"Boat-building is 90% mental. The other half is actually doing it."Before I ever mark up and cut a piece of plywood, I've built the boat a dozen times or more in my head. My current project of building a
Salt Bay Skiff as the designer, Chris Franklin, meant the boat to be built and used -- which is as a sloop-rigged sailboat, not a rowboat-- is no different. One doesn't stumble toward a hoped-for, final goal. One defines that final goal clearly and specifically from the getgo and then creates the steps to make that happen.
In the case of the
SB, Franklin specifies 50 sf of sail distributed between a main and jib, which suits me just fine. For as light-weight as I am, maybe 120 lb, and as short as I am, 5'6", and for the
SB being a boat that doesn't lend itself to hiking out, I need to rig the boat with sails having a low center of effort rather than concentrating the sail area into the seeming simplicity of a single main sail, which could be an easily fabricated, poly tarp lug sail but whose performance I'd hate and whose tall center of effort I'd have to overcome. Yeah, yeah. Some say that a tall sail can reefed down in a blow. But that's exactly the time when I've got other things needing doing, like not getting myself drowned in a catastrophic capsize. I can drop a jib a whole lot faster and safer than I can reef a main or, if things get really dicey, drop the main and keep the jib.
Wikipedia says,
" Polytarp is used to construct nearly every type of sail. However, the material is best for traditional sail types such as sprits, lugs, gaffs, gunters, lateens, junk sails, and jib-headed sprits. They are not suitable for sails that depend upon being highly tensioned, such as the Marconi or Bermuda types of triangular sails."I've got a good source for tensionable main sails, which I don't want to attempt to sew, much less make one from poly tarp. But I haven't yet found an affordable source for jibs/jennys. So I wouldn't mind making some from poly tarp to discover what shapes and sizes might work well with a
SB.
If I've decided to commit to a main and jib, rather than a single main --or to allow for the possibility of switching between the two rigs as I was considering at one point-- then locating the mast and daggerboard is simplified. Thus, thinking now avoids grief latter. Or as Yogi did say,
"If you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytarp_sails
Locked
