2023: Now for the Sails

Taking Stock of the Sails

Indeed, I love all my Doyle sails, as they are well built ie strong fabric, good shape, well sized for our boat, and have needed only minimal maintenance.  We have replaced the UV sunbrella stitching only once in all our years of ownership (now 16), and also a bit of repair to the yankee luff.  The yankee and the staysail furl and unfurl easily every time and they set very well IMHO.

In Mast Furling Mainsail

The in-mast furling mainsail not so much.  It's a fantastic sail...when it works. When it furls in and out fine, I love it.  When it won’t unfurl, it really pees me off.  There is never a problem furling it, unfurling is a different matter.  It becomes a huge chore, with help from at least a couple of others, to extract it from the mast...

Readers, and hopefully sympathisers, will recall that I had the mast re-tuned in 2023 to make it straighter.  The back story is that after replacing all the standing rigging in 2018, the mast was put back on the boat with a major bend in it – a no no for in-mast furling gear, so it needed correcting.  Quite frankly, after an enormous amount of research and the re-tuning of the mast in 2023, I believe it can only be a user error.  What I mean is this:  

At times, it works perfectly.  At others it does not.  So, I've concluded that it must occur as a consequence of user error.  I should add that I had the mainsail flattened a bit in 2018 so, all things considered, it should not have changed much over the last five years since 3 of those 5 the boat wasn’t being sailed.  So watch this space.  I might add that, as at Sep23, a basic new cross cut one will cost upwards of USD 3500.  We could all do without that!

Stay tuned.