by GreenLake » Fri Aug 28, 2020 5:32 pm
Depends on the sailmaker. Sail that was on my boat simply had the end of the pocket sown shut, but an opening above, so you could angle in the batten. (In other words, the pockets widened towards the end, an only the bottom half, the width of the batten, was sown shut. Simple, but effective.
The four battens should be of different length. I think the two middle ones are longer (if the sail is class legal). If you got a set of four middle ones by accident, you can simply make your own battens from anything suitably light, flat and not too flexible. The sail that came with the boat had long lost the original battens and someone had replaced them by a motley collection of thin pieces of wood. I wanted something that better filled out the pockets and took two five-gallon paint stir sticks and ripped them to half the desired width and glued them together, sanded them down, rounded all edges and corners and coated. Those lasted me until it was time to finally replace the sails (well, technically, the sails should have been ready for replacement from day one, but I decided to make my beginner's mistakes with old sails).
~ green ~ lake ~ ~