The new main sail is here! We picked it up a couple of weeks ago and put it up before we left for Cuttyhunk for the weekend. It’s…beautiful.
Truthfully, I had some concerns for this sail. Evenstar has in mast furling – meaning that the mainsail gets rolled up like a window shade inside the mast. To do so, it must pass through a small slit that runs the length of the mast. One of the key reasons we ordered a new sail is that the old one had become so floppy and wretched that it was binding and jamming when we tried to furl it up.
Part of the problem with the old sail is that it had a hollow leech, and no battens. In Non-Sailor English, this means that the trailing edge of the sail (the hypotenuse of the right triangle of the sail) was flat, and almost cut to a concave curve. Most main sails have stiff fiberglass sticks in them called “battens” – these are inserted horizontally into pockets in the trailing edge of the sail. They are there to provide stiffness to the trailing edge (the “leech”), and to even allow for more sail cloth to be carried there in a size outside a normal right triangle’s hypotenuse (a “roach”).
Can you see the inherent problem with a sail that rolls up into the mast, and horizontally installed battens? It just doesn’t work.
The new sail is quite different. First, it is made from a higher tech stiffer cloth than the older sail, so the cloth is heavier and harder to handle. Second, this sail had battens installed, to give it a full leech. But these battens are installed Vertically, so they can be rolled up with the sail. But this is an item of concern, since the sails themselves would be stiffer and have thicker battens, yet need to fit through the same slot in the mast that the old sail did.
Well, I was surprised to find that not only did the new sail furl without a problem, it furled faster, more easily, and more compactly than the original sail.
And shape? The old sail just could not be trimmed. It was hopelessly stretched and had several tears repaired. There just was no way to get a good sail shape from it. But this new sail is crisp and stiff, and shapes like a dream.
A worthwhile replacement this was, even though we hadn’t planned it and hoped for another year out of the old one I am glad we made this change.
