Need a new suit
When ageing sails get to the point where theyÕre unusable itÕs time to bite the bullet...
My needed new sails. The current ones had been fine when I’d bought her, over ten years ago, but now the genoa had all the aerodynamic curve of a flattened out sugar bag, and had stretched so far it touched the spreaders.
The only reason the main had any shape at all was because it was fully-battened. Worse, they were getting dangerous; instead of accelerating in gusts, Karima blew over, so that I needed a reef in anything over 15 knots of wind, and I was lucky to tack in less than 110°. Something had to be done; and not scarily fragile hi-tech grey laminate either. Karima was going to have white wings.
I sent off enquiries to several sailmakers, and the reply which impressed me most asked about what sort of sailing I did, and gave me a rough price for different grades of suits of sails. I had a lovely long conversation with the sailmaker himself about exactly what sort of sailing I did: how far, what sort of winds, racing or cruising. We agreed on a flatter-cut main for safety as the wind got up, and a slightly smaller genoa.
While I was at it, I ordered a new zip-top sailcover with lazyjacks. I’d been coveting one of those for a while.
After that came measuring. I’d thought, in my innocence, that I’d just say ‘Offshore 8m’ and that would be that – until I printed out the forms.
“I hope you understand those,” said Philip, my non-sailing husband, handing them back after one look. I hoped so too.
I had no bother with the deck ones, nor the boom, stowed in Karima’s cabin, but the mast was in its winter quarters, high up in the roof of the marina shed. I had to enlist Philip’s help to hold the end of tape measure, and we took it in turns to balance on a rather wobbly stepladder, one arm around a convenient beam. We each measured everything until we got three readings the same for each dimension. I finally filled in the form and sent it off with crossed fingers, photographs of the cars and mast section, and a request to Rob to get back to me if any readings were wildly different from the last Offshore 8m he’d done.
My new sails arrived in spring: three big boxes with a warning that there was an item under tension in one of them – the long battens in the sailcover.
Naturally I couldn’t wait to get them on, but wait I had to, because there wasn’t a flat calm messing-about-with-sails day for two weeks.
I was just leaving the house, sails in the car and a fanatical gleam in my eye, when I was stopped by a total stranger. He turned out to be a fan of my novels who was visiting Shetland and had come to say hello. More importantly he was a fellow sailor, so I whisked him down to the marina to meet Cass’s boat (Cass being the fictional heroine in my series of novels), and give me a hand. I was very glad of him too, not just for unfolding acres of gleaming white crackling canvas on a 2m-wide pontoon, but also because I’d never seen sail battens with a clicky fastening that had to be screwed and slid – just working out how to open it took us ten minutes!
The next day I took her out for a sail. “She’ll be like a new boat,” everyone had assured me, but it was far better than that. It was my own familiar Karima sailing the way she should again. She really had been given wings. It was bliss to feel her so responsive to every little gust.
Even Philip came out to see the new sails in action, and watched in admiration as the log rose to 4.7 knots in a practically flat calm.
Our next excursion was a breezier day. She just set her shoulder to the water and forged onwards. Fifteen knots of wind; pooh. Eighteen, and she was going at 6.5 knots. Of course I had to turn upwind and go homeward, but with her new sails she was equal to that too, heeled but still responding to her helm. 21, 22... it wasn’t until the wind speedo hit 23 that I reluctantly rolled half the jib away and stormed home in style. I turned head-to-wind short of the pier, dropped the main straight into its cover without the usual unseemly too-muchwind flapping, and zipped it up.
New sails – wow!