Sails

I talked about our new main and jib from North Sails earlier in the blog so I guess we better follow up with some pictures now. 

Here is a picture of the Carbon/Dyneema 3DL main from this summer. It worked wonderfully this year (second season). We had some issues with how the mast curve fit to the mast last season and I thought that we would have to adjust the mast curve.

Thanks to our sailmaker, Martin Angsell at North Sails Stockholm who came out and sailed with us on a very short notice early in the season we found that the mast had too little pre-bend in the lower section and by moving the foot back just a little bit the sail suddenly fit very well. In this very picture it looks like we haven´t pulled the cunningham at all though but don't be fooled. It looks and performs great!

This is a picture of the Dyneema/Aramid jib that is new for this year. Note that even though the luff of the jib looks loose we found that the jib was very sensitive to halyard tension and we had to be careful with too high tension. It is going to be very interesting to see how this jib holds up. It was made new for this year in 3Di and is roughly 10% larger than the old one. We decided to not put it on a furler since that in reality limits the selection of head sails for a cruising boat to one. Given how actively we prefer to sail we needed more flexibility.

The boat is originally designed for being raced with large genoas only but since we normally sail with much less weight on the rail than racing mode we designed the jib to work well already in low wind speeds but we added a reef for it to ensure that we could carry it through a large spectrum of wind. Above 25 to 30 knots we have a smaller heavy wind jib in dacron and below 8-10 knots we still use the one of the many Carbon/Aramid 3DL G1 that came with the boat.