Posted by Jonathan Engdahl on August 27, 1997 at 23:13:59:
I have a Cape Dory 14, which is about as close to the Amazon as
you can get, except that the sides are rounder, giving more of a
tendency to roll, and the original sail is a triangular Gunter type.
I have built a new sail using Stuart Wier's drawing of the Swallow,
and scaling the sail to 80 sq. ft., the same area as my original sail.
The new mast is the trunk of a small tree, the gaff and boom are stairway handrails purchased at a lumber yard, and the sail is a
$12 blue plastic-laminate tarp from the hardware store. I have
no doubt that the whole mess will go by the board in the first good
blow, but until then, it will be cheap to experiment with.
I tried it out for the first time last night, although by the time
everything was set up and I got out on the lake the wind was
almost gone. One thing that I think I have wrong is the way the
sail is raised. I have a block about 13 feet up, and the halyard
runs up to the block and is tied to the center of the gaff. I raised
the sail until there was about a foot or two of halyard running diagonally downward from the block to the center of the gaff.
It looked like Stuart's picture, but the wind tends to blow the
gaff away from the mast, and I don't think it's right.
I can't tell how the Swallow and Amazon are rigged at this point
from the illustrations. Wier doesn't say how it's done, but Knight
talks about a traveller. Now that I think of it, I might recall
something being said somewhere in one of the S&A books
about a traveller.
I'm thinking I might get by for now with moving the block a bit
lower, moving the halyard to 1/3 the length of the gaff, and
pulling the halyard tight, so the gaff is right snug against the
block. The tree I'm using for an mast is rather rough, and a
traveller would catch on the way up and down.
Will this work? Does anybody out there have any experience
with this type of sail? Has anybody seen how it is done on the
real Amazon at the museum in England?
None of the books I have checked out at the local library has
enough detail to help me. Any good references?
Jonathan Engdahl
Bass Lake
Chardon, Ohio, USA
BDTDINDWD