Soft Shackles

Hank on sails are wonderful, and so is synthetic rigging! The problem is bronze hanks are a bit brash on the Dyneema and can lead to costly and early replacements of your headstays. The solution: soft hanks.

Soft shackles are notoriously large to allow them to loop around all sorts of items, making them very useful in all applications on a sailboat! The problem is when they are really big, they are also really long.
A bronze hank is roughly 2.25 inches long (internal length), meaning that the sail resides about 2 inches behind the stay.
To replicate this same position with soft hanks, the soft shackle needs to be made very small so that it will keep the luff of the sail close to the stay.
I made these soft shackles using 1/4” Dyneema and they are being tested on our next transatlantic voyage.
I will be keeping an eye on how these work out and reporting back on how they hold up!

Which is the safest sailboat?

When it comes to sailboats, there are two main distinctions: deck stepped and keel stepped. This refers to how the mast is supported and directly affects the strength and reliability of the mast.
Which one is safer? Find out in the video link below!

Mainsail and Trysail

While the trysail is a smaller version of a mainsail, it is not to say the same thing as a heavily reefed mainsail.

While some people advocate that a third reef in the mainsail is the same as a trysail, I would like to counter that point.
I personally have a mainsail with three reef points and a trysail, I can tell you that they are not the same animal!

A mainsail, no matter how reefed, will always include a boom. As seas toss you around, the boom can begin to swing around, especially if it looses wind pressure when you go down into the trough between waves. The boom can easily injure parts of the rig and kill anyone it hits! Try sails do not use the boom.
By not being boomed out, they also can be shaped with more ease. A reefed mainsail will always have a flat foot that will extend out over the side of the boat as it follows the boom that is eased. The trysail will remain mostly over the deck. When on a run, the sail will remain with the clew over the deck and simply billow forward a bit. If you jibe, it is no different from a headsail flipping from one tack to another. No drama and no damage!

When on a run, the center of effort of the sail is closer to the middle of the ship which means less weather helm which means it’s easier to maintain control in a storm. If you change course and want to beam reach or go slightly to windward, all you need to do is sheet the sail in and it will flatten out.
We find the trysail to be incredibly versatile, even in non-storm conditions. If we are going downwind and need to ease the mainsail far out, the torquing from the boom holding the sail so far to the side of the boat will give tremendous weather helm and it will steal wind from the headsails, compounding that problem!
The trysail will let air go by to the headsails which will pull the yacht downwind and keep the center of effort over the deck to reduce weather helm.
If the trysail is so versatile, why don’t people use it more?

The answer is simple, they have a single tool but not the complete set. This means they can use it but it’s not easy to do so. For most, a third reef is simply the next reef after the second reef. Easy enough to do and they are well practiced at it. But the trysail requires removing the mainsail and sliding the sail onto the track, switching over the halyard and running the sheets to the clew. Doing this in a storm is impossible and dangerous which is why they simply put in a third reef and call it a day!

For me, having the complete kit means that putting up the trysail involves releasing one halyard, pulling another, and tying on one sheet.
Our trysail lives hanked on to its own track with its own independent halyard attached and ready to roll. The trysail track is to starboard of the mainsail track, so the starboard sheet is always attached. All I need to do is toss the port sheet over the boom and tie it to the clew and hoist the trysail up! If the weather is really bad and I don’t feel like messing with the port sheet, then we raise it with only the starboard sheet and just stay in port tack.
With the trysail up, I can get everything tucked away and tied up while the boat sails along comfortably in horrible conditions. If it gets too nasty out there, I can also easily and effectively heave to with the trysail.
This sail is so versatile, I never leave port without it set at the base of the mast ready to hoist at a moments notice. The difference between me and everyone who avoids the trysail is I have created a method to deploy it easily and that convenience means that I can use it easily.

Jury Rigging

When something breaks in your Rigging, the repair is called a Jury Rig. On passage from Gibraltar to Madeira, a 700 mile voyage on the same tack, our windward chainplates broke to the cap shroud and aft lower. Not a good situation when you’re 300+ miles from land!

While this picture shows the jury rig on the leeward side, it was actually the windward side for the majority of the voyage!
To support the loads of the cap shroud and aft lower, I lashed them to the neighboring deadeyes at a 45* angle. This angle helps keep the loads lower so that the remaining chainplates don’t become overwhelmed and break as well.

This spread out the load to the remaining two chainplates (forward lower and check stay) while keeping the mast up.
The other very important thing we did as soon as we found the problem was change the sailplan to a setup that would put the least strain on the weakened rigging.

Being a cutter, we have redundancy in our rigging. The masthead setup is again repeated at the height of our staysail.
The Cap Shroud is stressed by loads on the headstay which pull on the mast head. This meant no jib or full main while we had the broken chainplate. The aft lower is in charge of holding the middle of the mast in place when the spar is loaded, but this task is also provided by the forward lower which also is in charge of giving the mast a forward bend. Being how we were not racing, absolute trueness of the spar was not that critical so the aft lower was of little priority at the moment.
The sailplan was staysail and trysail, with the trysail set at the spreaders. The staysail was supported by the inner forestay and the check stays which also acted like lower cap shrouds for it. Running backstays would not provide this same lateral support as they run too far aft and only function as a backstay.
The trysail was set at the spreaders to keep the forces low and light. Less force aloft meant less strain on the broken rigging.
Being keel stepped with a thick and heavy mast meant that the spar itself was intrinsically stiff. The broken rigging was a unwelcome but not catastrophic.
Figure this, we were sailing along when I discovered the broken chainplates. This means that they were not supporting the mast and the mast was still able to remain unbroken while sailing in 20 knots of breeze. I jury rigged the stays to once again give support to the spar, but the spar was able to support the load on its own without those stays (for the short amount of time, I wouldn’t have wanted to sail 3 days on it without the support!)

When we arrived to our tiny island, I found a mechanic who machined new chainplates for us to replace the broken ones. With the new chainplates installed and the rig set back up to normal, we can now safely sail away to continue crossing the Atlantic.

Made it to Madeira

It took us 9 days to sail from Gibraltar to Madeira (4 of those days was spent fighting the current in the Strait of Gibraltar). We had a rather rough sail but made it to the tiny island of Porto Santo and are now anchored in the harbor safely.