SAILS
by an inflexible sail material were being cushioned by the
movement of the old, less stiff, spruce mast. Murrin
advises that when using high modulus sails with heavy
wooden boats that are close to hull speed and will not
accelerate further in gusts, it is vital that at least the
sheets are from a material that has some give – and that
the skipper and crew understand when loads are
becoming high and act accordingly.NEW SAILS
The process of having new sails built for your yacht has
changed radically and not at all. The big sailmakers will
input a yacht’s rig measurements into a 3-D modelling
application, allowing them to play around with a virtual
rig, assessing loads and wind flow. Neil ‘Jaffa’ Harrison,
of Doyle Sails Europe, says: “We utilise the same modern
sail design and technology we do with all our sails. The
analytical tools that gives us with regards to loads,
allows us to design and engineer sails with a classic
aesthetic but modern performance and shape holding.”
Mark Butler, of James Lawrence Sailmakers, which
kitted out Mariette with new sails prior to her win in
June’s Transatlantic Race, says: “For any boat, first you
need a sail plan. A customer may have, say, a 1932 sail
plan and with careful study it can tell them what the
implications of that rig would be. Sometimes we need to
draw one up from scratch. It always pays to sail on the
boat yourself. Classic yachts can be quite sensitive and
things only have to be about five per cent out for theClockwise from
top left: Bolt
rope can shrink,
pulling the sail
out of shape;
Cetewayo flies
laminate sails
on a wooden
rig; Sperry sails
on schooner
CharlotteThe origins of tanned sails
The red colour of the sails on old working boats comes from red ocre,
which was often part of an anti-rot preservative originally made up
using oak tree bark, but increasingly in the latter half of the 19th
century, using cutch (from the catechu tree). What made up the rest of
the mixture depended on what port you were in, but linseed or fish oil
and tallow were commonly used. On a yacht, to preserve the sails but
keep their whiteness, often the mixture wouldn’t contain cutch but
instead sugar of lead, borax, cuprinol and parafin might be used. While
a leisure yacht could take its cotton or flax sails off to dry, a working
barge or bawley, sailed daily, didn’t have that luxury and often the sails
would remain on all season, certain to rot without protection. Tan-
coloured sails today, when the sail material is commonly a synthetic
canvas dyed in the factory, have mainly an aesthetic function.boat to be almost unmanageable. If the rig isn’t the right
size, the gaff angles are off, if the sheeting points are
wrong, how much the sails overlap, how full they are...
it’s easy for the owner to be perplexed!”SPIRIT OF TRADITION
Most Spirit of Tradition boats use high-tech materials in
the rig and sails. Spirit Yachts has used sails made by
John Parker at OneSails since 1998 and today its boats
are fitted with OneSails’ low-stretch 4T Forte sails, which
is a new generation of laminate sail. These use
proprietory materials and processes to guard against
delamination from water ingress between the sail’s layers,
traditionally the enemy of all laminate sails.
Other manufacturers have their own processes, as does
Elvstrøm, which laminates its EPEX sails under such high
pressures that it offers a ‘no-delamination’ warranty.BETTER THAN EVER?
With modern sail materials, are classic boats performing
better than ever before? Owain Peters, of Hood
Sailmakers UK, offers a qualified yes: “There is a certain
amount of movement in wooden hulls that tends to be
further stressed by the inflexibility of low tenacity yarns
and cloths. Use with caution is advised, though the
performance improvement (especially over the medium
term, when woven materials tend to ‘drift’ in shape
terms) is unambiguous.”