Sometimes, when I am pondering over details in the JR, I look up the material I have about the real Chinese junks (mostly Worchester), or I carefully study the photos taken by the Dane, Karsten Petersen in the seventies. On these 2-3-masted Hong Kong schooners, the big driving mainsail in the middle appears to be set on plumb masts or with the mast raking maximum 1-2° forward. The much smaller foresails are rigged on masts with quite a lot rake. The relatively tiny mizzen masts sometimes rake a little aft. I tend to think that these professional sailors knew what they were doing.

I remember Graham Cox mentioned friction problems when he set the black, cambered sail on the forward-raking mast on his steel-boat, Arion, and Pete Hill also mentions it in the last magazine (#93).

Of course, friction when hoisting and lowering a junk sail, can have several causes, so I will not try to shout out “thou shalt not...”. It just appears to me that raking the masts forward, is generally not necessary. With the new freedom to vary the mast balance of my sails (gained from Paul’s experience with his La Chica), I see no big reasons for not doing it the easy way, with plumb masts.

However, this is not a big deal, anyway, so personal taste will probably have the last word. I find that raking masts look odd, and will only use them when strictly necessary. Besides, I am not 60 anymore, so prefer climbing plumb (and stationary) masts, these days  -  and only if I have to...
Live and let live...

Cheers,
Arne

PS: I certainly am not going to send this to the Facebook. Everything seem to be kind of blown up (Edit: better, exaggerated?) there, not as badly as on the now dead Yahoo JR group, but still...

A schooner in Hong Kong, 1974. Photo: Karsten Petersen

(See section 8 from my album photos)

Anonymous wrote:

Always good to listen to your experience.

in the first sentence, do you mean ‘aft’ rather than ‘to the side’.

Ah, I see. Aft is probably best although that depends if the sail is squared out or sheeted in. Now I have corrected the term "fore and aft" to "fore-and-aft" sail...

Arne

Why I avoid forward mast rake where I can

All fore-and-aft sails have their centre of gravity, CG, moved out to the side (or aft) with respect to the mast top, they being gaff, lugs or junk sails.
For a junksail this means that the sail constantly must be held from falling forward when raising and lowering it. This means that lines like batten parrels or standing luff parrels will have to rub on the mast as the sail goes up and down, and this adds friction. The angle between a line from the sail’s CG to the mast top could be called the CG offset line, and its angle to a vertical line would then be the CG offset angle. This angle is critical to how much friction there is between the sail and the mast, both as the sail goes up, and when it is coming down. The lower the aspect ratio of the sail, and the lower the sail’s mast balance is, the higher goes this CG offset angle, and the friction with it.

On the sail I use on my Ingeborg, this offset angle is about 21°. On the diagram below, I have swung the lower end of the mast 4° aft around the present mast top (and the sail with it). This increases that CG offset angle to about 25°.

The sail of my Ingeborg has tolerably low friction in it when hoisting and lowering it. I can mostly crash-dump it without any need for hauling it down. In a pinch, I give the shown THP a light tug, and down comes the rest.

However, if I had rigged the sail with the shown 4° mast rake, that THP certainly would have been needed more often, and hoisting the sail would have been harder. Therefore, minimising friction is my main reason for sticking with a plumb mast.

Even so, sometimes there are good reasons for raking the mast forward. On a foremast on a schooner, for instance, or if the deck layout or interior dictates the mast rake. Annie Hill has another argument for it. She sails up and down the east coast of NZ (North Island). There she often experiences a combination of light winds and old swell rolling in from the Pacific. She finds the mast’s forward rake helpful in taming the sail in these conditions.

Well and fine, I respect such good reasons. However, I will always aim for a plumb mast as long as I see no real need for rigging with forward (or aft) mast rake.

Cheers, Arne

(..PS: And don’t come and tell me that a forward-raking mast looks smarter or saltier...)

(Full size diagram at Arne's sketches Section 7...)