Reefing

[adam aunins]

The sail I have now has a set of reef points in it, and on a windy day, with guests aboard, I've thought of raising the boom up when I reef instead of lowering the head of the sail. That way someone would have to stand up to get hit in the head with the boom.

My question is has anyone tried this, and if so how did it work out? Does it cause any ill effects to the boats handling?

[GreenLake]

Adam,

raising the boom would have the effect of raising the center of gravity of the weight aloft as well as raising the center of effort. Both would in effect make the boat heel more with the same wind. In addition, the wind is always a bit stronger the higher you go, further adding to this effect.

If you then have your guests stand up, you've done about the maximum you can do to make your boat less stable.

That said, I haven't seen the need to try this. It depends on what precisely you mean by a "windy day", and how many guest you have on board -- I've found that with a few additional bodies, I can sail in more wind without having to move about the boat so much. No hiking, and there's a wider range of winds where nobody needs to switch sides. And that was without a reef. With a reef, the range of conditions would get wider.

Finally, the Daysailer boom is fairly high. I often sail with inexperienced crew or novices and none have gotten in the way of the boom yet. And I certainly don't encourage them to stand up.

[adam aunins]

I in no way meant to imply that I want my crew to stand up. What I was getting at is with the boom raise that way the only chance they would have of hitting there head would be to stand up.

The last time I was out in what I call high winds (17-20++) we had to beat it back to the beach. Now my sail is not in the best of shape and I have yet to buy a boom vang plus I didn't have the lines with me to reef on the water. We were a little over powered but but it just meant more hiking and a lot of tacks to get back to the cove. We had three men in the boat and one was having a hard time getting from one side to the other and would often forget about the boom while he dealt with switching sides. No brainings just took his hat off, didn't go back for it the third time.

On a side note I have yet to put a tape measure to my mast to see if it is a little bit short. Going off all of the signs I would say that this boat lost its mast or was blown over on the trailer at one time or another. There is some damage to the standing rigging and there has been some glass work around the mast hole in the deck. So that might explain the boom just clipping peoples heads.

[GreenLake]

It's hard to tell without your measurements, but it just sounds different from my experience, and I've had some big and not so agile people on board. So perhaps you do have a boom that's lower.

If that's the case, then raising the sail a bit when reefed would merely place it in the same position as it is on other boats, but, given a choice, lower is better.

There's one other consideration: there's an upper limit to your approach. Usually there's a notch where you feed the sail into the mast slot. The slider for the gooseneck would have to avoid that area, or it will fall out.