New sails, input wanted

dmairspotter · Post by **dmairspotter** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 9:14 pm

Hi all.

In keeping with this years boat project (pouring all available money into the boat) I am getting a main and 135% genoa.

The local sailmaker (who I like and trust) has offered a 280 AP Dacron crosscut main, with 2 rows of reef points and full battens.

Genoa is 240AP Dacron crosscut and a new Harken roller furler.

The boat will be used 90% for coastal daysailing, 8% for weekends or week cruises, and 2% for beercan races (maybe).

Any thoughts before I pull the trigger?

Thanks all.

David · Post by **David** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 10:19 pm

What are the proposed weights of the two sails?

dmairspotter · Post by **dmairspotter** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 11:51 pm

I am not sure, but I think the 240 AP and 280 AP refer to the weights in some furrin' metric type measurement.

If I am correct in this, the always reliable internet gives me a mainsail weight of 6.5 oz and a genoa weight of 5.6 oz.

I think I will stop up at the sailmakers tomorrow and have him show me the fabric, maybe pick his brains a little more.

Peter · Post by **Peter** » Fri Jan 16, 2009 1:48 am

I made my full-batten main with a loose foot ... highly recommend it.

Post by **Tim** » Fri Jan 16, 2009 7:30 am

Those are typical cloth weights for sails on boats of your size and for its intended use. Good to go. Anything heavier is just heavier, and more annoying to work and sail with for this sort of use. World-girders may require more, but you don't.

Be sure you know exactly what you are getting, and exactly what you want before placing the order. Don't assume that a "complete" sail is by any means going to contain certain features that you might want. Be very specific, or ask for detailed specifics from the sail loft if you don't know. Be sure you know the specifics of what you need on your exact boat, so that the new sail is properly built to accommodate. You think they know what you want, and they think they know what you want, but often things slip through the cracks.

By this, I mean specifics like:

--reefing ears?
--Cunningham?
--Foot type?
--Jacklines, often necessary to allow the sail to be pulled far enough down for reefing hooks

Among other things, perhaps. Or you may need nor want none of these features, but be sure you know one way or the other when you order.

How's your mast track and slugs? If they're balky/sticky at all, now is the time to upgrade to a Strong track. Note that full battens are under compression and add forward pressure to the luff slides, and can sometimes make the sail harder to pull down than it used to be with regular battens.

I am also a fan of the loose foot and full battens.

Ronin120 · Post by **Ronin120** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 9:51 am

Since it's very cold out and I'm waiting for the boat to warm up so I can do some work on it I read this thread on sails. I'd like to weigh in with a slightly different option for your mainsail.

I have a main with a single full and three "larger" regular battens. The full-batten is used for the top-most batten.

I found that with the full-battens I always had a good looking sail. But often times, that while it 'looked' good it was the wrong shape for the conditions. Generally the shape was too full in heavier air. I was having a hard time flattening the main as the breeze pickup and consequently was creating a lot drag and pressure on the helm.

Anyway, I went with the 1-full/3-regular setup and have been very pleased. The top full-batten does a great job of supporting the leech in what is traditional a tough area to keep in trim. The rest of the sail can be tweaked to straighten out the leech in heavier air or ease it up a bit in lighter air.

This setup does a couple of things that are kind of nice, it keeps the weight of the sail lighter and it reduces the cost of the sail. I focus on the weight savings over the price savings but that's just me.

I'm all for full-batten mains on boats that are going to going away for a long period of time (off-shore voyaging) where longevity (lots of distance in a short period of time, constant usage and UV exposure) is expected and sail-makers are not readily available. For general usage and coastal cruising I think it may be overkill.

In any case, go for the loose-footed main. You'll never regret it. And even though I don't have it now I'm going with a Strong track with my next new mainsail purchase. I dread yanking the current main, using plastic slides, up 51' of old aluminum slotted mast.

Just my $0.02.

Best

Hirilondë · Post by **Hirilondë** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 10:14 am

Ronin120 wrote:

I found that with the full-battens I always had a good looking sail. But often times, that while it 'looked' good it was the wrong shape for the conditions. Generally the shape was too full in heavier air. I was having a hard time flattening the main as the breeze pickup and consequently was creating a lot drag and pressure on the helm.

I've heard several arguments for and against full batten sails, but that is one I've never heard before.

Had you tried different compressions on the battens for different winds? Most sails have some type of capture for the battens at the leach that can be adjusted to change the compression on the batten itself. The tighter the capture mechanism, the more the compression. The more the batten is compressed the more it is bent, hence the more full the sail. In heavy air you can then relieve virtually all compression, allowing the batten to flatten the sail. If this wasn't enough, then you probably needed stiffer battens.

There could have been a design or cutting flaw in the sails as well, but I am in no position to comment in that respect.

Maine Sail · Post by **Maine Sail** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 10:51 am

As much as I love local guys Jan, Richard & Win I usually buy mail order for cruising sails. Jan still loves to work on my sails when they need repair even though he did not get the sale/sail business. Both he and Richard have said to me before that they make no money on standard cruising sails and building racing sails to building cruisng accept that it keeps his guys busy, if they are slow, which they hardly ever are..

I have purchased eight sails from Dirk at National Sail Supply in Florida. The quality is incredible and the price can't be beat. The sails are assembled in Thailand using Challenge sail cloth, at the Rolly Tasker loft, which is one of the largest in the world. This is the same loft that assembles sails for many of the name brands you pay bigger bucks for..

If you can do your own measuring Dirk is great to deal with.. I am ordering a new main for my CS-36T delivered for $1550.00 with full battens, two sets of reefs etc. etc... My best local quote was about $2900.00...

That is $1350.00 I get to spend on other upgrades..

Chris Campbell · Post by **Chris Campbell** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 12:42 pm

My last boat came with full battens and the Dutchman system for sail handling, and had a 40' luff and a 16' foot. I was moving up from a much smaller boat and worried that it would be too much work to put up the main for a short sail, since I remembered it being a pain to take down and stow the main on the smaller boat - but the Dutchman system made it so easy to put that sail away, that I was able to do it in under a minute, on my own! The sail would flake down and just require a little tug here and there to straighten out the flakes that hadn't laid down perfectly, and it was done. I don't honestly know if the Dutchman system would work just as well without the full battens - if anyone does, please share - but that system as it was on Weatherbird, was a real treat, and one that I hope to recreate on the new boat, no question (despite its much smaller main, at 35' luff and 10' foot).

I also had no trouble with sail shape, and liked the fact that the sail didn't tend to slat around when the breeze was down or if I were motoring directly into the wind (full battened sail characteristics).

My two cents...

Rachel · Post by **Rachel** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 3:05 pm

And on another "everyone has an opinion," I didn't like a full-batten main for cruising, even though the shape seemed good with them. And it did flake down nicely on the boom. So I was thinking the opposite, along the lines of "Well this might be really nice for coastal cruising or daysailing, but not for long-distance cruising."

Where I wasn't fond of it was in these areas:

1) Added friction on the mast track (which could potentially be solved with a Strong Track)

2) Extra hardware to break and to carry spares for in the form of Battcars.

3) The battens would tend to get hung up on the shrouds and/or other places when raising/lowering or reefing unless we were directly into the wind (and even then sometimes if it was gusty or bouncy).

4) The aforementioned extra friction made it tough for me to get the sail re-hoisted unless we were facing directly into the wind.

5) Apropos to 4 and 5, if you're, say, offshore at night, settled in on a reach with the windvane doing the steering, and with the off-watch finally settled into slumber, it's really nice to be able to tuck in a reef without disengaging the wind-vane and coming into th wind. When you do that the new motion is sure to wake up the off-watch, and to give you a really bouncy work platform in the middle of the night. And then there you have to re-tweak the windvane to get it just so. I'm not trying to sound lazy here, but if you' have that situation day in and day out, you begin to have cross feelings toward your full battens.

6) A minor point, but if you're living aboard (cruising), and you do need to unbend the sail and take it in somewhere, the full-length battens are a trick to stow below or to transport.

Rachel

Ronin120 · Post by **Ronin120** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:03 pm

Hirilondë wrote:

In heavy air you can then relieve virtually all compression, allowing the batten to flatten the sail.

I am a very bad "explainer" and I should have done a better job of getting across what I was experiencing. When I use the term flatten the main in my sailing what I do is yank the outhaul out as much as possible, do the same with the cunningham, tighten the mainsheet as much as appropriate and then drop the traveler down enough to run a bubble in the front third (or more if the wind is really up) of the mainsail. It's especially pronounced because at the same time I'm pumping in as much backstay as possible to flatten the jib too. I can alleviate some of that by adding some tension to the babystay which pulls the middle of the mainsail forward and flattening it a bit.

I wrongly use the term flatten to really mean tighten up the leech. Now, this is generally for winds above 15 knots. I like only the back third of my main to be working.

What I was seeing with the full-batten setup was a nice shape no matter what, even as the breeze picked up. I was having a hard time getting the main placement correct and I think I was ending up with the main overtrimmed and thus creating too much drag. It didn't make any sense to me and I was pretty sure that the "full" (another bad way of describing) shape of the main was interfering with the flow through the slot when I had it undertrimmed also. I know from bad trimming in my previous life that closing down the slot between the jib and the main is a sure thing for going slower.

Another thing I noticed was the cunningham didn't affect the luff the way I thought it should have. I think this was because the battens didn't allow the transfer of the load all the way up the luff. That's pure speculation on my part though.

The concept of adjusting the tension on the battens is a good one but in this case there wasn't any means of doing it. I inherited the sail with the boat and they simply slide into the pocket and were wrestled into place. With my current main the battens are adjustable (velcro) but nonetheless I don't want to be adjusting my battens as the winds go up or down. I just put them in at the beginning of the season and leave it that. And I seem to remember that the old battens weren't tapered. I'm pretty sure that with the new full-batten mains the battens are tapered which probably goes a long way towards better shape. All my current battens in my 1 full, 3 regular battened main are tapered.

Interestingly, when I went to my sailmaker to replace the old full-battened main I was all set to get a new full-battened mail. He talked me out of the idea for pretty much the reasons I mentioned above.

Different horses for different course I guess. I've seen rigs with two full top battens and two regular battens for the lowers. I apologize for being obtuse.

Best

Brodie · Post by **Brodie** » Thu Jan 22, 2009 3:07 pm

I got a new mainsail for my Marlin two years ago from a local sailmaker (Jasper and Bailey in Newport). Because my boat has such a long boom (11') relative to the mainsail hoist (25.5') Aaron recommended two full battens at the top and two partials at the bottom. I have been very pleased with this setup as it gives me most of the benefits of a full batten sail without some of the drawbacks mentioned in the previous posts. One other quirk of fully battened sails; they tend to make the boat start moving while the sail is still being hoisted. I noticed this on a Freedom 38 that I've raced on, it's not much of a problem if you usually motor off the mooring or away from the dock before you hoist, but if you sail on or off a mooring it can make things interesting.

Do ask what the foot attachment will be as this will affect how your reefing lines are run...loose foot or slugs will allow much easier placement of the reef line.

jollyboat · Post by **jollyboat** » Thu Jan 22, 2009 6:01 pm

Well in as far as battens are concerned with your new sails - you are all right in your opinions. Full battens have their benifits as well as some disadvantages but over all full battens are not at all bad. One of the options that we offer to our customers at no extra charge are what we call "combi" battens, where the pockets are designed and built to be both full and partial and the sailor decides what battens would be best for them at any given time. The main purpose of battens is to support the "unsupprorted area on the leach of sail - otherwise known as the roach. This can be acheived with leech battens only. Full battens support both the roach and the body of the sail, and help to increase sail life by limiting the damage caused by flogging. Another note about battens is that "one set of battens" doesnt really provide the best performance for your sail. On light air days, lighter battens should be used and on heavier air days the batten should be changed to heavier or more stiff battens for best performance. There is so much to discuss about battens, that I could write several pages and still get through it all. If you have you have any questions that I might be of help with please let me know.