Sail slatting aint an issue around here. All boats do that, including BMs. If anything its the parrel squeak that gets me. There's batten clang too, as the sewn in padding twists out of kilter rendering them useless, but I may wrap carpet all over them soon. 

Our sails are 7.5%-6% fore-main and I'd like more. We've had lots of light windward sails in the tropics and a little more bagginess would be nice.

Arne Kverneland wrote:

Armchair speculations...

Annie, take what I write below with a pinch of salt, as it is more like ‘loud thinking’:

First of all, just about all boat types will have one or two special wind- or wave-conditions that they don’t like.

I can see your point that it is annoying to have Fantail's sail luffing and filling as the boat rolls or climbs over big waves. Still, I wonder how a standard Raven 26 with BR does it here. My hunch is that your boat type, with her high ballast ratio and big beam, will shake the wind out of almost any rig, unless the crew sets maximum sail area to keep the boat under pressure.

She's not really shaking the wind out of the sail - that implies quite a violent movement.  These are swells rather than waves and it seems to be to do with the apparent increase and decrease in the wind.  I'm afraid it's not very easy to describe.  I am setting the right amount of canvas, I believe and if I shake reefs out, the situation seems to get worse, if anything, probably because in an effort to reduce the flapping from happening, I sheet in harder.  But yes, I wonder how her sisters sail in those conditions.

I wonder if Fantail simply is under-rigged. Her JR is only the same area as the working sails of the Raven 26, and there is no way she can set as much sail as the main plus Genoa1 on a standard boat.

Actually, the sail area I put onto Fantail, is the equivalent of the main plus the No 1 genoa.  She is, in fact, a little undercanvassed in very light winds, but the situation I'm describing is in F3 and over, when she usually sails very well indeed. 

Or maybe I am all wrong here  -  if your described situation only occurs when you already need the first reef, then I can see the point with flatter sail.

This starts happening before I need a reef and continues as I reef down.  I usually avoid sailing in these conditions of onshore wind and swell. once the wind got over F5, so don't know if the sail would still back and fill once I had four or more reefs in.    The camber decreases in the top sheeted panel and the fanned panels are flat. 

But on the other hand, if it is a ‘more waves than wind’ situation, then the answer is more sail, and not less camber.

Et cetera etc, etc...

Arne

Armchair speculations...

Annie, take what I write below with a pinch of salt, as it is more like ‘loud thinking’:

First of all, just about all boat types will have one or two special wind- or wave-conditions that they don’t like.

I can see your point that it is annoying to have Fantail's sail luffing and filling as the boat rolls or climbs over big waves. Still, I wonder how a standard Raven 26 with BR does it here. My hunch is that your boat type, with her high ballast ratio and big beam, will shake the wind out of almost any rig, unless the crew sets maximum sail area to keep the boat under pressure.

I wonder if Fantail simply is under-rigged. Her JR is only the same area as the working sails of the Raven 26, and there is no way she can set as much sail as the main plus Genoa1 on a standard boat.

Or maybe I am all wrong here  -  if your described situation only occurs when you already need the first reef, then I can see the point with flatter sail.

But on the other hand, if it is a ‘more waves than wind’ situation, then the answer is more sail, and not less camber.

Et cetera etc, etc...

Arne

I'm wondering, what kind of keel does Zebedee have?

I've given up on making new wingsail battens. To make such a big single wingsail was too much for me to do, with limited time, with limited facilities, and above all, with limited mental energy and waning physical powers, as I approach my eighth decade. I'm going to have to leave the topic to younger men. I want to go cruising again. If I try to make a wingsail again, it will be on a smaller boat.

I've made new straight forward battens, and these will be hinged to the after battens in the way that I'd planned with the wingsail. Then I only have to cut off the starboard side of the sail at the luff line and refinish the luff. So I'll have put the clock back to the days before we all started playing with cambered panels. We didn't know how to make hinges with a large angle of articulation then. We do, now. My hinges will have an angle of articulation of 20 degrees each way, resulting in a camber of 8.5%.

Ideally, I would add a small amount of camber to the part of the sail that is forward of the hinge, so as to get good curvature forward, while keeping the after part of the sail dead flat. Which is the way I prefer it; it's so much nicer to live with a flat sail. A flat sail doesn't go well to windward, so we need camber. Put that camber in the forward part of the sail, and we have the best of both worlds.