The new yard on Footprints is 100mm alloy tube with a 3mm wall thickness (5 metres in length for a 53 sq metre sail). As much as possible in my new rig I am trying to do away with hardware and instead use lashings, ordinary polyester braid where the loads are not so high but where there are high loads I am using spectra braid which has a dyneema core.

The halyard attaches to the yard via a 10mm ss bow shackle which is in turn lashed to the yard with 6 metres of 4mm spectra braid making up multiple turns and located by ss saddles on the bottom of the yard. I say saddles plural because I had spread the load by having a v shaped lashing. David Tyler is using a similar system except his is straight dyneema braid (6mm) and he has formed carbon eyes under the yard to locate his span.

Unfortunatly my alloy yard has devloped a bend in the exact middle where the lashing attached but I think that may have happened in the very first weekend of sailing when we had very strong winds, bendy battens, and the sail too far aft so every thing was loading up very heavily. As a result the top sail panel was not setting properly. When I discovered this I flipped the yard upside down and created a span where the halyard shackle is lashed around the yard using the same 4mm spectra braid, and there is a single 6mm spectra braid span going right to the top of the yard. Since doing this I have sailed in strong winds and the yard has not bent again so I think it is a matter of spreading the loads as much as possible.

Now that the new sail on 'Footprints' is performing as it should I will take photos of various aspects of the rig and post them on the site. Another thing I have done is to use 50mm webbing for my batten parrels which have very low friction and slide easily on the mast and as a result you can get the parrels quite tight so the sail does not fall away from the mast when it is to leeward of the mast.

If you look at all the high tech racing yachts these days, whether they be Americas cup yachts or single handed trans ocean yachts you will not see many hard hardware attachments points for sail and rigging hardware. Instead everything is done with lashings. My old timber yard on the old sail had a galvanised steel halyard attachment bracket. It was ugly, heavy and starting to rust. I would not want to go back to that. If I continue to have problems with my new yard bending (only T5 alloy) I will probably make a carbon fibre yard as on Tystie because I want to minimise the amount of weight I have to pull up the mast.