DaySailer.org Forum

My wife was admiring a West Wight Potter a couple of slips down from ours. When I asked her what was so appealing about it, she said she liked it because it looked so simple and easy to sail.

That made me step back and look at our rigging, which included stern traveler, Barber haulers, storm jib leads, jib furling line, topping lift, and lazy jacks. The next time out I removed it all. I even took off the bow and stern mooring lines. The cockpit went from 19 pieces of rope down to seven (three sheets, downhaul, vang, and CB controls). My crew likes it.

It takes more time to reef and furl, and the boat does not point as high, but if people are having more fun on the water, I suppose there isn't any point in getting back faster.

Talbot,

You're a smart man for taking your wife's input and looking at your boat objectively.
One of the things that attracted me to the daysailer was the simplicity of it all. I look at and admire the rigging others use and even have a notebook with all kinds of rigging diagrams but when reality comes to my boat it is basic systems with good controls, easy access and an uncluttered cockpit.

Fred

me too, i sail a 'bare boat' ds1 (with good sails) because its a beautiful, sweet handling and fun boat to sail. the only 'aftermarket part' is the 3:1 boom thang. i'm not racing but few bigger 'cruiser types' can keep ahead when crossing tacks. i'm more interested in seeing the new wind than adjusting some 'twingle'

Definitely something to be said for simple. Every time I've contemplated adding some new "twingle" to the boat, I ask myself: is it something that will make the boat easier to singlehand (since I rarely have crew or race), and more importantly, will it make the boat safer to sail under any/all circumstances? The answer is usually yes, but there are rigging items that I've added, tried out, found to not meet those criteria in actual practice, and subsequently removed/put back the way they were before. A good example of the latter was a fancy-schmancy sea-anchor/deployment/retrieval line I knocked together when TRW first got me. Didn't work worth a <BEEP>, and just cluttered things up. It was soon relegated to the "old boat stuff tote" ...

Tim makes a good point. Some of those things (lazy jacks, jib furler) were specifically intended to help me sail alone. My crew's point was that when I'm with her, I'm -not- sailing alone.

Also, she was pointing out that as an instructional platform, my boat was very challenging. Partly it was the visual overload of red, green, blue, and white lines (They're all color-coded, but there are so many, it just blurs for her, like a kaleidoscope.) Even worse is when I actually -use- the lines. My wife usually drives, but she's still learning how to find the wind on different points of sail. If I start tweaking the sail set with all my tuning gizmos, the situation never stays the same long enough for her to figure out what's going on.

Interested to hear about the sea anchor. I have one of those too, and had a similar experience. What I found is that the tall cabin of the DS seems to catch the wind and turn the boat down, even with the sea anchor set. I end up drifting sideways to the wind. The times you use a sea anchor are in heavy wind and seas, so the boat rolled violently. I've had better luck heaving to, or otherwise keeping the boat moving.

I have seen some yachts with a small upside-down triangle rigged to the aft end of the boom. It's just a stiff piece of canvas that looks like it's strapped between the boom and the deck. (At this point the main is down and the boom is fixed.) The idea, I guess, is to create a powerful weathervane effect to keep the wind from pushing the bow around. Another modification to consider when the crew isn't there to tell me get off the water if the wind is so strong I can't control the boat.

Yeah, the sea anchor was something I tried before I was enlightened as to the art of heaving-to ...

I'm with Tim on this one. I look at any addition to the boat in terms of how much simpler or more complicated will it make the boat. More complicated = longer rig time. The only additions to my boat are the boom vang and the jib halyard tensioner. In this year's Florida 120, we had an afternoon leg on day one that wound up being a beat. I don't have barber haulers on my boat but I rigged one with a spare piece of line. I tied a bowline around the jib sheet and fed the other end of the line through the windward jib fairlead/cleat. I pulled the loaded jib sheet 6" closer to the centerline and picked up the 10 degrees on the course I needed. The rest of the cruise I didn't have barber haulers cluttering up the cockpit when they weren't needed.

That suggests a general strategy: Rig whatever you want, but set each line up so it can be removed if you don't need it.

I think I could re-encrust my boat with most of its lines in about 10 minutes. The only ones that require a mast drop are the lazy jacks. With the water level at drought levels in our local lake, this promises to be a short season, so I should have a seven-month winter over which to invent removable jacks and other complications.

That's the beauty of these boats talbot: they are so easy to rig "just the way you want it". And as Chris points out, so easy to "MacGyver" as necessary, even while underway. Just keep a small selection of extra line/hardware onboard, and you can pretty much knock together anything you want/need ...

One option you have is to add one thing at a time back to the setup, let your wife/crew learn/get used to that, then add the next thing. Might reduce the "kaleidoscope" effect you describe. For many of us, we learned how to use these additional features as we went along/added them, slowly and over time. Totally understandable, the "brain-overload" of new crew facing it all for the first time.

Before Ella's arrival, when my "First Mate" (wife) would come along with me, I would let her helm as well as crew. She pretty much "got it", but I would only give her one specific job/line to handle at a time. In fact, she was aboard the time the shroud departed, the incident that ultimately resulted in the addition of the mast hinge, and she was keeping her cool, like that was a normal thing! She was really catching on, but now with Ella, when she goes, Ella goes, and vice-versa, so I make sure we go out in conditions where I can do everything, and they can just enjoy themselves ...

I believe that storm tri-sail thingy is for use at anchor, and I'm seriously considering making one, since I plan to do more overnighters to include anchoring out. Need to do a bit more research tho. Sailrite has some options here, but they seem to be for much bigger boats:

http://search.sailrite.com/?freeText=an ... hor%20sail

My daughters do not subscribe to this list, but if they did, they would now contribute a long list of anecdotes about Sailing With Dad.

Suffice it to say that my first wife (their mom), was not an avid sailor, so it was often just me and the kids, plus dog and toys. (Technical note: Stuffed animals don't float. They are not Coast Guard approved as a throwable device.)

Many of the additions were devised to make it easier for me to do everything when small kids were aboard. The last time I sailed with that crew was the week before my younger girl moved away to college, and she's now a graphic designer in another city. And I only took the old rigging off last week. We never named our most recent boat, but I should probably call it "Inertia."

That would be a great name!