I was happy to spend about 8 hours sailing on Saturday. A rare east wind, with no rain, made sailing north on beam reach easy and comfortable. I made it to the next port and then headed home on the reciprocal tack. All wind and no waves. Good times.

Having a tiller brake is definitely better than hand steering all the time but I think I need something more for a longer trip. There was too much variation in the wind speed for me to leave the tiller for more a minute.

I would like to build a wind vane based on David Tyler's design.

The boat is small and has a kick-up rudder. Does anyone have some advice for the easiest type of steering to build? A full servo-pendulum seems more complex on paper, but I can imagine fitting a trim tab that works with a kick-up rudder might actually be more difficult.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Arne wrote:

Chapter 7, about rigging the sail

I realise now that a few makers of these sails have run into trouble during rigging it. This was much due to the fact that I was late to write the ‘rigging Chapter’  -  no.7.
Now I have put a PS at the end of Chapter 5, suggesting reading Chapter 7 before starting on the rigging.

I read the 'rigging Chapter' again and noticed, or finally understood, what you wrote about the halyard attachments. I have an annoying issue with halyard twist at the moment. I rigged the halyard with a swivel block at the mast head. For some reason this seemed like the right thing to do. It was not. I have some persistent problems with halyard twist.

I am not going up the mast and I don't really want to un-rig everything to take the mast down right now. But, in the offseason, I will be reworking the mast head to use two blocks at the mast head, in the locations you described.

For now I am getting pretty good at pulling the halyard out of the deck hardware, untwisting it, and reeving it back through the rope clutch on the deck.

I got the boom fendering on, eventually. There are a whole bunch of lines right around that part of the boom. I kept lacing different things into the fender accidentally. I think it turned out OK, but I did not take a photo.

On the subject of fendering of the yard, boom, and battens; On the new sail on 'Footprints' we cut up my wife's yoga mat into strips and sewed that into the batten pockets, and yard and boom pockets. This seemed to work well, and yes, I did eventually replace the yoga mat.

But I also came against this issue in a small way on the gaff jaws of my little catamaran. I tried a couple of different types of rubber glued onto the inside of the jaws to provide some cushioning and prevent damage to the paint work on the mast. I was not having much success because whatever I used I seemed to get a lot of friction when raising or lowering the sail. Then I came on some scraps of sheep skin which my daughter had been using in some craftwork. I cut up a strip of that, trimmed back the wooly bits and then glued it on top of the thin bit of rubber already in the jaw. It works really well, no friction, and no damage to the mast. So maybe worth a try for cushioning on a junk rig.

After my short overnight coastal trip I noticed something had been scraping up the mast pretty good. It is inside the red box drawn on the attached photo.

I think this was caused by the YHP block, which has a stainless steel body, hitting the mast when the sail is squared out on a port tack.

After reading Arne's instructions again I figured out how to rig the YHP higher up the yard than the sling point. I hope this will prevent more metal-on-metal damage.

I also added some more appropriate fendering to the yard. I used marine vinyl that was left over from the batten pockets and laced it to the yard.

Both of these updates are shown in the attached photo.

I still need to get fendering on the boom. I have the material cut and the holes punched, but the wind was blowing around 12 knots or so when I installed the yard fendering. Now I am waiting for calm weather to coincide with my free time. When that happens I will lace on the the boom fendering.

Scott,

I notice the same asymmetry on my Ingeborg. When doing very short tacking up a channel, I leave it as it is, but on longer legs, I may do small corrections from tack to tack.

Anyway, it is common practice among racing folks to ease the mainsheet a bit as they come about, to speed up acceleration, and then they haul in the sheet, as the speed has been won.

There are two more noise-factors with respect to symmetric tacking in a JR:

• ·         If the batten parrels are slack, the sail will ride at a bit distance from the mast on sb. tack. Then the sail will act as if it has been sheeted harder in, sort of.
• ·         In my waters, at least, the direction of wind and waves is often not the same: On one tack, it feels like heading almost right into the chop, while on the other, the waves are more on the side. I frequently adjust the pointing angle with this in mind.

I therefore am not too concerned about getting the sheetpoint perfectly “symmetric”.

Arne