Anonymous wrote:

Dear Graham, many thanks for that fast, recise and informative repl.  I will pay very close attention to it, when I get my first-ever sail with junk rig in, perhaps, not much more than a week or two!  Can I ask a supplementary question here?  I have studied at least some of your posts with regard to gybing in windy conditions.  You do not seem to arranged your rig in such a way that the sail can be rotated across the mast which, of course, will bring the CE inboard and - I presume  - make gybing easier.  Is there any good reason, or reasons, why you choose not to have the option of rotating the sail across the mast?

Hi.  Swinging or rotating the sail across the mast has the advantage of bringing the centre of effort further inboard, which may assist in balance, and it may also make gybing softer, but I have no experience of this.  I cannot swing my sail across the mast because I use fixed luff parrels to control negative batten stagger.  I use a type known as Paul Fay parrels after the person who first illustrated them in JRA circles.  Nonetheless, I do not find gybing a problem.  Firstly, I try to reef early so I don't have an overloaded sail. This also takes care of any balance issues sailing off the wind. The sail is so powerful off the wind that you don't need to carry a press of sail downwind.  As Annie once said, on this rig you shake the reefs out when you come on the wind, the opposite of bermudian and gaff rigs.  I also make sure the sail is sheeted fully out, square across the ship before I gybe.  Gybing with the sheet pulled on harder will add to the load on sheet and battens considerably.  I face aft, steering with my knees, then start hauling the sheet in through gloved hands, leaving the tail cleated and flaking the bight of the sheet down on the cockpit seat.  As the leech of the sail starts coming up into the eye of the wind, the pressure on the sheet will ease dramatically and I haul like crazy.  By the time the sail starts to come across, a lot of sheet is in and the boat is sailing noticeably by the lee, so that when the sail comes to a stop on the other side it is feathering a bit, which softens the gybe.  I have occasionally found myself driving hard at night, trying to get into an anchorage before the tide turned or something, and decided that gybing would be too hairy.  I then started the motor and brought the bows of the vessel through the wind, commonly known as a chicken gybe.  Mostly though, I do not feel that there is any disadvantage to having the sail in a fixed position on the mast.  I'd swing it across perhaps if I had a flat sail and did not need my fixed luff parrels, but I like my cambered sail.  Every rig is a compromise!

As someone who's photos you have probably looked at, and who has written about runnning by the lee aboard Arion, I thought I'd better respond!  What Annie says is correct.  PJR just talks about the head of the sail, and at first I was careful, since I am an offshore sailor, to make sure the yard never went beyond athwartships, but eventually I decided that the top sheeted batten was the thing to watch.  If you let this batten go forward of the mast you will increase the compression loads on it.  Alan Martienssen, who has sailed many offshore miles on Zebedee, once told me that if you could stop the top two sheeted battens from breaking, the rest of the rig would be ok.  These days I let the top sheeted batten out until it is square across the ship, any time I have the wind well aft of the beam.  This means that the yard is a bit forward of the mast, but that's ok as it does not have any sheeting loads on it.  The boom and lower battens are not so far out, due to twist (I have a simple, three span-six part sheet), though I can adjust the twist by overhauling the lower end of the sheet.  With the sail set like this, I can sail up to 30 degrees by the lee in sheltered waters, but in the open sea I never let the rig get by the lee, preferring to change course or gybe if necessary.  I am usually sailing under windvane in these conditions, so I can make sure the boat never gets by the lee. If the wind changes, the ship will follow the wind shift. The other thing that is relevant here is not too drive the vessel too hard off the wind, as the sail is so powerful.  I reef early, always keep the rig snugged down, which keeps the loads manageable, assuming the rig is properly engineered.  You wont lose any speed, possible increase it, by reducing rudder loads and yawing.

PJR (pg.206, my edition) says: "When broad reaching the sheet may be let right out until the sail is square to the boat.....when running, the sail remains trimmed as for  broad reaching.  Be careful not to let out more sheet that this, allowing the head of the sail to sag forward of the mast, because this puts a heavy compression loading on the sheeted battens and is a common cause of breakage".

But -

1.  Many authorities on this site write of happily running by the lee, and

2.  Many photographs on this site appear to show downwind boats happily ignoring the stricture of PJR.

Would anyone care to reconcile this apparent contradiction?