FACING PAGE: SANDY OSBORNE
EMILLY HARRIST
here was a time when, possibly as a legacy
of dinghy sailing and some youthful offshore
racing, I would strap Sally’s long, heavy
wooden boom down and attempt to get it as
close to parallel with her waterline as I could, without
ripping the toerail from its fastenings. It was a legacy
of “Vang on!”, a call we used to hear all too often on
those interminable triangles to nowhere which
comprised RORC racing in the 1980s. On a
flighty racing boat the vang is used, among other
things, to control twist and keep the
forces acting on the fin keel in balance.
Long-keeled Sally, or Sally II, is an
altogether different creature, the second
of what later became the Vertue class,
Jack Laurent Giles’s best known design.
She is 25ft and a bit long, 78 years old,
and last summer managed to clock 8.7
knots on the chartplotter she had for a
75th birthday present three years before.
Let no one tell you that old long-keeled
yachts are slow, or don’t point worth a
damn. Sally knows her limits, for sure; try
and push her upwind closer than she
wants, or her sails permit, and she sulks.
Sally’s sails – Simon Richardson on the
Hamble knew his stuff after cutting his
teeth, and sails, on 12-Ms in Newport
Rhode Island in the old America’s Cup
days – are cut to suit her hull’s ability
upwind. That is, not too flat. Crucially,
they’re powerful enough to drive her hull
(just shy of 5 tons) at the angle it prefers
to assume to the wind.
Simon once told me that it is largely
the hull that defines how close to the wind
a boat can sail, so there’s no point in
cutting sails that do not match that angle.
Get Sally in the groove – an easy matter,
as she’s better at steering herself than the
helmsman; just peg her tiller and put the
kettle on – and she will set her perky nose
to the horizon and go. But try and make her do what
she was not designed to do, viz knife-edge to
windward at 30 degrees off, and forget it.
Like most old boats of her era, she has this longish,
heavy boom, prevented from taking out the backstay
(or preventer as Giles called it) in a Chinese gybe by
the addition of a boomkin, a jaunty little appendage
that can be forgotten when paying harbour dues, but
which adds character (and carries the backstay well
out of reach of any sky-ing boom).
Thank goodness then for a boomkin, for Sally does
not have a kicking strap. But I soon realised that for a
quite separate reason its lack was a positiveadvantage, although occasionally I would bowse the
boom down on a broad reach to the rail with a handy
billy, if it wasn’t too windy.
And that is the key. The heavy boom alone is
enough to keep the mainsail drawing, but if the
breeze pipes up the absence of a kicker allows the
boom to rise and fall naturally, spilling wind from the
top of the sail, while still allowing it to fill the lower
portion. It serves as a natural depowering process,
while reducing the strain on the rig.
And that is exactly the scenario that we
faced as we charged past Rhubh Reidh
lighthouse on a broad reach, after a weekend
jaunt to Gairloch last September. Vicious
bursts of heavy air fell from the clifftop. With
far too much sail up (that is, a full main and
staysail), and little inclination to reef, we
simply let the natural rise and fall of the boom
regulate our sail area. The top of the sail was
aligned almost dead into the wind, pressed flat
against the top spreaders, but the lower half
meanwhile was pulling like a train.
Truth be told, when we did get around to
rolling up a good portion of the mainsail, the
speed remained in the high 7s, and
occasionally low 8s, apart from that
tremendous burst which had the GPS
peaking at 8.7 knots, unheard of in all the
time I have owned Sally.
When I ran all this past a vastly
experienced old friend, John Simpson, former
skipper of Jolie Brise, he told me that his old
Dutch boat Blauwe behaved in exactly the
same way with her mainsail. However he
pointed out that sails on older boats don’t
want to be sheeted in too flat, particularly in
light to moderate winds. “If they are cut full;
let em’ work full to develop the power
necessary to drive older heavier boats.”
Being a cautious kind of sailor, he was
glad that we reefed and just let the mainsail
spill for only a shortish amount of time. A
mainsail flat against the spreaders might have
caused chafe on a long passage.
If the gust that drove us to that heady speed had
encountered a full mainsail, kickered down to the
rail, I suspect something would have given. Instead,
the boom rose, the sail flattened against the
spreaders, the gust spilled and the power in the
lower half was quite enough to have Sally break a
record that will probably stand until we next storm
down to Gairloch. As my friend Craig Nutter once
told me (he owns the Harrison Butler, Sabrina, a
Round the Island Race winner): “Adrian, you must
let twist be your friend.”“The heavy
boom alone is
enough to keep
the mainsail
drawing, but
if the breeze
pipes up, the
absence of a
kicker allows
the boom to
rise and fall”Above: A kicker
on Jour de Fête
prevents the
boom from lifting
and keeps the
mainsail flat and
controlled.
Opposite: Adrian
Morgan’s Vertue
Sally II in Scottish
waters