A couple of years ago I asked on the forum if anyone had tried rigging a storm jib for the DSII.
No one had, but now I have. I bought a new JY15 jib from Intensity, about $130. The JY15 sail is a 75% jib on the DS. I sailed alone yesterday in winds supposed to be gusting to 22 mph.
Good news: The boat was much faster and better balanced than with a reefed main alone. I could keep the boat upright without flogging or stalling.
Not-so-good news: The jib from a JY15 doesn't work like a DS jib. Jim Myers at Intensity had warned me about this. The DS jib leads are way aft and outboard compared to the JY15, so the jib foot foot pulls tight while the leech is still loose. With the sail slapped onto the boat right out of the bag, there was no way to get the telltales in sync, port/starboard or high/low. The tack angle was only marginally better than the 140 degrees I measured with my steering compass using the double-reefed main only. (Yep. 140. No closer to the wind than 70 degrees.)
Here's my tuning strategy. Let me know if anyone has another idea:
I could not find a deck layout for the JY15 anywhere, but after looking at scads of photos and scaling them to the published dimension of the boat, it looks like the JY15 jib blocks are 70" aft of the tack and 14" port and starboard on either side of the center line. My plan is to locate those two points (should be somewhere on the cuddy top), and then put an eye strap at each location. Seems like I could just clip my barber hauler blocks to the eye straps to approximate the JY15 pull angle. It will be a little more complicated, because the JY15 sheets don't climb over a cuddy. However, there's enough room along the forestay that I can bring the tack off the deck to match the cuddy height.
Any thoughts? I think it will be worth it. I love sailing in strong winds, but I don't like being afraid. The experience of sailing the boat under control in those conditions was a rush. (You know you're aging when you get a rush out of being unusually placid.)