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JonE said..
OK help me out here.

If I fit a furler can I still use it like a tuff-luff - so long as I don't try and actually furl battened sails on it?

Obviously taking into account adjustments for luff length etc etc...

Yep. Some, like our Profurl, do have fat extrusions rather than the slender Profurl shape, and the primary feeder can be a bit of a PITA because it has to come out when the sail is furled. The fat extrusion may be slower but some recent CFD work indicates that many of our old beliefs about leading edges and aerodynamics are incorrect, and one would have to be training very hard for the flow over the extrusion to be the difference between winning and losing.

Yeah I reckon we are at cross purposes - I never reef my heady, it's either in or out - so Shane Guanaria made it lovely with no compromises. Then it gets furled totally away and I raise my hanked staysail on the inner forestay - bulletproof and then I have great shape on the staysail. I am getting another larger staysail as there is a bit of a gap between the heady and the staysail now. My rig has the equivalent of runners at 2/3 of the hounds height so no hassle for the inner forestay.

24 years ago I was big on never getting as furler. I told my sailmaker that furlers were evil. Then I spent way too long farting around with getting the heady into bags every time we dropped it. After about 2 weeks of cruising I started looking out for a furler. I have had 3 different steering systems, 2.5 different cabin things, a new back deck, and lots more but never contemplated getting rid of the furler - it furls - it doesn't reef, so its great and there are no compromises in performance that a normal person could detect, certainly no difference in shaoe or pointing. Heady furled, staysail up. Staysail down, heady unfurled. Simple, great sail shape, great performance. What is not to like?Spend the money you would spend on a foam pad on the luff of a reefing genoa on a dux removable inner forestay and a super long lived blade staysail, number 3/4 equivalent. The genny lasts heaps longer staying well in range, the hanked on staysail only comes out on days when the wind blows up and lasts forever. It pays for itself after a few years of less wear.

You can even use the same genoa tracks for the staysail. Although the sheeting base of the genny tracks should be too wide we can still use them. The staysail is non overlapping. So I sheet out wide to the normal tracks and then tighten up on the windward sheet. It's an old 420 trick I did to work around the lack of narrower tracks - and never got round to finishing the tracks off. It is a really lovely thing to have in big breeze. One person eases off the old leeward sheet whilst the other slowly winds in the new sheet. We can tack in big winds and the staysail stays totally flat and doesn't flog. And I can change sheeting angle if the water gets rough with a quick windward sheet ease. Change camber, and twist all by fine tuning both sheets.

Yep - I knew what you were talking about with the "all or nothing" furling. You still can't switch from #1 to #2 size quickly when racing if you only have one forestay though yeah?

This has been a very informative discussion and the parameters are clearer.

The challenge is that the boat has two use-cases. Single handed where I don't care that much about boatspeed and crewed where I really care about boatspeed. I always care about pointing. I don't want to effect my AVS by even a couple of degrees because I think the boat is right on the line for cat 1.

I reckon the thing to do is take my oldest #3 or buy an old dacron #3 maybe recut for the boat and punch hanks into it. I'll whip off the Tuff-Luff and just go sail the boat with the hanked heady in a howling gale and see how I like it. If I like it I'll get hanks punched into my old #2 for round-the-cans and keep the tuff-luff and the good headsails in the shed for when we do a regatta.

Edit: Bloody hell I just saw what hanks cost!

What is the purpose of the cringles along the luff of this sail?

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JonE said..
What is the purpose of the cringles along the luff of this sail?

If the ancient memory neurons are working correctly, it's to run a line through to make it easier to fold. They were also sometimes a fall-back allowing you to lace the headie on if the headfoil broke.

? to run a luff line to help lower the sail ?

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Planter said..
? to run a luff line to help lower the sail ?

If so, it was never talked about or written about AFAIK, and those grommets were pretty common in the '80s so any such use would have been common knowledge. I think headfoils were more likely to suffer damage in the days of tough kite poles and big masthead rigs, so there was some consideration about getting to the finish without the headfoil.

Now my memory is stirring, using the grommets to help pack the sail was very much the secondary use - but those who packed sails on the deck in the days of masthead riggers would remember that every little bit of help was valuable. Kids these days don't know how easy they get it!

If you put a line through the grommets I think they would bunch the sail and jam it into the headfoil.

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JonE said..
What is the purpose of the cringles along the luff of this sail?

Assuming this is a smaller sail, it might be so it can be meets the keel boat regs as a heavy weather jib. The heavy weather jib has to have an alternative luff attachment if using a foil.

A

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JonE said..
Yep - I knew what you were talking about with the "all or nothing" furling. You still can't switch from #1 to #2 size quickly when racing if you only have one forestay though yeah?

If there there are two tracks in the foil, then you can do a peal sail change relatively quickly.

www.sailbetter.com/peel-sail-change-step-by-step/#:~:text=By%20%E2%80%9Cpeel%E2%80%9D%20we%20mean%20hoisting,boat%20speed%20will%20be%20minimised.

A

Spoiler alert. The foil is history.

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JonE said..
What is the purpose of the cringles along the luff of this sail?

Working a foredeck in the late 80s early 90s we would pack headsails with a line run through those luff cringles, secured at the head with half-hitch stopper knot. So changing sails, you'd grab the bunched and secured luff and drag it up the foredeck, feed the head into the alternative track on the foil, and when the back end of the boat had finally got their **** together while you wait getting drenched on the bow, you'd pull the stopper knot and help feed the foil. Then the old sail would come down, shoved below to be packed. Sail didn't need to be folded - would just run its luff line through the cringles, stoppered as before, and it would be ready to drag back up as needed to repeat the above process.

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JonE said..
Spoiler alert. The foil is history.

Yay!
Going hanks? Or you gonna go nuts and go the furler route?
Either will result in a much more pleasurable short handed sailboat than a tuff luff.