no more than 105 to 110 percent is a very efficient rig. Adding more overlap to this kind of boat is not going to improve performance, it’s just going to cost you more for the sail.”
As with many things, change comes slowly in the marine world, sometimes imperceptibly slowly, and we only notice how much things have changed when we look at an old photograph. That’s what happened to me. I was trolling through my photo archives when I noticed a photo of a cruising boat, rail down, lugging a low-clewed overlapping genoa sailing upwind in a seaway. It reminded me of sailing in the days of the IOR rule, when 150 percent genoas were the name of the game, and we were bound and determined to use them no matter the conditions. How things have changed! The IOR Rule has been relegated to the history books (thankfully), and the need to lug oversized sails around is also slowly becoming a thing of the past, especially for those sailors cruising blue water.
Beyond that, any boat going offshore will also need something smaller than a 130 percent headsail to help it contend with severe weather. 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. 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. Preserve your 130-percent sail and change to the smaller headsail as the breeze increases. 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. more
Why are these sails black? Because black is cool.
Racing sail fashions change like human sartorial fashions. These days, if your sails aren’t black, you’re wearing a polyester leisure suit or a miniskirt.
I have dreams about sailing. My boat is named Main Street, which may be why I sometimes dream I am sailing it on a street, weaving through motor vehicle traffic under a spinnaker. That’s really weird, but at least it’s not scary, unlike my dream about showing up at a regatta with goldenrod-colored Kevlar sails, which leaves me in a cold sweat. Once I dreamed I came to a race with white sails, and that was a certifiable nightmare.
I came of age as a sailor in the white-sail era and thought of bright-white Dacron as a scientific wonder. Little did I know that even as I fussed with trimming cross-cut sails that would last forever but, like an aging athlete, lose their muscle tone and sag a little more every season, chemists were working to make white sails obsolete. here
North’s 3DL sails fell into this category for many years, with variable densities of the carbon, depending on where it was needed to resist the heaviest loads. Our newer 3Di sails are darker now because starting in 2013 with the introduction of 3Di RAW, we’ve rid our highest-performing sails of the cover layer and its associated parasitic weight. We should point out that not all 3Di sails are black, because North has 3Di products that include aramid fibers, which are yellow, and Dyneema fibers, which are white. We also use black, white or gray taffeta or non-woven surface materials for durability on our 3Di ENDURANCE and 3Di OCEAN performance cruising products, for which the owner can choose the color of preference.
Black has not always been the fast look for sails, but lately more and more black sails are showing up on the water. Why? The simple answer is that many sails are now made with carbon fibers—the strongest load-carrying material in sails—and carbon is black. If some sails seem even blacker to you than they did a few years ago, you may be noticing North’s 3Di sails, a product that has gained market share over the last half dozen years. Many sailmakers use carbon in their sails, but typically the carbon is laminated between layers of polyester or Mylar film, so it does not look completely black.
3Di RAW on Swan 42 one designs 📸 Onne van der Wal
Many sailmakers have followed the trend toward black sails in recent years. Most add a “light skin” or taffeta on top of the film to achieve the black look! Others simply add a non-woven layer of colored polyester material to make the sails black. here
Volvo Ocean Race Alvimedica and the Code Zero versus SCA and the J1 here
Typically a sloop carries a regular jib as its headsail. It can also use a genoa. more
Types of jibs: more
By the way: we think that Viking sails were made from wool and leather, which is quite impressive if you ask me. [links]
The most common small and mid-sized sailboat - seems familiar?