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Re: Swallow, Amazon and Scarab flag sizes/halyard attachments


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Posted by Mike Field on July 10, 2015 at 16:02:20 user mikefield.

In Reply to: Re: Swallow, Amazon and Scarab flag sizes/halyard attachments posted by Magnus Smith on July 10, 2015 at 13:47:12:

"Without a stick to raise the flag up, it would have been obscured by the mast top often."

That's the key. I can't answer explicitly for these boats without reading the books again (and maybe not even then), but traditionally the hoist of the pennant was sewn around a wire that was free to rotate around a wooden stick (pennant staff). Each end of the halyard was fastened to the staff, one with a clove hitch about half-way up and another similarly at the bottom. When hoisting you kept tension on the bottom to keep the staff vertical (so as to be able to thread it through any other rigging) until it reached its full height, when the upper clove hitch would be chockablock at the halyard's sheave and the upper end of the staff above the masthead.

Here are some pictures --

On Aileen Louisa I made the halyard an endless loop with enough twist in it to let me make both clove-hitches using the double-loop method. This meant that I couldn't inadvertently lose the halyard (as I think John did somewhere with Swallows's main halyard) by letting one end disappear up the mast to run free through the sheave -- which would mean having to unstep the mast to re-reeve it.

(Note that this is not the case in the flagpole picture, where I had to be very careful to keep the two ends firmly knotted when the pennant was lowered and staff removed.)

I can't tell you where, but I seem to remember there's a sketch in one of the books showing a masthead pennant set like this drooping at an angle after its wet halyard dried in the morning sun.



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