Heritage
AjAx News / AlAmy
strength while ensuring minimal brine
below. If the ash sail battens broke,
they were easily replaced.
Blondie hated tinned food,
subsisting on salt beef when he ran
out of strawberries and salads. In
this 1964 race chocolate, jam and
Guinness were his mainstays. ‘80 days
food and water for one gentleman in
reduced circumstances,’ he exclaimed.
‘She feels as heavy as lead and I will
take a long time to eat her up to a
reasonable waterline again.’
He encountered icebergs, friendly
whales and porpoises, with their
attendant great shearwaters, andinvisible steamer ships all too close in
the fog. For him the only undefeatable
enemy was the crazy motion of a
small yacht in heavy weather but his
strangest solution, which remained
a fantasy, was a dentist’s chair
arrangement below where you could
cook, eat, navigate read and sleep, well
strapped in of course; not dissimilar to
the real arrangements now in use on
modern offshore solo yachts.
After Blondie sold Jester, her new
owner, Mike Richey, continued her
participation in every OSTAR until
1988 when, sadly, she met her fate
mid-ocean. A replica was built and
the Jester Challenge sails today in
her memory. For originality, courage,
vision and determination her story has
few equals. The innovations Hasler
pioneered continued to influence
yacht design for many years to come.
‘The wind-vane steering gear is to my
own design, based in part on the highly
successful gear designed by Ian Major
[1955 voyage of Buttercup from England
to Florida]. It works on a servo or ‘trim
tab’ system in which the wind vane
turns a small servo rudder mounted on
the trailing edge of the main rudder.
This causes the main rudder, which
is left free, to turn in the opposite
direction, and so steer the ship.
‘Jester’s gear is designed so that the
whole device, servo rudder and all, can
be shipped or unshipped with the boat
afloat. On the transatlantic race this
gear worked so well that I only steered
her manually for a total of about one
hour, when negotiating heavy seas off
the Longships (Land’s End), although
naturally I have had to spend a lot of
time readjusting the gear to suit varying
wind conditions. All such adjustments
are made from the control position.’The innovations that
made Jester a pioneer
Blondie Hasler described in his own words in 1961 how his novel junk rig
and windvane self-steering worked, and how he arrived at the design
‘I wanted a sail that I could reef and
furl and unreef again entirely from
the steering position without having
to crawl around the deck,’ explained
Hasler. ‘The focal point of Jester’s
design is the rig. It consists of a single
sail of 240 sq ft, which has a yard at its
head, a light boom at its foot and five
full length ash battens. It is a pure fore-
and-aft sail, not a squaresail, trimmed
and handled on all points, including
when tacking and gybing, just as if it
were a single Bermudan or Gaff sail. It
can claim to be the world’s most easily
reefed sail: taking down or shaking
out a reef is done quickly and simply
by adjusting the four lines led to the
central control position.
The halyard hoists the sail from
a point near the centre of the yard;
the sheet is a single long rope rove
through a treble block at the stern. The
pull is distributed evenly up the leech
of the sail by spans spliced into the
after ends of the battens. This greatly
reduces the twist of the sail and the
loading of the sailcloth, automatically
pulling the leech downwards when the
sail is reefed.
The yard parrel leads from the slingplate on the yard, round the mast, back
through a bullseye hanging just below
the sling plate and down to the deck. It
adjusts the fore-and-aft position of the
yard on the mast, and holds the yard
down when the sail is furled.
The batten downhaul is not
necessary on heavy Chinese sails but
needed on my lightweight Terylene to
pull the forward ends of the battens
down and hold them down when
reefed. It is a single long line, rove, like
the sheet, through a treble block at the
deck with different parts leading to
each batten just abaft the mast.
The running rigging is completed
by a nylon burgee halyard on the
starboard side which doubles as an
emergency halyard.’The Junk Rig
Windvane Steering
Hasler with production self-steering
gear in 1976, fitted to a Moody 33A model yacht
windvane system from
the 1930s that
influenced Hasler’s
system‘The only undefeatable
enemy was Jester's
crazy motion’