Rigged Right
The marriage of a traditional rig with modern materials and methods is an ongoing evolution aboard the 31-footer Ganymede.
A determined DIYER experiments with soft shackles and lashings.
PROJECTS
When we built Ganymede, our 31-foot cutter, in the backyard a decade ago, we digressed not only from the stock drawings sent by Cape George Marine Works for its kit boats, but we diverged from nearly every aspect of contemporary boat design. Part of it was in order to have enough room in a 31-footer for a small family, but most of it was calculated to save money on the construction by being able to make nearly everything myself.
One of our biggest departures from contemporary ideas was a gaff rig. Though gaffers are nothing new, they’ve been out of style long enough that there wasn’t much information on building one with modern materials. All the resources I could find assumed solid-wood spars and spliced galvanized wire. So it was a leap of faith, to say the least, to not only design my own rig, but also to assemble it out of things I could easily make myself or find cheaply.
Some of the things I learned are applicable to any full-time cruiser, whatever their rig. Recognizing that there would be lots of design tweaking down the road as we cruised and learned what worked and what didn’t, I often used less-expensive parts, planning to replace them with the real deal if the design proved workable. It’s a strategy I used elsewhere on the boat, and though it costs more in the long run than doing it perfectly the first time, it got us to sea sooner. The upgrades can happen little by little, thus spreading the cost over a more manageable time frame.
In the end, we set off with a pretty good design—though clumsily executed—and have been slowly tweaking and adjusting it as time and budget allow. The most obvious upgrade we’ve done was to switch the $25 (apiece) galvanized turnbuckles for Colligo Marine’s lovely aluminum deadeyes. Those original turnbuckles lasted for several years and a few thousand miles. But even though they were made in the USA and lubed with Lanocote, they were all but seized up when I went to remove them. Evidently, bronze chainplates don’t play well with galvanized shackles. No matter—i’d wanted Colligo kit from the start and took the
first opportunity to upgrade to it.
I could have reused the original synthetic standing rigging, which was still good even after a couple years of heavy use in the tropics, but I got a deal I couldn’t turn down on some spool ends of polyester-covered Vectran— the same stuff I’d used before, except it was bright blue. Given the price, I got used to the color pretty easily.
The only real design flaw, I think, was the gaff saddle. I don’t know what convinced me to use a gaff saddle rather than just plain jaws, but I spent a good deal of time making one out of carbon fiber and aluminum-bar stock only to find that it refused to sit properly when hoisted. It always wanted to ride on the top edge instead of flat, and it wore away the paint on the mast in short order. We tried all sorts of things to get it to behave, finally settling on a Dyneema bridle that would hold it in position until the thrust of the gaff took over. Even then, I had to unship it in Huatulco, Mexico, and have some stiffeners welded on and a portion of the gaff sleeved, because the twist of the gaff when broad reaching was tweaking it way out of shape and threatening to rip apart the fastener holes.
That rather klutzy arrangement lasted for a few thousand miles until I had a chance to make strong, simple gaff jaws out of carbon fiber, which so far has worked much more perfectly and elegantly, having no moving parts, weighing a lot less, and creating less friction.
And really, that has been the pattern for the entire evolution of Ganymede’s rig—everything that started out simple has become even more basic, and almost all of the metal parts have been replaced with soft attachments. Wherever there was a stainless-steel shackle or carabiner (and there were lots), I began replacing them with a loop-and-toggle system, using little hardwood toggles turned on a mini lathe. The first one was on the throat halyard, where I spliced a sort of toggled soft shackle with ¼-inch Dyneema. Next came the peak halyard, then the tack of the staysail, and now nearly every place I need a quick disconnect has a loop and toggle.
Of course there weren’t enough wooden toggles to go around, so I had a batch of them machined out of aircraft aluminum, then had them anodized. Now Ganymede has them everywhere—on every reef cringle for the outhaul tackle; on the mainsheet, so it can be stowed out of the way; even her mooring pennant finishes at a toggle, albeit a big wooden one more fitting for the size of the line.
In other places, fittings that don’t need to disconnect are fastened with lashings, which are lightweight, easy to inspect and cheap to replace. During our last refit, the bronze fittings for the mainsheet attachment were eliminated in favor of a Dyneema loop with a stopper knot fed through a sleeved hole.
Another way we eliminated weight and moving parts was by lashing round thimbles as fairleads and in place of blocks wherever possible. This works well on sloops, cutters or whatever you sail. The first place we got one was a staysail-sheet fairlead, then the topping lifts, then the jib downhaul and sheet leads— they come in all sizes now, in both aluminum and the more traditional stamped brass.
The latter came in very handy when I needed hanks for the jib but couldn’t use regular snap hanks on the polyester-covered Vectran headstay. Using Dyneema soft shackles directly on synthetic stays is unacceptable because both the stay and the hanks will wear at the same time. So I threaded a whole bunch of round brass thimbles onto the stay before splicing the stay to the lower thimble. I then spliced a piece of 1⁄8-inch twine around each one. It takes only moments to hitch each one to its corresponding eyelet on the jib, and the headstay suffers absolutely no chafe as the sail is hoisted and doused.
There were also a couple of things that worked so well from the get-go that I’ve done nothing but upgrade the materials. For example, the staysail is hoisted flying on a Vectran halyard that becomes its own stay when under tension. It’s an accidental arrangement—i was trying to copy something
I saw in a book and got it backward—but it’s such a convenient setup that I’ve done nothing but upgrade the bottom turning block and the toggle.
The strop it attaches to at the stem is new as well. I began upgrading all the old strops when I discovered Dyneema anti-chafe sleeve. It used to come only in white and in limited sizes but has become common in black, which looks better, and in many more size options. My first strops were all sewn Dyneema loops made for mountaineering and slid through a length of nylon tubular webbing for chafe and sun protection. But splicing my own strops and covering them with Dyneema sleeve allows for perfect sizing and a more elegant, slim look.
Another item that has evolved is the running backstay setup. We began with Vectran backstays that tightened with a four-part tackle ending at a cam cleat. Trouble is, cam cleats are a weak link and, even with a tackle, I couldn’t get adequate tension. Also, a lot of line had to feed through the tackle to ease the runners, and the accompanying fiddle block swinging out there tended to bash things. After trying several different ideas, we finally installed a new set of winches for the jib sheets and use the primaries for the runners. Other than making tacking slightly acrobatic, it’s probably as ideal a system as we’ll get.
The simplest rigging components on the boat— good old-fashioned belaying pins—have needed nothing since day one. The first ones I spun out on my mini lathe in California are still going strong, and my only regret is that I didn’t make more because I’ve switched to them from cleats in several places. Recently I took a friend, who is a bit of an engineer and a whole lot of a nerd, out for a sail. He was intrigued most by the belaying pins.
“How could these be improved?” he asked, turning one over in his hands.
“I don’t see how they could,” I said.
“If I 3D-print some exactly like this one in my shop, will you test them?”
I couldn’t say no to that, so now Ganymede is sporting three new, printed belaying pins: one made with nylon, one with ABS and one with nylon-12. We’ll see how they hold up to a few years of hard use.
In talking about upgrades, I shouldn’t fail to mention the aluminum-mast tabernacle that I made during the first major rig refit. The original design was for a keel-stepped mast, but the only aluminum light pole I could find for the purpose wasn’t long enough.
A wooden pillar I built at first for the foot of the mast to rest on was never a good system, and rainwater would come down the inside of the mast in torrents. So the tabernacle served not only to seal up the hole at the partners and allow the mast to be raised and lowered with ease, but it also freed up a lot of interior space with only a slim compression post where the mast and pillar had once been. With insulation between the tabernacle base and the compression post, anyone touching the post during a lightning strike—probably—won’t get fried.
We’re not done upgrading rigging yet—a piece of 5⁄8-inch Dyneema cast off by another boat just got repurposed as a bobstay for the new, lighter bowsprit I made out of carbon fiber to replace the original fiberglass one; now the homemade fiberglass boom is calling. Who knows what I’ll notice next once that’s all faired, painted and re-leathered? What I do know is that the rig that I was initially so unsure about has exceeded expectations and is only getting better—lighter, stronger, simpler and more elegant. And to me that’s the best thing about modern times: We can take the best ideas from the past and make them better with the new materials and methods that we have on hand. Ganymede’s rig is a real-life testing lab for all my half-baked notions of boat design. With any luck, we’ll keep inventing and refining for years to come.
Currently based in Rhode Island, Ben Zartman has just applied fresh bottom paint on Ganymede for a summer of New England sailing, whenever his steady work as a rigger and delivery captain permits.