Bow sprits and cruising chutes

[Vara]

Keeping up to date as I do,I notice that a lot of boats are sprouting little sprits to fly their chutes.
Why?
Having flown mine attached to the little pin that stops the anchor falling off when under way with no problems,I'm puzzled.
So before I go down to the local building site to nick a bit of scaffolding tube and a few bolts can somebody enlighten me?

<hr width=100% size=1>If it can't be fixed with a lump hammer dont fit it!

 

[simonfraser]

i fly an asymetric spi off mine on a wire luff & on a furler.
this way i can control a large sail on my own, so far!

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[boatless]

It moves the centre of effort of the sail, and therefore the whole sail area, forward, reducing any tendency to weather helm.

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[rwoofer]

1. The longer the bowsprit the more upwards lift there is from the chute. This counteracts the tendency of the boat to nosedive going downwind.

2. Make it easier to do an inside gybe, although a sprit needs to be reasonably long before I would even consider an inside gybe.

3. Introduces a bit lf lee helm so that you naturally bear away in the gusts which has the knock-on effect of depowering the rig - very helpful

4. Increases the downwind angle before the main overlaps the chute.


I remember when I used to sail a twin trapese asymmetric dinghy with a long bowsprit that you could fall of a 6foot wave and still have a soft landing because of the amount of upwards lift the spinnaker produced.

RB

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[Phoenix of Hamble]

An Asymmetric changes the boats ability to cope with Apparent wind, and hence sail much higher with a kite up than a traditional spinnaker...

The further forward the tack, the broader the angle of the apparent wind and the better the boats ability to generate speed, and keep the kite full...

Read Bethwaites book 'High Performance Sailing' if you want a really detailed understanding... but in essence, with a pole you should be able to sail higher with the kite still flying and at speeds above wind speed (through apparent wind), and hence have much better VMG than sailing low which forces you to sail at windspeed or lower...

Should also add that with a displacement hull like a yacht, the gains are relatively lower than in dinghies that can plane... so thats why you'll see relatively more bow sprits on dinghies and sportsboats, and where yachts have them, in agreement with above comments, the asymmetrics on poles are more usefull for ease of handling rather than huge performance gains given the hull speed restriction of the square root of waterline length.....(but there are still performance gains)

<hr width=100% size=1><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>Edited by NAS on 10/09/2004 21:57 (server time).</FONT></P>

 

[Vara]

Thank you for your replies;as soon as I saw the reference to "high performance sailing" I knew that this was a path I didn't want to follow/forums/images/icons/smile.gif

<hr width=100% size=1>If it can't be fixed with a lump hammer dont fit it!

 

[rwoofer]

High performance in this instance really means that because the spinnaker is so much easier to handle it can be massively oversized to give the higher performance. If you stick to normal size then you simply get the ease of use.

RB

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[alldownwind]

Perhaps an easier answer is that a short sprit gets the tack downhaul away from the pulpit, stops it snagging on other bits like the bow navlight unit? I noticed one on a new Halberg Rassy recently, hardly a 'performance' boat.

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[Vara]

Thanks I can handle that.
So its on with the black balaclava,and down to the building site./forums/images/icons/smile.gif

<hr width=100% size=1>If it can't be fixed with a lump hammer dont fit it!

 

[boatless]

Just make sure you don't nick a steel one.

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[Phoenix of Hamble]

A good bowsprit can be made from the end of a broken windsurfing mast.... just a thought....

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