WM gear on a boomed staysail

[Rosie1963]

I have an unusual rig in the fact that it is a slutter and not a cutter.

Laurent Giles experimented with this fr some time. It seems to work insofar as the staysail is much larger in proportion to the rest of the rig so she can tack up the Orwell without really worrying about and I do get drive off the wind too. The problems occur when you use the gigantic 22ft foot genoa. There is hardly any space between the stays. The sail needs to be handed through the (small) slot when going about. The previous owner managed to get around this by adding a foil and roller reefing for the genoa. This has presented its own sheeting angle problems but means that I dont need to go forward to go about. This is good - as Brion Toss calls a clubbed staysail a "deck de-populater".

Aynyway, I am seriously considering adding WM to the the staysail, to assist with single handing - so I can stowe the all the foredeck of sails before anchoring/coming alongside all from the cockpit. I know Herreshoff explored this with success (I think).

Anybody tried this? It would be great to see other's set-ups.

 

[chal]

Chal has normal cutter rig. A bit of research shows that she started life with a fully boomed staysail. When I bought her this had long been changed to both foresails being sheeted in the "normal" way. Neither foresail was on a furler and dealing with them was frankly hard work. I put the jib on a WM straight away and used the staysail sheeted to a horse so that it remained self tacking but without the boom. I left it hanked to the stay.

This year I decided that I needed to improve things with the staysail. It never really set well as it was, and dealing with it when it came down was still awkward, so I have fitted a WM and gone back to sheets (though I might also give the boom a try).

The big advantage is of course that I pull on a string and the sail is more-or-less sorted. Not entirely, because it's cut much more in the shape of a right-angled triangle than the jib, so once it is wound up the sheets are much lower down. The sail doesn't have a wire luff and the combination of these factors means that, if it's breezy, the upper part of the sail starts to blow out after a while, so I still need to lower it partially and put a few ties around it. It's still all more relaxed than dropping the hanked sail was. There's a "Furling Gear on a Gaff Cutter" thread a bit lower down on this forum that expands on this a bit.

There's quite a bit of discussion about this in Cooke's Cruising Hints that I found useful. I got the modern compendium edition which you can get from Amazon for under a tenner, which I reckon was money well spent. Here's a link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cruising-Hi...03701164&sr=8-1&keywords=Cooke+cruising+hints

Cooke was very keen on WMs and shows a few options for controlling and furling from the cockpit for single handers.

 

[Kukri]

FB Cooke has a drawing of WM gear on a boomed staysail. Will drop my copy of the Cooke Booke off at the weekend if you are on board.