How Tight is too Tight?

When setting up your rigging, it might be very tempting to tighten each stay until something breaks! The problem with this protocol is you would then have something break.

The truth is, your standing rigging only needs to be tight enough to hold the mast straight and upright. The looser your standing rigging can be, the less stress you will put on all the fittings that are associated with the rigging. The removal of unnecessary static loads will greatly prolong the life of your rigging and your yacht.

It is important to remember what each stay does, and therefore, how tight it needs to be. The cap shrouds need to be the tightest of the shrouds, as they keep the tip of the mast in place. Due to leverage, this stay needs to withstand a lot of load. If the stay is slack at rest, the top the mast will move to leeward as the weather builds. Eventually, the stay will become tight and the mast will stop moving. The less you want the masthead to move, the tighter this stay needs to be.

The further down you go, the less stress each stay will experience, and the looser it can be.

On cutters, check stays will be present to counteract the inner forestay. These stays do not need to be tight at all, as all these stays do is stop the inner forestay from pumping the mast. As the inner forestay pulls forward, the mast will bend forward slightly, and the check stays will become tighter.

At rest, however, these stays may appear to be "too loose."

The headstay and backstay are another stay of constant debate. If they are tighter, you can point upwind better. Looser and you can reach better. The correct answer for the tension in these stays is "enough to point what you need." If you are a gaff rigged cutter, you will not point very well due to the sailplan, so there is no reason to overstress your fittings by having a bar-tight headstay. On the other hand, if you have a fin keeled racing sloop, the headstay should be akin to a banjo string!

Standing rigging is only there to hold the mast up. The goal is to accomplish this task with the loosest stays possible.

Another Alternative to Cotter Pins

The classic dilemma about how to seize off your turnbuckles for your shrouds is never ending. If you use cotter pins, you will have little legs sticking out to snag your running rigging or your flesh! If you bend the legs so they are hidden, they might not be able to stop the turnbuckle from spinning! Also, over bent legs are at a higher risk of breaking due to the stress of bending so far.

Instead of cotter pins, you can also try ring pins, as these have no sharp edges, but they tend to work their way out of the hole and fall off, thus making them an undesirable choice.

The next option is to use seizing wire and wrap the turnbuckle to the screw hole. This option works well, holds everything in place, and offers no sharp points for injury. The problem with this setup is it will take a while to undo if you need to tune your rigging.

Another option that is good for day sailors and small craft is to use welding wire bent through the screw holes. It will hold everything in place, but it is not a very strong option and not recommended for larger yachts or blue water cruisers, were the stresses are higher.

As of now, you might be thinking that there is no good option to this problem, and that each solution introduces new problems.

Rod Sinclair shared with me these photos from his yacht where he devised a creative solution to the entire debacle. He uses a stainless steel nut above and below the turnbuckle to lock everything in place.

​The reason this works well is because stainless steel has a tendency to gall. This means that if you push stainless steel against something hard enough, it will stick to it. The bronze turnbuckle is simply set in position to tune the rigging and then the stainless steel nut above and below it are tightened onto it. When the nut is tightened against the turnbuckle it will push onto the sides of the threads of the screw and gall, making it very secure and difficult to loosen on its own.

This solution is the best of all worlds because it is never going to snag your rigging or flesh and it is quick to remove for adjustments.

How to Position Your Masthead Aft of the Mast Step

The fore-aft position of your mast plays a very large roll in the handling of your yacht. Too far aft, and the yacht will exhibit a lot of weather helm; too far forward and your yacht will exhibit a lot of lee helm. As you can see, you can use this feature to tune your yachts handling and create a balanced machine that will glide through the water effortlessly.

Masts all look straight, but they actually bend back just a bit. Cruising yachts tend to rake aft less, racing yachts rake aft more.

If this is the first time you are setting your rigging, and you have no idea if the yacht has weather helm or lee helm, you are best to start at a happy medium. A good starting point is 12 inches aft for every 50 feet of mast height. You can calculate your aft rake by multiplying your mast height from the deck by 0.24. This number will be the number of inches your mast head will be located aft of your mast at the deck.

You might be thinking "How can you figure out how to set your masthead 12 inches aft of your deck junction when it is 50 feet into the air?"

The answer is very simple, you use a plumb line!

Attaching a gallon jug of water to the main halyard, will provide you with a very ideal measuring device for setting the mast rake. The gallon jug weighs around 8 pounds when full, which ensures that it will pull the halyard straight and taught.

The jug will act as the plumb weight and will transfer the position of the masthead down to the deck. Using this, you can easily adjust the headstay and backstay to move the jug of water to the ideal placement on the deck. When the jug is positioned at the correct distance aft of the aft side of the mast, you know that the mast head is also in the correct position fore-aft.

After this step is completed, your next step will be to sail test the yacht and see how it responds.

If you feel that you are not able to balance the sails properly, it might not be an issue with your sail trimming, but instead that your mast needs to be moved a bit more. If you have too much weather helm, your mast is too far aft and needs to be moved forward. If you have too much lee helm, your mast is too far forward and needs to be moved aft.

If you have a backstay adjuster, these adjustments can be made while sailing to further improve your yachts performance. When sailing upwind, you can tighten your backstay and pull the mast back a bit. This will tighten your headstay and grant you better pointing ability while also pulling the mast aft, giving you beneficial weather helm.

When reaching, you can ease the backstay adjuster to move the mast a bit forward and reduce your weather helm. This will also cause the headstay to sag and create more of a belly in the luff of the headsail, greatly increasing your sails power.

On a run, you can ease the backstay even further and push the masthead forward to induce lots of lee helm that will help you power along downwind. The headstay will also sag a lot and that will cause the sail's luff to bulge out like the luff of a spinnaker. This will create a lot of power and pull your yacht downwind with speed!

How Tight Should Your Stays Be?

It is easy to think of standing rigging and running rigging as two different parts on a sailboat, but in fact, they both share the same goal: Allow your yacht to sail.

Running rigging is thought of more often with sailing as sailors use them to set, trim and adjust the sails. The standing rigging, on the other hand is left standing there.

The truth is, your standing rigging is only there to hold the mast in the proper position to achieve better sail shape. If the mast is too far forwards or backwards, it will lead to poor handling and sailing performance will suffer.

Back to the original question about tightness of stays. The answer is very simple, the stays need to be tight enough to hold the mast in the proper position. I know this sounds vague and ridiculous, but bare with me for a moment.

If your stays are at the proper tension, then the mast will remain in its ideal position on all points of sail.

The reason that the correct tension is not a number is because no two stays are the same. If the boat builder placed the chainplates at slightly different spots, then the tensions in each stay will differ to maintain the mast in the proper position.

Now that we have moved your mind away from a set number, lets look at the actual tightness of the stays.

If you don't want the mast to move, then all the stays would need to be bar tight! This would hold your mast still, but it would also stress the heck out of all your fittings and fasteners. Your mast might stay perfect for a few sails, but before long you will be cracking mast tangs and ripping chainplates through your deck!

You actually want your rigging to be a bit on the looser side of life, in fact, the ideal would be to have your standing rigging as slack as possible while still able to hold the mast in position.

Higher aspect ratio rigs will require higher static tensions to keep the mast in place as compared to lower aspect ratio rigs. This is easy to remember because you can switch out "aspect ratio" with "strung" and just imagine that the people on fancy race yachts are high strung while those on low aspect ratio cruisers are not high strung.

On a massive triple spreader race yacht, the shrouds will be tight as banjo strings to keep the mast from deflecting too much as the wind builds. On a gaff rig yacht with a short mast and no spreaders, the stays might wobble around a bit as they are rather loose without the sails set.

Once sailing, the force of the wind on the sails will pull the mast over and the stays will all tighten on the windward side and loosen on the leeward side. It is common to see, even on high aspect ratio rigs, that the leeward shrouds will dangle around loosely while sailing in a blow. This doesn't mean that the stays are too loose, simply that the mast is deflecting a bit to leeward, and that is just fine.

While you might want your mast to remain perfectly centered as you sail, which would make you want to tighten your rigging until something breaks, your sail maker doesn't want you to tighten them that much. The sailmaker is planning on your mast deflecting a bit, and builds your sails expecting this to occur. If you rigging is too tight, your sails will remain too flat and will not provide you with sufficient power; thus leading to poor sail performance.

Instead of thinking of your standing rigging as a static line that is set once and forgotten, it is better to think of your standing rigging as another line on your yacht that should be adjusted to improve sail shape.

To answer the original question of "How tight should the rigging be?" The cap shrouds will be the tightest, the intermediates (if present) will be a bit looser, the forward lowers will be a bit lower again, and the aft lowers will be the loosest. The tension of the cap shrouds is set to be "tight enough" that the spreaders don't rattle, and the mast doesn't pull hard to the side when you yank on the cap shrouds. A good starting point is where you push on it with a good yank and the stay only moves about half an inch.

Once you have this stay set, you then can feel its tightness and go setting all the other stays along the way. As you set the tension on the stays, you will want to sight the mast repeatedly to make sure the mast remains in column and centered over the yacht.

You also want to be certain to start at the top and work your way down the mast. This will make dock tuning the mast a one time thing, as you will set it roughly perfect on your first attempt.

Once you have the shrouds set, it is time to set the headstay and backstay. These stays share the same load of keeping the mast in position, fore-aft. The headstay is best set first, positioning the masthead slightly aft of the mast base as it meets the deck. This will make your mast rake aft just a bit. A good starting point is to look up your yachts design plans and see where the designer wants the mast head to be. If plans are not available, a good rule of thumb is to set the masthead aft the mast base 12 inches for every 50 feet. How to find this position will be discussed in a future post.

The tension of the headstay will be determined by the backstay, which pulls on the headstay via the mast head. Ideally, you want to have a backstay adjuster present that way you can adjust your headstay tension while you sail along.

Headstay tension is the last stay that should be thought of as a static setting. Windward performance depends on headstay tension. The tighter the headstay (to a point) the better your ability to point will be. The looser the headstay (to a point) the more power your headsail will be able to produce. As you bear off the wind, a looser headstay will power up your headsail and provide you more lee helm which will help to pull your boat downwind with speed.

Completing the dockside rigging tune is only the beginning of the rig tune, once this is completed, the next step will be the sail tuning. Sail tuning involves taking the yacht out for a test sail where you will tune the rigging as you sail to maximize your sail shape and performance.

At the end of your dockside tuning, you will never need to know a "number value" for the tension in your stays, instead, you will position the mast to a rough ideal and set the stays to a "good enough" setting that will allow you to safely go out sailing and do the fine tuning of your rigging.

Synthetic Lifelines

Synthetic lifelines allow you to replace your questionable steel lifelines with dyneema that will provide you with a very lightweight lifeline that is immune to corrosion and easy to install yourself. The only specialty component that you need to make the conversion is a gate latch that can be spliced onto a synthetic lifeline. These latches cost around $70 each, and are readily attainable at most chandleries.

Synthetic lifelines are tensioned with lashings that attach to the pulpits. If you cut your lifelines a bit short, you don't need to worry since this will only require you to use a longer lashing.

The biggest issue with synthetic lifelines is chafe. You need to be mindful of sheets rubbing on them, as well as chafe from the stanchions that they pass through. The other issue is the spliced portion of the lifeline will not fit through the stanchion.

Chafe from the sheets can be managed by adjusting the sheet leads, but the chafe of the stanchion can not be avoided. The lifeline will rub on the stanchion because the lifeline passes through the stanchion. The trick is to polish the passage through the stanchion so that the chafe point is reduced.

As far as the splicing goes, there is a trick to work the splice around the stanchion. The splice is simply passed over the outside of the stanchion so that the bulk is bypassed. Be sure to leave enough room to scoot the spliced area over to inspect for chafe.