Of late there have been many posts with regards to what sort of junk rig one would want to put on ones boat. These comments have ranged from the well informed to the the puzzled first timer trying to get a handle on all of this.

What stands out to me as an NA (I served an apprenticeship but have never practiced... shows how old I am :-)  ) is a complete lack of consideration of the hull. You cannot consider the rig without considering the hull that it is mounted upon. Some hull rig combinations are so obviously made for one another (the American cat boat springs to mind and also the Scottish Zulu) that one does not tend to think of the hull and the rig as separate entities but as one unit. However, for most boats it is not so.

The lovers of flat or flatish (or flat enough) sails have made their arguments and like wise the gentlemen (and ladies) who like cambered sails have stated their case but as I have said, no one has mentioned the hull.

However the hull and the rig are not independent entities, they have to function together, in concert else performance will be indifferent. Some hulls need (indeed demand) a rig with cambered sails, others will work with either. What is the criteria?

Historically flat & flatish sails have worked best with light displacement hulls and easily driven hull forms (long & narrow also helps). Jester and Kurt's mehetable come to mind. I have sailed with Kurt on mehetable and there is no doubt that mehetable sails well. There is also no doubt that Kurt understands his boat and how to get the best out of her (yet another consideration). If you understand your boat and her rig, you are going to get far more out of her than if you do not.

Heavy displacement hulls are different, many heavy displacement hulls are relatively easily driven but they do take power to accelerate and to get moving. They also take power to drive in a seaway. Many are under canvased as well, which does not help things and they are often short on deck space to boot. If you put a flat junk sail on this sort of hull, you are going to be disappointed.

Putting a flat sail on heavy (and in particular, short) hulls is what gives rise to lack luster performance, complaints that the boat will not tack or that you have to have a lot of way on before you can commence to tack. Or the boat falls off a long way before you can get going again on your new tack. While many put up with flat sails on a heavy hull because they do not know any better or possibly because they think that camber causes complications that they would rather not have. I beg to differ.

A heavy hull needs drive and the only way that I know of to give it what it needs is to put camber (shape) into the sail. The more under canvased your boat is, the more you need camber. It is that simple. Camber is a means of getting more drive out of a given sail area. That is why just about every rig currently used has camber (yes, even square rigs have it). Yes, your boat is going to heel more with a cambered rig, because heel and drive are closely related and should you draw a vector digram for self, you will soon see that (you can minimize heel by moving the point of maxim camber forward but there are other considerations and I'm not dealing with that within this article). Should you find the increased heel unacceptable, reduce the sail area and the boat will heel less.

Doubtless adding camber to a sail has disadvantages as well as advantages (this has been discussed in detail by others) but please do bear in mind, it's not just whether you like the idea of camber or not. You do need to consider the hull that you are putting the rig on. You need to understand what camber can an cannot do for you and what your particular hull needs. Blanket statements about camber do not cover the whole picture.

Hello Everyone,

Arne,

'Which rig?' has been exactly the question that I have spent almost 5 years pondering with Footprints. I originally bought Footprints for the boat and not the junk rig that came with her. By the end of summer one I was thinking I had made a massisve mistake buying a boat with a junk rig. As it turned out though my problems with the rig had their cause in the fact that the builder of the boat and the rig had made just about every mistake possible to make with a junk rig. (Thankfully they did not make the same mistakes with the construction of the boat).

By the end of that first summer I knew I had to fix the rig somehow. I bought a copy of PJR and set about rebuilding the sail I had. This involved some reshaping of the sail and replacing the 4 original and very bendy battens with 6 much stiffer battens. By summer two I at least had a junk rig which worked. By summer three I was starting to enjoy the benefits of the junk rig not the least was the fact that I had to deal with only one sail on the boat which by now was proving to be very easy to handle.

I knew though that 'Footprints' was not reaching her full sailing potential, and having come from a background of mutihulls I found this a little frustrating. Year 3 of ownership saw me exploring all sorts of rig options for 'Footprints' and which could be retrofitted, ranging from a very conventional bermudan rig, a gaff cutter rig which had also been originally designed for the boat, a high tech rotating wing mast rig with roachy mainsail and small self tacking jib, (which I really would still like to build), and also different variations of the junk rig. Enter David Tyler and Tystie with her wing sails. After talking to David and watching Tysites performance I decided that Footprints had to have a soft wingsail and David even designed the wing sections for me. This was the sail I was going to build.

However, and fortunatly as it has turned out, a new house project saw all boat projects put on hold for a year. By the end of 2011 I was back to thinking about the boat and her rig and enter David Tyler again and this time suggesting a Fan shaped cambered panel sail. This seemed like a good answer to solving the rig question for Footprints, and by early this year I was also aware that I would need to make a new sail soon as the original rig was by then 15 years old. As has been well documented the construction of the new sail was carried out during February of this year and it has really taken the rest of the year until now to get the new sail working well.

So the point of all this is that for Footprints at least I now feel that I have got the best possible sail for the boat. That is a single fan shaped cambered panel junk sail. This sail suits her single masted low aspect rig and probably I think is the best sail to realise the full sailing potential of the boat. Sure I might also be able to achieve the same sailing potential from some sort of bermudan rig, but that would involve a different kind of mast, lots of standing rigging, multiple sail handling winches, headsails to manipulate when sailing down wind, and a lot more stress on the boat and the rig. Cambered panel vs. flat sail? Well a cambered panel sail is what I have got now and given that David Tyler has successfully sailed from New Zealand to Hawaii single handed with what is essentially the identical sail gives me confidence that my cambered panel sail is capable of crossing oceans, and also providing the slightly more performance orientated inshore sailing which I enjoy so much.

Bruce Weller wrote:Having read Arne on the cambered rig (and become an instant convert), then David on the fanned rig (converted) and Slieve on the split rig (converted again) and now Kurt Jon's latest (converted back to my PJR start) I must seriously ask myself whether I am just a junk-tart*?

I shudder to think what simultaneously following all my enthusiasms will do to innocent sailcloth so, after some searching, I have brought this topic back so that I can review it in some detail and perhaps finally work out the best sail for my proposed Welsford Pilgrim or just do what the designer has drawn.

The postings may also assist others facing my dilemma.

Bruce W

*Call it out as self-deprecating humour if you will be so kind.

"..and now Kurt Jon's latest". Kurt ends by saying that he'd favour a Fantail planform of sail, but cut flat, for a single mast rig. I've come to the conclusion that  this is best for an offshore rig, but that an inshore rig will benefit from a little camber in the lower panels. (Kurt agrees).