Re: Sister Hook Alert - was Re:Mast Hoops on the Goblin


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Posted by Bill Wallace-King on July 27, 2004 at 22:03:27 from 212.21.127.214 user Bill_Wallace.

In Reply to: Re: Sister Hook Alert - was Re:Mast Hoops on the Goblin posted by Geraint Lewis on July 25, 2004 at 15:41:56:

As a Nancy Blackett skipper I can perhaps add a little to Geraint’s comments.

Most of Nancy’s mast hoops are lashed the mainsail with many turns of quite fine twine. The bottom three are lashed instead to shackles with captive pins, so they cannot be dropped in the sort of conditions John Walker encountered on the foredeck. For the same reason the brass reefing handle is attached by a chain. We try to avoid Nancy being in open water in winds above F6, and even above this I have only ever had to undo two of the shackles.

The hoops obviously cannot get up past the spreaders, which is why Nancy’s spreaders are set so very high – an unusual and very distinctive feature indeed. Above the top hoop, the mainsail is attached to a jackstay, a tensioned wire running the full height of the mast. It is tensioned by what readers of The Riddle of The Sands will know as a rigging screw, galvanised, and is now commonly known as a bottlescrew.

There are no winches on Nancy save for the anchor windlass. The main is hoisted hand over hand, using only the x2 purchase afforded by an overhead block to achieve tension. This is fine when the sail is fully hoisted.

An interesting feature of this set up is that, when the main is reefed, the halyard no longer holds the top of the sail close in to the masthead sheave. Consequently, the deeper the main is reefed, the more the tendency for the wind in the sail to pull both the sail and wire away from the mast, leaving a very large gap. When deeply reefed it is really quite disconcerting.

As Geraint says, the roller reefing mechanism is readily fouled by the luff of the main, often causing damage to the sail if great care is not taken. More modern versions of the same principle have a protective dish at the front of the boom preventing this from happening.

All in all John Walker did a pretty good job of reefing the Goblin’s main in the conditions he faced on the foredeck. It only goes to show the value of good preparation, and its good to know that like Jim Brading before him, Geraint’s skipper Bryan Bonser ran though all of the ropes and procedures in easy conditions so that the crew was well versed in the drills should an emergency arise.

A huge proportion of Nancy’s sail area is in her main, and I can confirm that John’s reefing will have produced exactly the easing in the heavy weather helm and the increase in controllability that AR describes in what, as a Nancy/Goblin skipper, I like to think of as “the good book”.

Bill W-K




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