Comillas49

For the first real installment of Gear Talk I wanted to cover the topic of sails. How working with sails has changed on a typical sailboat with the advent of furling sails, electric winches and other things and in particular our own personal experience comparing sailing aboard a Morgan ’42 Mark II racing yacht twenty-five years ago vs. O’Comillas today.

Some terminology:

• Furling sails: a sail that can roll on itself to reduce the surface exposed to the wind.
• Reefing: the process of reducing the main sail by lowering and reattaching it at a lower point on the boom. Thus exposing less surface to the wind.
• Trimming: the process of adjusting sail angle to the wind.

As I explained in the weather info section, for any given wind direction, wind speed, and waves there is a corresponding combination of course, sails and trimming that is optimal and a range under which such a combination will operate safely. This premise has not changed in the last twenty-five years, what has changed is how easy it is to adjust how much sail to use at any given time.

So lets take a look back at sailing aboard Sagitta, a Morgan ’42 Mark II racing yacht. This sailboat had multiple sizes of genoas and jibs and a mainsail that can be reefed. So basically in the front sail you had a selection of sizes and depending on the wind you would take one down and put a different one up. On the main sail you had four, perhaps five, reefing points. The winches for raising and lowering the sails where at the base of the mast while the mechanical winches for trimming the sails where on the cockpit.

O’Comillas has a furling genoa, a furling jib and a furling main. Once the sails have been raised, they stay up the whole time unless they need to be taken down for repairs. To reduce size, a sail is rolled or furled on it’s self. All of which can be accomplished from the cockpit without having to move to the base of the mast.

So lets put both boats through the simple scenario of going from light winds to heavy winds.

On the Sagitta, you may go through several reductions in the front sail. This entails going below deck picking a new sail and bringing it up. Then for example, you would lower the large genoa, tie it, and then raise a smaller genoa. Both of these tasks have to be done at the base of the mast. Then repeat the operation until you are using a smaller working jib. For the main sail, you may also need to reef twice or more. Each time, you need to go to the mast to partially lower the sail, reef it by hand since we didn’t have one of those reefing systems that exist today, and then raise it again. All these operations can be physically demanding for a short handed crew.

On the O’Comillas, you will start with the genoa and the main fully unrolled and as the wind picks up, from the cockpit area you would roll up more of the sail to make it smaller. At some point it will be better to completely roll-up the genoa and then unroll the working jib but that operation is also easy to do from the cockpit area as well. No going below deck, no physically changing anything on the base of the mast. Easy. The electric winches are also a huge improvement. When talking about a large genoa with a surface area of 754 ft² (70.1 m²) trimming with an electric winch is a cinch.

We do have extra sails such as a spinnaker, spares, and a storm main but for the most part everything can be done without having to move from the cockpit area. Furthermore, rolling a sail is much less challenging than raising it. All these changes make it possible to operate a 49-foot sailboat between two people very reasonable. A task that would have been impossible aboard Sagitta.

We are now in Newport! The whole family got to see the sailboat and we went out sailing with our friends from Buffalo (Jim, Rosanne & three wonderful kids) My son’s first word when he saw O’Comillas was “enormous.” My wife Kristi, on the other hand said she thought it would be bigger. I guess 50 feet seems smaller or bigger depending on your perspective. I can think of a bunch of other jokes involving wives and sizes but I’ll leave that to another day.

José Manuel went out shopping at Costco and he must have bought half the store. I guess he must be thinking that we just keep sailing around the world while we are at it and thus why the massive amounts of food. He does have a point though; if we have too much we can use it in Spain or donate it, but in the middle of the ocean, like I’ve said before there are no stores.

Unfortunately, after all the preparation and anticipation work, you can still get it wrong or something unexpected happens. Here perhaps is the best lesson I learned sailing in the Caribbean many years ago. If you find yourself with too much sail surface area, and the sailboat is sailing uncomfortably on the higher end of its range, get everyone ready aboard and reef and/or change sails to reduce the area exposed to the wind. Always!

Regardless of how tough conditions may be, and how difficult it may be to reef any of the sails, you will always be better off. Even if the maneuver involves going to the bow (front section) to bring down a genoa (large jib, a type of sail) in rough seas. Of course, don’t rush to do the maneuvers before everyone is ready. But remember: if you think a given task is risky now, always consider the possibility that the weather may get worse and the maneuver will become more and more dangerous the longer you wait. Furthermore, the larger the sail’s surface area the higher the forces exerted. Therefore, the longer you go with too much sail in rough weather, the more you expose the mast, the sails and the whole sailboat to conditions beyond their designed limits risking all sorts of bad things happening.

In the occasion I was referring to in the Caribbean, I was quoted as saying to my cousin Amalia “El miedo es libre” which in Spanish roughly translates to “you are free to fear.” I guess I didn’t have anything inspirational to assure her that everything was going to be ok. After all, fear had grabbed a hold of me as well. In forty to fifty knots of wind with rough seas that are completely soaking you, changing a sail is the last thing you want to do. But as I’ve said already, if you think it is tough now, how about with fifty to sixty-knot gusts of wind? Thankfully, my father gave the order, we did the maneuver regardless of puking all over, and I mean all over, and we survived to tell the story.

Do not ever let fear cloud your judgment. Fear is not useful in the middle of a dangerous situation. Be respectful of the sea. Be aware of your own capabilities, of those on board, and your sailboat; and always anticipate the likelihood of conditions getting worse.

We’ve received requests from family in Venezuela that we write Sloopy in Spanish. Since O’Comillas has a Spanish flag, I found it only fitting that Sloopy would be bilingual. So we’ve translated the last two posts and added a new post. From now on, all Sloopy entries will be bilingual.

In terms of the main blog, I’ll continue to write in English, not because I’m better at it, but because it is easier. I’ll leave it up to Dad to write blog entries in Spanish once the voyage starts.

We leave for Newport on Saturday, so this blog is going to get very active very soon. Scheduled departure date for the voyage is Friday May 30th.

The first question to ask is what do you mean by a GPS failure. If we are talking about a malfunction in the main GPS charter/plotter this is where redundancy comes in. We carry two backup portable GPS units on the sailboat with extra spare batteries. Therefore, the odds of everything malfunctioning are next to nil. That is of course provided the signals from the GPS satellite system are all functioning. Yup, it is actually possible (thankfully not too probable at this time) for the US Global Positioning System to stop working as hypothesized in Wired’s Oh, Nooo! What If GPS Fails?

Not so much because we are paranoid of such massive GPS failure, but because this is totally retro-cool: we are taking a sextant onboard O’Comillas along with a 2003 Almanac and Norie’s Nautical Tables and paper charts. Odds are, we won’t “need” any of this, but Dad and I felt it would be really cool to trace our voyage on paper charts using a sextant. The sextant we chose was a Mark 25 Sextant which instead of a split mirror (the kind I’ve seen before) it uses beam converger or full horizon mirror. Of course, until we get completely confident with the entire sextant process we will be double-checking our answers with, you guessed it, one of the GPSs onboard.