Goose winging

Rum_Pirate

Well-Known Member
Joined
23 Aug 2004
Messages
27,971
Location
A tiny Island, Caribbean
Visit site
J_S_Johnston_Sailing_Yachts_New_York_05.jpg
 
It is an impressive spread, but it's a spinnaker not a goose winged headsail.
They were cut like this until (IIRC) the advent of nylon.
 
I'll save this photo to use when I explain to new crew about uncontrolled gybes.

It looks like that boom weighs a ton, is positioned nicely at shoulder height and would be doing 90 miles an hour by the time it passed over the cockpit. I suppose it had the advantage of exterminating incompetent or careless crew so the owner didn't need to sack them.
 
It looks like that boom weighs a ton, is positioned nicely at shoulder height and would be doing 90 miles an hour by the time it passed over the cockpit. I suppose it had the advantage of exterminating incompetent or careless crew so the owner didn't need to sack them.

In an uncontrolled gybe, it's not the boom that the crew need to worry about, it's the cheese wire that will precede it in the form of the horizontal diamonds.
 
What are the "horizontal diamonds"?

I assume this refers to the wires which can be seen supporting the boom in the same way that shrouds support a mast. You can see one, together with its spreader part-way along the boom, in the initial photo.

It's how very long struts were strengthened before carbon fibre etc came along :)

Pete
 
What are the "horizontal diamonds"?

If you look at, for example, a Folkboat mast you will see a set of wires and struts that form a diamond shape on the upper mast. As Pete says they are used to stiffen thin / light sections otherwise unsupported. They are called jumper stays (the solid bits being jumper struts) or, more colloquially diamond stays. You occasionally also see them on used on the boom of old boats with very long booms as in this instance. Never very common I don't think.
 
I'll save this photo to use when I explain to new crew about uncontrolled gybes.

It looks like that boom weighs a ton, is positioned nicely at shoulder height and would be doing 90 miles an hour by the time it passed over the cockpit. I suppose it had the advantage of exterminating incompetent or careless crew so the owner didn't need to sack them.

Don't forget to mention the mainsheet that will become very loose and possibly tangle around anything in its path - including necks - as the boom swings to the other side. Plus the whip lash as it snaps taut.
 
The need to control this bending of the boom then lead to the fabricated 'Park Avenue booms' replacing the round booms with jumper struts, as they could be wider and deeper in the middle where the bending was greatest. Although of uniform section, this boom on Defender was steel, but was one ton lighter than her original pine boom.

Defender was Vanderbuilt's 1895 defender of for the America's cup, design by Nat Herreshoff and built for $250,000. She raced the US trials and then the actual race series that summer before being laid up for the following four years. She was then completely refitted before being used as the trial horse against the 1900 defender. After those six races, she was then broken up and sold for scrap ($10,000) as her hull was a composite mixture of steel frames, bronze plating (3/16th thick) and aluminium gunwales and sheer strakes that took galvanic corrosion to new heights.

Her spinnaker (12,000 sq feet) was of finest linen. Although asymmetric they didn't set like a modern asymmetric kite. They were very narrow shouldered and the clew was either taken to the foot of the mast or even slightly aft and to leeward of the mast. They were very much running only sails.
 
My first reaction was to wonder what the crew felt like when the skipper asked them to 'just pop out to the end of the boom and sort the clew outhaul out.."?

Its a great picture of a bygone age of yachting. I wonder what they would have thought of the modern multihull as it flies a hull doing thirty or forty knots...
 
The need to control this bending of the boom then lead to the fabricated 'Park Avenue booms' replacing the round booms with jumper struts, as they could be wider and deeper in the middle where the bending was greatest. Although of uniform section, this boom on Defender was steel, but was one ton lighter than her original pine boom.


The weight of the boom is important. It keeps the sail 'flat' by it's weight 'pulling' the sail down from the gaff.

Heard of a gaffer whose owner replaced the heavy timber boom with a light (kevlar?) boom and ended all sorts of difficulty with the boom lifting significantly when sailing.
 
My first reaction was to wonder what the crew felt like when the skipper asked them to 'just pop out to the end of the boom and sort the clew outhaul out.."?

Its a great picture of a bygone age of yachting. I wonder what they would have thought of the modern multihull as it flies a hull doing thirty or forty knots...

'Not cricket, my good fellow, not cricket!'
 
Top