Category: Sails

Rigging, Sails41 Comments

How to Rig a Cruising Spinnaker in 4 Stingy Stages

$tingy Sailor

If you don’t have a spinnaker for your sailboat yet, aren’t you a little envious of those big, colorful, billowing sails you sometimes see at your favorite cruising spots? Nothing says, “Yeah, we’ve got this!” quite like a racing or cruising spinnaker. It’s as though the sailboat is puffing its chest out with confidence and strength. No wonder it’s called the fun sail.

In this post, I describe the strategy I used to get started with an asymmetrical spinnaker. You can use the same strategy with a symmetrical spinnaker but the cost is higher due to the required whisker pole and its control lines.

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Sails, Sewing11 Comments

No Furler? Make a Foredeck Sail Bag

$tingy Sailor

If you have a headsail furler on your sailboat, this project will probably be of little interest to you. But if you have hank-on headsails and want convenient protection for them like the sacrificial covers on furled headsails, read on.

A foredeck sail bag is something of a luxury for the trailer sailor. It’s not necessary to sail and unless you spend considerable time with the headsail doused, it’s not of much use to a trailer sailor. But if you like to cover your sails overnight or if you keep your sailboat in a slip and you don’t want to remove and stow the headsail during that time, a foredeck sail bag can be handy and save you setup time.

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Sails, Tips3 Comments

Use Your Boat Hook to Sail Faster Downwind

$tingy Sailor

In a previous article, I described how to rig a cruising spinnaker. If you don’t have a spinnaker yet, or even if you do have one but you don’t want to raise it for short runs, one of your best options when sailing dead downwind is to set your sails “wing and wing.” That is, with your mainsail eased all the way out on one side of the boat and your headsail eased all the way out on the other side of the boat. With both sails catching as much wind as possible, you’ll achieve top speed.

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Sails, Sewing3 Comments

How to Make a Mainsail Cover

$tingy Sailor

Summer Dance didn’t have much in the way of canvaswork when we bought her: an original mainsail cover and an old outboard engine cover that also looked pretty ghetto. Besides being 1980’s brown in color, the canvas of the mainsail cover was faded and shredded in places, much of the stitching had disintegrated, and the zipper had come almost completely loose. It was unsalvageable but it did work as a pattern to sew a new cover out of Sunbrella, the gold standard of marine canvas.

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Sails14 Comments

How to Clean Sails at Home

$tingy Sailor

Just like a white shirt is a magnet for spaghetti stains, your sails are magnets for stains, dirt, and mildew. Unlike a white shirt, you shouldn’t bleach or machine wash your sails, it will ruin them. That means don’t clean them in a chlorinated pool, either.

For hundreds of dollars, you can send your sails to a professional cleaning service like SailCare.com. They’ll come back looking great but if they also need ANY repairs (loose stitches, etc.), you’ll be put on the spot to have them repaired and your cost can quickly mount. And if your sails are old, they’ll still be old when they come back. Their cleaning process includes re-impregnating the fabric with resins but that just stabilizes the current shape of the sails for a while, it doesn’t restore them to a like-new shape. But if you’re going to have your sails repaired anyway, this can be a good option to clean them at the same time.

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Sails8 Comments

How to Add a Draft Stripe to a Sail

$tingy Sailor

This project is a companion to my previous projects, How to Add Numbers to a Sail and How to Reproduce a Class Insignia on a Sail. If you’re getting started in club racing or if you just want to get the best performance out of your sails for cruising, draft stripes can help. A draft stripe makes it easier to  see how small adjustments in sail trim affect the shape of your sails and therefore, how air moves over them. A draft stripe can help you to optimize the amount of lift your sails produce in different wind conditions and become a better sailor. Becoming a better sailor means you make more efficient use of your time when cruising and have more fun. And if you race, better sailors sail faster.

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Sails1 Comment

The 6 Worst Things You Can Do To Your Sails

$tingy Sailor

Crisp, clean sails not only look better than dirty, worn out sails, they also work better and let your sailboat heel less. New sails are expensive so it’s smart to take care of the ones you have so that they will last longer before you need to replace them. Here are some simple things that you can avoid doing and that will help your sails to last longer. I’ll also mention a few things that you should make into habits that can prolong the life of your sails.

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Sails2 Comments

How to Reproduce a Class Insignia on a Sail

$tingy Sailor

This project is a companion to my previous project, How to Add Numbers to a Sail. If you need to add or replace your sail numbers, you might also need to add or replace the class insignia too. Or maybe you want to add a company logo to your sail or a graphic that illustrates the sailboat’s name. Whatever shape you want to add to your sail, the basic process is the same. In this post, I’ll describe how to make the classic Catalina 22 mainsail class insignia for half the cost of retail.  Continue reading “How to Reproduce a Class Insignia on a Sail”