Brian Kerslake wrote:... and Pete Hill (Oryx) are here too - you can't miss Oryx in Falmouth Yacht Haven!

Corrrection - I thought I'd seen Pete's boat which I (mis) remembered as a yellow cat with twin red masts and white junk sails. It wasn't her. That cat's owner, whose name I can't remember right niow (apologies if he reads this) says that Oryx left a few days before we arrived and is now safely in Brest after a 3-day light-winds passage.

Because of the negative batten stagger in Arion's rig, I have been experimenting with luff parrels and reading the articles written by other members with great interest.  The first thing I tried last year was standing luff parrels, both the standard PJR type (as Annie has recently fitted) and the type Paul Fay uses (from the forward end of each batten around the mast and back to the forward end), but found they caused a lot of friction.  Without them I can haul up my sail by hand, with just one turn around the winch, but with them I needed to use a winch handle.  They worked, both to control creases and limit how much the battens would move forward.  I did not get positive batten stagger but it was sort of neutral and workable.  Paul Fay put plastic pipe over his which seems to have helped with the friction and I was thinking of trying this as a mark 2 version soon.

Before doing this, I decided to try using a throat hauling parrel and set it up the way Arne does, from batten 3 (counting from the top) around the outside the mast, then between the mast and the sail and up to the front of the yard.  I currently have it running through a block at the front of batten 4 as well, thinking I needed that to control the batten stagger of that batten.  I have a lower parrel too, going from the deck up through a block on batten 6, to a block on batten 5, around the mast and back to the front of batten 5.

The results have been astonishing.  The throat parrel pulls the whole sail back so that it sets perfectly.  The lower Hong Kong parrels are completely slack and I have now eased off the upper HK parrels as well.  The lower luff hauling parrel does no work at all and I will probably remove it.  I thought I would need it to haul back the battens when reefing and furling but to my amazement, when I lower the first panel down to the boom, starting with the yard hauling parrel and throat parrel properly tensioned, I now have positive batten stagger on batten 6.  If I re-tension the luff and throat hauling parrels, the same thing happens with the next batten and so on.  If I let the sail down without re-tensioning these parrels the sail immediately develops negative batten stagger.  I find I can control the the amount of positive stagger when the batten is just above the bundle by first taking the slack out of the yard hauling parrel then tensioning the throat parrel as much as I need.

I do not seem to need the lower luff hauling parrel at all and am planning to rig the throat hauling parrel straight to the deck from batten 3, as running it through a block at the front of batten 4 is not only unnecessary, it seems to try and push that batten too far back when hauling on the parrel.  The Hong Kong parrels are not under any load either but I think they may be useful to dampen the luff when pitching into a head sea.

To make the operation easier, I am going to run the tails of the luff hauling and throat parrels through rope clutches, so I can easily re-tension them with one hand during reefing and furling, easing the halyard out with the other hand.  That still defeats the old adage, "one hand for oneself, one for the ship," and I would love to have a sail that developed positive batten stagger automatically, like the standard flat Hasler-Mcleod sail, but I am addicted to the performance of my sail so hope I will eventually get so familiar with handling it that I will know just how much tension to apply to the throat halyard when reefing and furling.

My conclusion is that an effective throat hauling parrel is the key to managing a cambered Hasler-Mcleod sail.