Chinese Gybe

jon711

jon711

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What is the definition of a Chinese Gybe? I was always taught that a Chinese Gybe was when the top and bottom of the sail were on opposite gybes, ie that the main hadn't completed the gybe. But it seems that more and more often, people are calling an allstanding accidental gybe a Chinese Gybe..

Is this just a case of language moving on, or the fact that with a typical bermudan rig, it is almost impossible to do a Chinese Gybe, so it may as well be used for an accidental allstanding gybe...

Jon
 
jon711 said:
What is the definition of a Chinese Gybe? I was always taught that a Chinese Gybe was when the top and bottom of the sail were on opposite gybes, ie that the main hadn't completed the gybe. But it seems that more and more often, people are calling an allstanding accidental gybe a Chinese Gybe..
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In the Sea Scouts they taught us that it was one in which the boom lifts high up as it comes across, then slams down hard. Presumably kicking straps prevent this sort of thing.
 
In common parlance in racing circles the meaning has changed quite a bit. To be a gybe broach. So not a helmsman accidentally turning a boat that is still in control through a gybe, but the result of what happens when the rudder loses it's grip and the boat rounds down. Normally under kite. Normally reasonably impressive to watch... Like the second gybe in this video....

 
jon711 said:
What is the definition of a Chinese Gybe? I was always taught that a Chinese Gybe was when the top and bottom of the sail were on opposite gybes, ie that the main hadn't completed the gybe. But it seems that more and more often, people are calling an allstanding accidental gybe a Chinese Gybe..

Is this just a case of language moving on, or the fact that with a typical bermudan rig, it is almost impossible to do a Chinese Gybe, so it may as well be used for an accidental allstanding gybe...

Jon
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I thought it could be done with a genoa/jib, too...

Mike.
 
jon711 said:
What is the definition of a Chinese Gybe? I was always taught that a Chinese Gybe was when the top and bottom of the sail were on opposite gybes, ie that the main hadn't completed the gybe. But it seems that more and more often, people are calling an allstanding accidental gybe a Chinese Gybe..

Is this just a case of language moving on, or the fact that with a typical bermudan rig, it is almost impossible to do a Chinese Gybe, so it may as well be used for an accidental allstanding gybe...

Jon
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To me a Chinese gybe is when, as you say, top and bottom of the mainsail end up on opposite sides of the mast: common enough when many boats did not have kicking straps at all, or lost the use of the kicker when roller-reefed. Can't happen with an effective kicker in use. The video is just a badly controlled gybe with the boom hitting the water, nothing Chinese about it.
 
jwilson said:
To me a Chinese gybe is when, as you say, top and bottom of the mainsail end up on opposite sides of the mast: common enough when many boats did not have kicking straps at all, or lost the use of the kicker when roller-reefed. Can't happen with an effective kicker in use. The video is just a badly controlled gybe with the boom hitting the water, nothing Chinese about it.
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It is very Chinese - a peculiarity of the junk rig - gybing when reefed - the reefed battens can suddenly rear up from the boom alarmingly (kicking strap only restrains boom/bottom batten) unless the sheets (going to the end of every batten) are tightened during the process.
 
scottie said:
I thought it referred to a Gaff sail with gaff on one side of mast and boom on other
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That's what I always believed.

Not that common with larger working boats as the weight of the boom was often an effective kicking strap.

But I remember Chinese gybes were not unknown in 12 Square Metre Sharpies in the early 70s when kickers were rudimentary at best.
 
scottie said:
I thought it referred to a Gaff sail with gaff on one side of mast and boom on other
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It did. But I'll tell you now that if you walk into a pub in Cowes or Hamble and say "we did a big Chinese today" everyone will be picturing the video I posted, not assuming you sail a gaffer. The meaning has shifted over time and common usage.
 
Three of the Volvo Ocean Race yachts suffered accidental gybes resulting in knockdowns. I assume the yachts end up sidewards due to the keel and ballast being on the wrong side after the accidental gybe.

Everyone in the videos referred to these gybes as Chinese gybes much to the discomfort of the chinese crew on Dong Feng!

TS
 
It sounds to me as if "Chinese" has been used fairly consistently, if a little Lounge-ly, over the years to mean "wild, uncoordinated, disorganised, not as planned", much as in the regrettable popular phrase "a Chinese fire drill". A balls-up, basically.
 
Richard Mayne’s The Language of Sailing (Carcanet, 2000) says this on pp62-3:

“a gybe, almost always accidental, in which the boom goes to the lee side but the upper part of the sail does not.

Prima facie, the phrase might seem to imply that 'Chinese' here meant simply odd or outlandish; but Kemp [Peter], Oxford Companion [to Ships and the Sea] (1976), 166, claims: ‘It is so called because of its prevalence with the Chinese junk rig with its light bamboo battens and no boom to hold the foot of the mainsail steady.’ However, Desoutter [Denis Marcel (Denny)], [The] Boat-Owner’s Practical Dictionary (1978), 53, maintains ‘The term itself is an unwarranted occidental jibe, for Chinese boats with their fully battened lug sails are incapable of getting themselves into this specifically Bermudan predicament.’ The OED cannot adjudicate since it omits the expression.

First attested in Kemp, loc. cit.”


The online OED still seems to omit the expression. The preview here http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199205684.013.0554 of the entry in the new 2006 edition of the Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (I C B Dear and Peter Kemp, Eds.) says “a type of wild and unpremeditated gybe which occurs in a gaff-rigged sailing vessel when the main boom gybes”. Does anyone have the full text of both editions to see if there is more, and if the claimed connection to Chinese junk rig of the 1976 edition is still made? And does anyone know if The Boat-Owner’s Practical Dictionary said more on the subject?

In any event, one surely cannot but admire Denny Desoutter’s “unwarranted occidental jibe”? :)
 
jon711 said:
What is the definition of a Chinese Gybe? I was always taught that a Chinese Gybe was when the top and bottom of the sail were on opposite gybes, ie that the main hadn't completed the gybe. But it seems that more and more often, people are calling an allstanding accidental gybe a Chinese Gybe..

Is this just a case of language moving on, or the fact that with a typical bermudan rig, it is almost impossible to do a Chinese Gybe, so it may as well be used for an accidental allstanding gybe...

Jon
Click to expand...

Most of the standard texts seem to define a Chinese gybe as having boom on one tack and head on the other.
However it appears to be used now to refer to any form of knockdown broach.
Don't know about language moving on, probably more like sloppy semantics.
 
So to summerise, because numpty keelboat racers call an accidental gybe a Chinese Gybe it is now a Chinese Gybe.

An accidental gybe is an accidental gybe or in plain english "A f**k up", let's try to use the correct terms, not just the street slang patois.....

Jon
 
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