Uricanejack
Well-known member
I’m not very good at rithmatic so I just use 5 knots cause it’s easy to count on my fingers.
works for most small boats as a rough guess.
works for most small boats as a rough guess.
I gave up geography. Never did it at O-level.I thought they were going from Dartmouth to the Solent? ?
If you come from Norfolk you can go a bit faster.I’m not very good at rithmatic so I just use 5 knots cause it’s easy to count on my fingers.
works for most small boats as a rough guess.
Yup. My boat is also 26' long and, judging from a couple we've met, about the same speed as a Co26. I reckon on 4 kts or 100 nm per day.As a crew member said to me after a 3 week cruise round the western isles “It doesn’t seem to matter how fast we go, we always average 4 knots”.
I got my sail recut to raise the clew about 25ch, for £70. No issue with high clew in usual unreefed mode and the thing does not droop quite so much part reefed. Most of our drive come from the genoa so loss of mainsail area trivial.I had an Achilles 9m with boom roller reefing (Proctor through mast): loved it.
Following the advice of a sailmaker, I put a cringle in the leach 10" above the clew. To reef, raise the boom on the topping lift, tighten the outhaul, put a tie through the cringle and lash tight to the boom, then whilst keeping a reasonable tension on the main halyard roll the sail round the boom. You should end up with a flat sail of an appropriate size without boom 'droop'.
I now have a boat with slab reefing and consider that roller reefing has a number of advantages. Especially for a singlehander. However it got a bad press because many of the earlier systems were poorly engineered and the kickers were not on a reefing claw so the kicker had to be removed before reefing (or jury rigged). Also rolling in a sailbag (or similar) was never going to achieve a decent shape!