Some Advantages of New Sails

Besides looking nice, new sails have some big advantages.  

Here’s a photo of Snickerdoodle with both sails looking pretty old.  Notice the stretch wrinkles on both sails.  There was no way that I could tighten lines to eliminate the wrinkles.  The both sails had stretched far enough that making them smooth again was impossible.

This year I bought two new jib sails (a 135% and a 150%).  These match up really well with my three-year-old mainsail.  Here are a couple photos with the “new” mainsail and the NEW 135%.  See you smooth the sails look.

When your sails get blown out like in the earlier photo, they only work ok for downwind legs.  When you try to sail upwind close hauled, the wrinkles disturb air flowing over the sails and the sails loose lift.  To help correct this, most skippers fall off to a close reach.  This works – but the boat ends up sailing farther than in should.  When the wind pipes up, the old sails cannot be flattened appropriately and the boat heels more than you want.  The passengers are nervous.  The boat heels over and wind spills out of the sails… OR you sheet out in order to spill wind and decrease the heeling.  Either way, now the boat is sailing slowly in a sideways direction because the keel no longer grips as efficiently.

When all this is going on, the pressure on the tiller is often times immense.  You might have to hold on to the tiller with both hands in order to control the boat.  Even with both hands though, the boat still has too much weather helm and rounds up uncontrollably.