Well... "Jib. A triangular sail extended upon a stay between jibboom or bowsprit and the foremast"Sorry, Granny, but perhaps some of the other readers might have benefitted from the refresher on egg-sucking.
You make the obvious mistake in assuming that all boats leave their moorings or berths.
Well... "Jib. A triangular sail extended upon a stay between jibboom or bowsprit and the foremast"
Now - who got a bowsprit?
Except for the fact that on an gaffer with a separate topmast the jib is not hoisted on the topmast forestay, but either set flying or hoisted on a jib stay that goes from the end of the bowsprit to to cap of the mainmast. On the topmast forestay can be hoisted a jib topsail. The only reason square riggers used names such as fore topmast staysail is because they had so many sails that needed unique names. On smaller craft it has always been acceptable to call your two headsails the staysail and jib since there aren't a dozen similar sails to confuse them with.In a traditional gaff cutter working rig, the two sails before the mast are thus the forestaysail and the foretopmaststaysail, and for brevity the latter was nicknamed a "jib" after a similar, but not identical, sail on a square rigger. Bermud(i)an rigged sloops do not have a separate topmast, so the single headsail can be thought of as a substitute for either the forestaysail or the jib of the cutter. "Forestaysail" is a bit of a mouthful so tends to get shortened to "foresail" or "staysail". "Genoa" is a contraction of "Genoa jib", a large headsail which overlaps the mainsail.
HTH
Just as the maintopmast staysail, maintopgallant staysail, and mainroyal staysail live on their respective stays. On Stavros we didn't carry any sails on the forestay or mainstay, though I think some ships do, at least on the latter.
Quite, with such a myriad of sails the only way of naming them all is to name them precisely. My point was that on a smaller boat with just two sails they have always just been called the jib and staysail because there is nothing else to get confused about. Basically long square rigger type names for sails developed from the simpler names as ships got bigger and more complicated. Calling the jib topsail on a small gaffer a fore topmast staysail is wrong even though it might be an accurate description.Well, we call it the foretopmast staysail because it lives on the foretopmast stay
The next two headsails' stays, on Stavros at least, also go to the head of the foretopmast, so if you were going to name them after their stays then all three would be foretopmast staysails, which is obviously not helpful. So we have an inner and an outer jib instead. Outside that is a fourth sail whose head goes to the topgallant, so I suppose you could call it a foretopgallant staysail. But we don't, we call it the flying jib. I guess having staysails outside jibs just feels wrong.
Pete
