All you need to know about spinnakers
Don’t be afraid of big sails: follow these top tips and you’ll be playing golf in no time
Once you’ve mastered the rudiments of sailing and found by some miracle that you can, on occasion, get to more or less where you intended with tolerable levels of stress and medication if necessary, it’s time to up the ante. The best way to do that is with a spinnaker.
It’s a word that strikes a peculiar kind of asymmetric fear into the heart of any normal weekend sea plodder. But there is nothing to be afraid of. Spinnakers provide entertainment and merriment for many amateur and professional seafarers alike, including Sunseeker owners, jet-skiers, container-ship captains, frigate and submarine commanders, paddle boarders, ducks, holidaymakers who’ve drifted into shipping lanes on pedalos and lilos, and golfers.
The last are unusual among landsmen, as golfers – unlike birdwatchers, radio hams, battle re-enactment societies and Morris Dancers – know what spinnakers are. Which is why they now play golf.
The cruising sea plodder, on the other hand, generally regards the spinnaker with something a bit like dread but worse. That’s because every cruising boat with a mast or the remains of one (a gaffer for example), comes with a spinnaker. This is mainly for marketing purposes, as it implies performance and even sportiness, which of course is a lie but will prompt the prospective purchaser to have visions of romping along in a greyhound of the seas instead of the 25ft-long bilge keeler of 18ft girth and nine berths that stands splay-footed on the hard in front of him.
All you need to do is place an ad that reads: “Comes with brand new spinnaker, never used.” Don’t mention it’s 40 years old. The only other type of spinnaker on a cruising boat has been “used only once, slight tear.”
True, on bilge and triple keelers a standard suit of cruising sails – jib and main – will serve 30 or 40 years without any noticeable effect on boat speed, eventually becoming tissue thin and prodigiously bellied, whereupon you can sell it for lots of money as a spinnaker to a racing sailor.
Sails can last even longer on sailing boats that motor everywhere, ie motor- sailers, unless you use them to shade your ice from the sun. But spinnakers, at once incredibly delicate, eye-wateringly expensive and colourful, on account of being made from gossamer thread from silk worms fed entirely on fluorescent markers and spun by munchkins high up in the Andes of Narnia, can last longer yet.
The prudent and thrifty cruising sailor will get many decades of use from a spinnaker by deploying it as a bean bag.
On racing boats though, spinnakers really come into their own. The optimum time to deploy a spinnaker on a racing boat is when there’s not enough shouting and recrimination. The spinnaker will soon put that right. Deployment starts with the skipper calmly screaming ‘spinnaker’ then going puce and bawling ‘now…’ followed by ‘…as in not yesterday!’ Some time after that a dozen people who were sitting around not doing much will finish their sandwiches, climb to their feet and start bumping into one another.
Hoisting a spinnaker involves a halyard, whisker Pole or Lithuanian, up-hauls, downhauls, sheets, guys, snubbers, strops and hissy fits. Sometimes the guy can be a sheet, and sometimes the sheet can be a guy, and sometimes the guy on the sheet can have a strop. Of course the guy on the sheet and the guy can be a girl but usually it’s a guy, as it affords the opportunity to adopt the charioteer posture of Ben-Hur holding the reins and performing crude pelvic thrusts while wearing shorts outside leggings. A spinnaker hoist done well is a beautiful thing, but no one’s ever seen one.
Once the spinnaker’s up it’s customary for the purplish skipper to pronounce ‘that was a right pig’s ear’. Then, two seconds later, which is the maximum time anyone can bear to watch the Ben-Hur guy’s ever more forceful pelvic thrusts without vomiting, the skipper shouts ‘spinnaker…now… as in not yesterday’. Strangely, even when it’s stowed, in the water or wrapped round the keel the hyperventilating skipper still thinks it resembles a pig’s ear. The procedure is closed with the words: ‘That cost me two thousand quid’.
And that’s all there is to it. No racing skipper who has ever lost a race ever had a decent spinnaker or crew to handle it. That’s what makes the spinnaker so indispensable, for there is no other piece of sailing equipment that offers so many and varied possibilities for recrimination, blame, rebuke and excuse.
‘A spinnaker hoist done well is a beautiful thing, but no one’s ever seen one’