Hoisting and lowering the mainsail
If your mainsail is hard to hoist or reluctant to drop, what can you do about it? David Harding offers some advice
Earlier this year, I was on a test sail with a friend on a boat he was thinking of buying. On the way back in, as you do, we put the sails away: we rolled away the headsails (it was a cutter) and lowered the main and mizzen (it was also a ketch). At least, we tried to lower the mizzen. Motoring directly into a gentle breeze, we released the halyard and the head came down a couple of feet. Then it stopped.
The sail was tiny; barely larger than that of a small dinghy. It had little roach and was fitted with ordinary plastic slides – only they didn’t want to slide, even when I stood on top of the wheelhouse and pulled down on the luff.
There was only one quick answer: I had to shin up the mast, stand on the spreaders, reach up and work the slides down. A few weeks later I had to go up to the hounds on a 12m (40ft) performance cruiser because the roller-reefing headsail had jammed halfway in. It was a straightforward temporary fix with a lashing – ‘straightforward’ being a relative term when you’re bouncing around up there – but twice in half a season for that sort of thing is unusual. It makes you think about what you would do in situations when you’re not able to go aloft.
Returning to our ketch, shinning up the mizzen under any circumstances would not have been an option for the prospective owner or his wife. Being stuck with a sail that won’t come down is potentially dangerous. And the mainsail on this boat wasn’t much better: it only dropped about halfway on its own.
Significantly, both sails had gone up without too much grunt but, as is often the case with mainsails (or other sails hoisted up a groove in the back of a mast), what goes up doesn’t always come down quite so readily. You’re working against gravity one way and friction the other. Sometimes on the hoist you’re fighting both gravity and friction. And on the drop, as we’ve seen, friction can all too readily overcome gravity.
That the sails on some boats don’t go up and down quickly and easily is something that owners often learn to live with: they just winch a bit harder on the way up, pull a bit harder on the way down, or learn to compensate somehow. That’s OK most of the time, but work-arounds are not really the answer. More often than not, you’re hoisting and lowering sails in confined waters with other boats around and plenty of distractions too. That’s when you really don’t need any snags.
How it all works
In principle, it all sounds simple enough. The mast-maker makes the mast with a groove in the back. The sailmaker puts slides on the sail that fit in the groove, and away you go. In the case of a wooden mast, the track is fitted to the back.
One problem is the number of different sections of luff groove. If you buy a new European production cruiser in the UK, chances are it will have a mast made by Seldén, Z Spars or Sparcraft, though there are others. If you look at all the makers that have been around over the past 40 years of so, it makes quite a long list: Kempsafe became Kemp before becoming Seldén, then there’s IYE, SS Spars, Proctor, Jon Spars, John Powell, Sailspar, Isomat, Francespar, Hall, Kenyon