We’ve been discussing mainsail battens on the forum. Not in a really serious way, not with Dylan Winter involved. He was telling us about his loose footed, batten-less jury rig designed for quick dowsing and redeployment as he ambled up the River Nene. It reminded me that Adriana had a batten-less, roach-less, headboard-less main for our first three-year adventure.
For tweaking the last ounce of performance out of a mainsail it needs the roach to add sail area high up, to stabilise airflow over the head of the sail and to minimise tip vortices. I didn’t think much about that when I had the sail built.
My rationale was that I could afford to lose some mainsail area because Adriana tended towards too much weather helm, I wanted to keep things simple and low maintenance, being able to drop the main off the wind without battens catching on the spreaders was a good thing. And if it was a design good enough for Lin and Larry Pardey it was good enough for me.
It was a lovely sail to handle, ten ounce soft Dacron, and it fulfilled all my expectations.
Well we needed to batten down the hatches up here in Lancashire this week. Hurricane Katia turned out to be a real boomerang of a storm – set off from this side of the Atlantic, roared through the Caribbean, soaked the US eastern seaboard and then came barrelling back across the Atlantic to knock the apples off my tree.
A nasty couple of days, weatherwise.
I’m anticipating a slow week. The Southampton Boat Show starts this weekend and many people will be keeping their wallets closed until they see what bargains they can pick up at the show. Normal service will be resumed in a week or so.
This might mean we can take time off for a boat trip later in the week, once the remnants of Katia have gone on their way. Every cloud and all that.
