mehitabel's better tack close-hauled is the mast-in-the-lee port tack, if I don't adjust sheets. If I do take in (at 4:1) half a metre or so for the mast-to-weather starboard tack, they're as even as compass and knotmeter can tell me. Her sheeting points are offset to port as in PJR. Her sails are flat-cut.

KJU

Annie, the problem with "  Good Tack and the Good Enough Tack "  is that when reading it, the reader  will not have the slightest idea what side the mast sits.

Arne

Arne Kverneland wrote:

Darren wrote

" ...Instead of adding another pessimistic term, I would suggest we change the vocabulary and talk about the Good Tack and the Almost as Good Tack (tongue firmly in cheek). .. 

I guess I would rather suggest a more neutral term, something like

either...

weather mast tack and lee(ward?) mast tack

or..

Mast-to-weather tack and mast-to-lee(ward?) tack.

Something like that...

Arne

Although it would be wonderful to have Footprints power away to windward equally on both tacks I am generally able to do a pretty good job of 'rationalising away' the so called bad tack. If Footprints is losing up to 0.5kt of boat speed on the bad tack then the net lose of windward performance between both tacks is about 0.25kt. And she more than makes up for this loss of speed as soon as the sheets are eased.

Now to get a boat with the same accommodation space and cockpit space I am going to have to spend at least an extra $50k over what I would get for Footprints if I sold her. And then I would be buying an older worn out Beneteau or Bavaria which would be a little faster to windward but not as good off the wind, and I would have all the complication of an older bermudan rig with shrouds and winches all over the boat, and multiple old sails. So despite the 'bad tack', the advantages of the boat and rig that I have far outweigh the one small disadvantage!

David Thatcher wrote:

It would be nice to find a non technical simple solution to the bad tack on our simple rigs, but maybe in the end it doesn't matter. I think that even after having perhaps drunken too much wine that even I can see that the advantages of the junk rig outweigh the loss of point something of a knot on the 'bad tack'.

To more immediate problems I have had another yard failure on Footprints so I am thinking of ways to resurrect my badly bent aluminium yard - maybe a very strong solid wood plug in the middle to replace the 100mm of bent tube? 

As a solution to the bad tack, I would propose a change in language.  The Junk Rig already suffers from an unfortunate name that makes the layman think of rubbish.  Instead of adding another pessimistic term, I would suggest we change the vocabulary and talk about the Good Tack and the Almost as Good Tack (tongue firmly in cheek).  For those, like me, who can't leave things well enough alone, we can sleeve the yard and believe we've got an extra fraction of a knot or degree to windward.

I wonder if the biggest part of the bad tack problem is not inherent to the rig, but instead a sail that hasn't been well optimised.  Ketil has one of the few boats that is fully instrumented to quantify what the actual difference is between the good and the bad tack.  For a cambered sail, it appears the answer is not much, if you work to keep the sail close to the mast when the mast is to windward of the sail.  For a pointy-sail sailor there's no shortage of references on how to tweak a sail for maximum performance (mast bend, sail overlap, sheeting angles etc. etc.).  I've not seen an equivalent work for the Junk Rig.  Even just a list of points that have been found important by the small fraternity of Junk Rig racers would be interesting.

David Th. wrote:

"It would be nice to find a non technical simple solution to the bad tack on our simple rigs, but maybe in the end it doesn't matter." 

I agree, David. I can easily live with not really knowing what makes the "bad" tack as good or better than the "good" tack. I guess I stick to my hunch from my write-up of that subject; that the mast standing proud of the sail when on the weather side of the sail, is the main culprit here. After all, the all-wooden mast of Johanna had a "sail area" of 1.6 sqm, which is 3.3% of the full sail area. This was one argument for switching to my recent slimmer hybrid aluminium-wood masts.

Sorry about that bent yard. I gather it was bent in the vertical plane? Maybe you can, in addition to that wood plug in the middle, fit a second tube along the main tube. Look up how we made the yard for Edmond Dantes in 2012. The thin tube was just bolted at the ends, plus clamped with wire and glued together. I have later done this to two more yards, then without the wire clamps. Instead i rub the aluminium well where the Epoxy is to go on, and I also carefully paint over the glue joint to protect it from the sun. For the thin tube, I choose the same dimension as for the lower battens of that sail. These yards stands nice and straight and have so far given me zero problems.

Arne