Newfoundland Launch

Garry Fillier grew up on the northern tip of Newfoundland, where boats were a way of life. A few years ago he set out to build a rowboat “as much like my Dad’s as I could remember.” But he made some changes along the way – a rudder, swing keel, and a gaff cutter sailplan – 106 sq ft main, 20 sq ft stays’l, and 30 sq ft jib. He even made a removable cabin for cruising in inclement weather. The trial launch was in the lower Humber River, which empties into the Bay of Islands on Newfoundland’s west coast. The nice touch of color is provided by a helpful neighbor. Sails will be traditional cut in 5 oz Contender tanbark polyester. Another suit to make in this chocolate-brown cloth will be for a Welsford Pathfinder gaff yawl being built on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba.

Jacklines

Club-footed jibs and stays’ls must be fitted with a jackline to allow the sail to drift away from the hanks on the lower luff when the halyard is slacked. Casting off the halyard releases tension on the jackline. The jib hank stays on the stay, the luff pulls away as the sail is hauled down. Without this “relieving line,” none of the hanks below a certain distance up the luff (a distance equal to the length of the sail’s foot) could come down to the bottom of the stay for furling. Mainsails with small tack angles and track slides or hoops will also need a jackline. The jackline is anchored in a grommet a foot or so above uppermost hank, track slide, or hoop that needs “relieving,” passes through pairs of small thimbles seized around the luff rope, trapping the relevant hardware. Special jackline hanks with just a single hole are no longer in catalogs, so we resort to old-fashioned sew-on hanks with a small grommet seized between the holes, or, more commonly nowadays, a “bend on” hank with the tongue bent shut as in the illustration. A jackline might pass through three or four hank positions before being belayed at the tack ring. Line should be smooth, very low-stretch stuff. When the sail is set and the luff stretched the proper amount, the jackline should be as taught as possible without distorting the sail’s luff. Photo shows detail of a club jib, in Oceanus cloth, for a 40' sharpie ketch.

Frou-Frou

The least essential thing we do in the loft is periodically make up a batch of varicolored pennants out of scrap spinnaker cloth. We add them gratis to four-cornered sails -- gaff, sprit, or lug sails. (Pennants won’t fly successfully from the head of three-cornered sails. A pennant at the head of triangular sails will inevitably wrap itself around the masthead.) I forget how these superfluous gauds crept into our inventory. Perhaps a customer wanted one, creating the suspicion that others might. Anyway, we always enjoy making a bunch. No harm in a dash of spice.

Bend with a View

Karl Stambaugh's flattie Sailing Skiff 15 has an unstayed mast with a 74 sq ft sprit-boomed leg-o-mutton sail. The sail plan doesn't inform how he expects the mast to bend -- how could it? Every mast will bend differently. So the sailmaker asks the client to do a simple test; a specified weight and a string line. The offsets will influence the sail shape. See this pretty design at www.cmdboats.com, and read more about mast bend on our Appendices page. The wonderful long view is in Utah, USA.

Beckets

Don’t get to do this every day, but enjoy it all the more when we do. The becket in the peak of this sprits’l for an Iain Oughtred "Spike" skiff has to be an easy, but snug, fit for the 5/8” (shouldered up to 1") peg on the sprit tip. To make sure the becket won’t tear out someday when the little boat is beating off a dangerous lee shore, extra seizings are made through a hand-sewn ring in the sail. This handsome and very traditional becket is only possible when the specifications for the sail include a rat-tailed boltrope. Another way of make a rope becket is to peel off a single strand from a length of boltrope and make it up into a grommet through a ring in the peak, then put on a seizing to make the loop for the sprit peg. Still another way is to make up larger diameter grommet which can be cow-hitched through a ring in the peak, again having a loop formed with a seizing. A non-traditional “becket” is made by fixing a suitably-sized brass ring to the peak with machine-stitched Dacron webbing – less expensive than the handwork, but nevertheless strong and practical.

Eider Duck

Pacific Northwest designer and builder Sam Devlin is perhaps best known for his powerboats (see WB No. 228), but he also has a number of pretty little sailboats to his credit. There’s a photo of one of them, his 1981 “Nancy’s China,” with sloop rig, on the Small Craft page of this ‘site. His 17’ 5” Eider, shown here, dates from 1978. Sails for one under construction up in Michigan (spring/summer launch) are currently on our loft floor. We decided to copy the unusual combination of a vertical cut main and crosscut jib, both because it looks pretty good in this rendering and because it suits the case: plenty of seams for shaping the head and loose foot of the 124 sq ft main, and plenty of seams for controlling the luff and leech of the 45 sq ft jib. Cloth is 5 oz Bainbridge Classic Cream, cut into 27” panels, so the finished job ought to look something like the artist's conception.

To Steer Her By

Recently came across this photo snapped at the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival, in St. Michaels, Maryland. Besides showing off our dabbler duck, it demonstrates one of the reasons we love our job. Nearly all our customers are small-craft devotees, who see their boats as something very special. Most have built their own, sometimes taking years to do so. They pour over possible designs, browse the local or virtual waterfront, and choose the little boat of their dreams. They’re focused, intent on creating a beautiful, utilitarian object. The carpentry, the hardware, the right color scheme, these are the subjects of their daily thoughts. They participate in on-line forums, trading ideas with like-minded sailors. They muse on how they’ll use their boat, where it might take them. That traditional good-luck star on the bowsprit is surely the touch of a skipper proud of his work.

Sailmaking at Sea

Here’s a report on shipboard sailmaking from the training vessel Picton Castle, in mid-Pacific, steering toward Pitcairn Island from the Galapagos: “We make all of our own sails aboard, almost entirely by hand just as they would have throughout the Age of Sail. On trade wind passages such as this, we have a full-time sailmaker always at work on the quarterdeck, and he or she never wants for assistants. Our cotton canvas sails don’t last forever – cotton will rot if stored damp, is weakened by sunlight and chafe and the sails will eventually blow out, although we try to keep them in good enough repair that the Manila lines controlling the sails will part before the actual sail gives way."

Green Energy

The Picton Castle crew view their 17th-century sailmaking in a modern context. Their log from mid-Pacific points out that “Making sails on a sailing ship is like creating fossil fuels aboard a Diesel liner. Our sails, together with the wind that fills them, are our primary motive power. They have several advantages over a Diesel engine – apart from the inspiring sight of a full press of canvas and the delightful silence in which they do their work -- they leave no odor, emit no waste products, and their fuel source will last as long as the sun shines and the earth orbits around it. We can sail for five years on a suit of sails, maybe 18 days on our fuel tanks.” You can follow the Barque’s adventures at www.picton-castle.com.

Luff Lacing

Luff lacings are usually shown “back and forth” through the grommets – reversing direction at each one. Extra friction at each grommet retards the tendency of the lacing to slip down and tighten up as the sail is raised, which would occur if the lacing spiraled all the way down. But back and forth lacing pulls each successive grommet in opposite directions, resulting in a laddered effect that can spoil the sail’s airfoil. The long continuous lacing easily gets out of adjustment. A better variation of luff lacing is a spiral composed of short “lacing pendants” or “lacelets,” each connecting only two, three, or four grommets. Being short, they don’t need to be reversed through the grommets. They don’t tighten up or get out of adjustment. After a careful first adjustment to make sure the tensioned luff will be parallel to the mast all the way up, they can be marked, for quick repeatability, where they should be hitched or stoppered through their ending grommets. The pendants remain tied or spliced in their starting grommets when the sail is taken off and bagged. A 20-ft luff with grommets at 2 ft intervals can be bent on the mast with only three lacing pendants, three quick hitches. We have used this style of lacing on the company boat Muskrat for many years. Alternates for attaching small craft sails to spars are wooden mast hoops or robands (rope bands) tied through each grommet. Read more about lacing, hoops,and robands on our Appendices page.