Oversizing Your Rigging

You often hear people suggest that you should oversize the stays of your yacht if you want to go ocean voyaging. They make it sound like if the stays are the weak point and making them larger will turn any sailboat into a blue water yacht.

The reasoning behind this is in the ocean, you will encounter storms with no place to hide. You will be forced to sail through weather you would only encounter in a nightmare, and your rigging will need to hold all of this abuse. By increasing the size of your stays, you are also increasing the strength of the wire, making the entire system stronger! Or so the common thought would lead you to believe. 

The problem with increasing the size of your steel standing rigging is two fold. First, the added wire size directly translates into added weight aloft. This will make your yacht much more tender and life during a storm will be far less than deplorable. The second reason is the wire size of your rigging is not the weak link in your standing rigging. Your entire rig is a calculated design where everything shares the responsibility. Increasing the wire size but not increasing the size of the clevis pins that hold the terminals is pointless. Now you have heavier rigging of the same strength! Remember, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so increasing the size of one link will not make the chain any stronger. True upsizing of your rigging would entail increasing the size of everything involved in your standing rigging. 

With steel rigging, there is a severe weight penalty for increasing the size of the wire. Synthetic standing rigging doesn't carry such a weight penalty; instead it carries a financial penalty. Increasing the size of the line used will increase the cost per foot dramatically! For example, 6mm New England Ropes STS-HSR costs $2.79 per foot. 7mm New England Ropes STS-HSR costs 3.49 per foot. That is a $0.70 increase for each foot of line you need to buy! If you take it a step further and go to 9mm New England Ropes STS-HSR, you are now looking at $6.09 per foot! Now you are looking at an increase of $3.30 for every foot just so that you can upsize your rigging by 3mm! 

Windage is another concern with increasing the size of your synthetic standing rigging, as it is suddenly a larger stay to pass through the wind. This is only a real concern for racers, as the average cruiser has enough junk on the deck to nullify any penalty from larger stays. 

After the financial burden, increasing the size of your synthetic standing rigging does offer one major advantage, it decreases the amount of creep you will experience. Having larger stays means that each stay will be loaded a lower percentage of its maximum. If you apply a static load to synthetic standing rigging, it will creep. If the load is greater than 10% of its maximum breaking load, you will experience significant creep. If the load is less than 10%, you will experience less creep. As you increase in size, the strength of the line increases dramatically, and so would the decrease in creep. 

Increasing the size of your steel rigging is pointless, as this will simply add weight aloft and cause you to heel over more while sailing. Increasing the size of your synthetic standing rigging will cost a lot more but it will also give you less creep. 

Ideally, you should try to keep your yacht's rigging at the designed size. When the rigging was designed, the designer factored in the heeling forces of the wind and the ballast in the keel. Altering from this would mean deviating away from an expertly calculated state into an experimental state.

Dealing with Winter's Stretch

Dyneema, used in synthetic standing rigging, is remarkably strong and light weight. This makes it an excellent choice for standing rigging, as it supports the mast without adding unwanted weight aloft.

The dark secret about synthetic standing rigging is that the dyneema has a negative coefficient of thermal expansion, meaning that it actually elongates as it cools. Aluminum, a common spar material, has a positive coefficient of thermal expansion, meaning that it will shrink while cooling.  Stainless steel rigging also has a positive coefficient of thermal expansion, so it will shrink along with the aluminum at roughly the same rate.

As winter approaches, the mast will shrink ever so slightly, as will steel rigging, meaning that it will all stay roughly the same tension. This is why steel rigging seems to stay the same tightness year round, as it expands and contracts with the mast. 

Synthetic standing rigging, on the other hand, becomes rediculously loose as winter approaches. The mast contracts ever so slightly, while the dyneema expands a bit. The combination is a longer than normal stay on a shorter than normal mast! You might be tempted to simply tighten the deadeyes during winter, that way the standing rigging is tight again, but the problem is that once summer returns, the mast will expand slightly and the dyneema will contract drastically.

It is very fair to say that synthetic standing rigging is temperature sensitive. I prefer to tune synthetic rigging at 80*F. I find that this gives you wonderful sailing in summer, when it is much hotter, and rigging that is still functional into the cooler times of spring and fall. In the dead of winter, it is not uncommon to find that your headstay has expanded a full 1/2 inch (12mm). 

While it might look as if the rigging is lost during the winter, you must admit that no one wants to go sailing when it is 20*F outside! As the weather warms up, the rigging will all go back into its place without any need for adjustments or tuning. 

This works well for fair weather sailors who only sail when the weather is inviting. What happens if you need to sail in the winter? Should you tighten your rigging for the sail and be sure to loosen it as the weather warms? What if you forget to loosen it and the contracting stay becomes too tight and breaks a fitting or rips out a chainplate? 

While I have yet to go sailing with synthetic rigging in the winter, we are probably going to be encountering this scenario soon. Maddie and I have set out cruising and we will be crossing the North Atlantic in the winter. We hope to arrive in the Azores by December and may be sailing over to Portugal in February! The winds will certainly be cold and the rigging will become slack! 

I have the standing rigging tuned to perfection at 80*F, and I know that if I tighten it during the winter, I will have to go through all the trouble of re-tuning the rigging as spring rolls around. If only there was a way to mark the 80*F position on the lashing! 

There is! Our plan is to setup a secondary lashing that will run over the current lashings to tension the rigging without disturbing the current setting. The current lashings will remain, but the new lashings will go over them and pull the stay tight once again. With the new lashings pulling everything tight, we will be able to safely sail during the winter to reach our next destination, and simply untie the new lashings as spring approaches. As soon as we untie the new lashings, the old lashings will take over and allow the stays to contract to their old settings! 

This idea has not been tested, but it is my solution to winter sailing on my own boat as we cruise the North Atlantic in the winter with synthetic standing rigging. 

How to Anchor by Sail

The commonly accepted practice to anchor requires a motor. The typical plan is to drop the anchor and then back down on the anchor with your motor. As the thrust from the propeller pulls your yacht backwards, the anchor will be buried into the seabed and hold you from drifting back. When you come to a stop, you know the anchor is well set and secure for the night.

If you are sailing, there is no motor involved in reversing to backdown on the anchor, so you can't really backdown on the anchor to know that it has set! This means that you would drop the anchor and wait for the wind to blow you back. As you are pushed back, the anchor will set (or drag). If your anchor will set, then all is fine, but if your anchor will drag, then you will slowly (or quickly) drift back.

To avoid this dilemma of not knowing if the anchor will set or drag when the wind picks up, there is a trick that still doesn't require the motor!

When sailing into your anchorage, simply drop the sails and continue to drift along with speed. While you are still moving at around 2 to 3 knots, drop the anchor and at least 5:1 scope based on the water depth. The boat will continue to drift forward as the anchor rests on the seabed.

When the yacht covers the distance of the anchor rode, the chain will become tight and start to pull on the anchor with a considerable force. This will jerk the anchor horizontally along the seabed and bury it into the substrate.

If the anchor drags, the yacht will continue to move forward until the anchor sets (hopefully). When the anchor sets, it will be very apparent because the bow will stop in its tracks and the entire yacht will spin around with some speed. This is why it is important to not do this at speeds greater than 3 knots because the force on the chain could be a bit too dramatic.

When the boat spins around, the anchor is set, and you can then let out additional chain should you desire; all while knowing that your anchor is firmly set into the seabed!

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.

Cooking While Underway

It is often touted that a gimbal stove is an absolute must onboard a cruising yacht. The gimbal allows the entire stove to swing with the heeled vessel, keeping the contents on the cooktop level. This means that you can cook while sailing with a rail in the water.

The alternative to a gimbal stove is a fixed unit, that simply leans over with the yacht as you sail. These are touted as "only useful in port" when the yacht is anchored and sitting vertically.

The truth is, fixed stoves have been around and used on sailing vessels for far longer than gimbal stoves have. There is no denying the convenience of a gimbaled unit, but this doesn't mean that a fixed stove is inoperable while sailing.

While working on a tall ship, I had an interesting conversation with the ships cook. The tall ship has a very large fixed stove, and no pot holders! She said that cooking on the fixed stove was simple, all you need to do is use a very tall pot and never fill it more than half. As the ship heels over, the food will lean over in the pot, but the contents will not spill over. The lack of pot holders was also alarming, but apparently the friction of the pot on the iron grate was enough to keep the pots in place. Since they don't slide, they don't bother with pot holders.

I took this information back to our own boat and applied it to great lengths. Our stove is fixed, and we use it frequently while under sail. We simply only cook while sailing on port tack, as this would put the stove on the leeward rail. If the contents of the stove were to spill out, they would spill away from any crew standing by it, cooking the delicious meal.

If we are heeling excessively, we simply heave to, which reduces heel and makes life inside the cabin much more enjoyable!

Cooking on a fixed stove is nothing out of the ordinary on a sailing yacht, it simply takes a few precautions to make sure that the meal is safely created without any injury to the crew. This will allow you to cruise on a smaller budget as fixed stoves are cheaper to purchase and much easier to install.