One for the Dinghy Sailors

Any recommendations for sail makers?

My Enterprise sails (1961!) are ahem slightly past there best and I need to get some new ones, but need to modify them with reefing points which I currrently dont have.

So any personal experience with decent sail makers?

By the way south coast based so preferably not wanting to travel to far.

Jon
Enterprise 3306

Enterprise sails are pretty readily available, all the major sail lofts will make them, but you might struggle to find sails with reefing points. for stndard sails I'd give speed sails a ring, they would probably courier them so no need to travel. Are you still with a wooden rig or do you have metal?

You could also speak to Jeckylls in Wroxham, norfolk (fraid you'll have to look up their number) they have good experience of wooden masts and can probably remember how to do reefing points as theres a lot of call for traditional sails in norfolk.

hth

s

Seconded

If you can tell them what make and model your mast is (ie proctor d+ or whatever), jeckylls can probably make sails to standard measurements they already hold, if you have an unusual mast they may ask you to measure your typical mast bend. I had to do this when they made some for my ent years ago I think it was a holmspar mast - they hadnt seen one before! they were great sails and good price it i remember correctly

We used to have a North Sales, Enterprise sail.

Paied about 450 for main sail a few years ago now not much to compaire with as the other set we had were from the dark ages!!

I've always reefed around the boom. You have to put a piece of strapping in the roll to attach the kicker, but always worked for me.

Shirley you just ease the main?

It is really easy to stall the rudder on the RS200 when it's windy due to the large roach on the mainsail and then you broach, no opportunity to reef it so to try and stop it happening we pull loads of downhaul on when it's howling and ease the main which allows the top of the sail to flap away on its own while the lower section pulls forwards and the foils work again.

Surely the obvious answer is to hike like a bandit.
If you can hike off your toes with straight legs you can keep the boat flat and keep pointing high. In a gust, dump main hike flat and trim in again. Takes a fair bit of strength but gotta be better than reefing points.

There is absolutely no reason to reef. I regularly sail race boats in up to 37 / 38kts across the deck without reefing.

To de-power the boat upwind, do the following:

1: Drop the rig backwards slightly (on a dinghy, you have no backstay obviously so you will need to do this on the shore before going out. Just move the shrouds down a couple of pins).

2: Either move the jib car backwards on its track, or ease the barber hauler (or both). This will open the leach of the jib & allow you to flatten the sail

3: Get as much outhall & cunningham on as you can & pin the leach of the main as hard as you can using the kicker to flatten the main. Get as much kicker on as you can & then more. Then, you can control the power by easing or bringing on the mainsheet as required.

4: Hike hard & then harder still

5: In big gusts, "feather" the boat (come up slightly to get the inside telltales on the jib fluttering a bit instead of streaming at 30% perfectly)

6: Weave your way through the waves. Go up a couple of degrees as you head up the face & down again as you go down the back-side. This will stop you from slamming & then having to get the boat back up to speed after a slam.

By opening the leach of the jib & pinning the leach of the main, you are flattening your sales & de-powering the boat. You will still get good height upwind if you can keep the rearmost 12 inches of the main driving (ie, the rest of the sail is flogging / backing apart from a 12" strip running down the leach from head to clew). If you have telltales down the leach of the main, aim to get the top one stalling about 70% - 80% of the time.

This is the fastest way of sailing pretty much any boat upwind in a breeze.

Just before you get to the top mark, don't forget to ease an inch or so of kicker and a bit of outhall & cunningham. A dead flat main is not quick downwind + you could end up snapping the boom on the bear away!!

A loose kicker upwind is fine up to the point where you are having to ease the mainsheet to dump some power, but having a loose kicker upwind in a breeze isn't a good idea at all IMHO. Plenty of kicker will bend the mast and flatten the sail, reducing power and drag and helping you to control the rig. I haven't got much experience of Ent rigs, but with most boats if you pull on plenty of cunningham together with the kicker it will flatten and twist off the top 1/3-ish of the sail to give you the spilling effect that you described, but without allowing the boom to lift and turn the sail into a flappy bag.