Rigging a boom preventer, and gybing deliberately. Got it wrong.

[FairweatherDave]

You could have poled out the genny without a preventer on the main.

Very true.
I was thinking of what is the deepest broad reach angle you can use the genoa without rigging a pole? (Sort of a general practical question, not a racers perspective)


Re. the preventer. I like to rig it sometimes purely if I want to let another member of the family on the helm. So I can relax. I've got good wind awareness, rest of the family really don't!

 

[lw395]

Very true.
I was thinking of what is the deepest broad reach angle you can use the genoa without rigging a pole? (Sort of a general practical question, not a racers perspective)

...

That depends on many things, relative size of sails, wind speed, sea state...
In lighter winds, you don't need to head up so much to bring the apparent wind forwards.
In stronger winds, you can reef the main more and let the genoa do the work.

I too like to get less experienced people on the helm, I often find it helps to tell them we plan to sail off to one side then gybe, and let them only sail as low as they are comfortable with. You can usually come up a lot of degrees before it adds significant time to the passage. And by heading up, you can often choose more or less tide etc.

 

[Nimrod18]

Re the deepest broad reach, when training new dinghy sailors, the top tip is get them to watch for the "nodding dog". Get them to keep an eye on the clew of the jib. The sign that they are just deeper than a "training run" (the deepest of broad reaches) is when the clew "nods" vertically down. This is the incipient sign of the jib entering the wind shadow of the main. Turning any further away from the wind and the jib flogs in the wind shadow.

I now teach (in dinghies) that the nodding dog is to running what tell tale lifting is to beating.

I confess, since I picked up that tip this summer, I've not tried it on a big boat, in particular with a genoa. Perhaps someone who's out on the H2O could try it and feed back?

 

[Sgeir]

I think it might be a bit of a hassle if I have to rig snatch blocks. I will try it and see.

Only takes a few seconds, but we just leave ours in situ.

 

[KellysEye]

I always removed the preventer and only then we would gybe.

 

[flaming]

I have a strop pemanently attached to the end of the boom - when not in use it is kept tight to the boom by a bungy attached near the goose neck. The preventers are run through toe rail blocks just aft of the shrouds with lines led back to the winches.

On Dad's old boat we did similar, but we refined it further by having the preventer strop stored along the bottom of the boom, as described, but then had 2 permanently rigged preventer lines that ran from the bank of clutches in the cockpit, forward to the same attachment as the (removeable) inner forestay and pole down, and through blocks there. Both had a small bowline in them. The preventer strop had a snapshackle on it, so all you had to do to rig it was open the clutch on the required line, go forward and retrieve the bowline, undo the snapshackle from it's storage point and snap it onto the bowline. Then you could retreat to the cockpit and tension the preventer line. This also meant that if you did gybe accidentally and wanted to, you could ease the main across by snubbing the preventer line out on one of the halyard winches.
And if you got the lead right, you could actually have both preventer lines connected at once, so you could let one off, gybe, and tension the other without ever leaving the cockpit.
It was the absolute Rolls Royce of preventer solutions.
The only change we made to it was to swap the blocks used from Harken ball bearing ones to much more robust "old school" ones after one let go when the main backwinded in fresh conditions.

 

[dunedin]

I doubt if I would get the benefit from a “Rolls Royce” boom preventer solution.
Wind always seems to be blowing from the direction where we are headed, rather than behind
New whisker pole has been little used this year!

 

[KINGFISHER 9]

Instead of using a midships cleat run the preventer through a snatch block and back to the cockpit, secured to something from which it can easily be released - free cockpit winch?

 

[Birdseye]

Very true.
I was thinking of what is the deepest broad reach angle you can use the genoa without rigging a pole? (Sort of a general practical question, not a racers perspective)


Re. the preventer. I like to rig it sometimes purely if I want to let another member of the family on the helm. So I can relax. I've got good wind awareness, rest of the family really don't!

Very much depends on the rig of your boat and also how stable the boat is on a run.

In my case the boat is very stable. I can reach with the apparent wind down to a bit more than 150 deg aft with both main and genoa filling. I can goosewing with the wind from dead astern to 20 deg either side, possibly a bit more because I can get the boom out almost to right angles to the boats centre line.. Thats assuming that I havent got a big sea underneath me. Thats the key issue - sea state and a stable boat. I once ripped the booms and goosenecks out of a boat because we were dead downwind, the boat rolled like a pig and we had no preventers on with 25 gusting 30kn.

Its when there is a big sea that I rig a preventer and maybe if its an open sea ( ie nothing around) I might pole the genoa. maybe I am overcautious but I would never do both with ther boats around, particularly when racing.