South Sound Sailing Society Ship-to-Shore: Letter

To Furl or Not to Furl

In 2000 my wife Lori and I moved to Olympia. For me this was a return to my boyhood home. For Lori this was yet another location in our more than 20 year military lifestyle. Upon returning to Southern Puget Sound I had to have a sailboat. Lori on the other hand had only been on a sailboat twice in her life, once for a week on our honeymoon and the second time for a week cruise on summer vacation. With this combined wealth of experience we set out to buy and rig the perfect south Sound sailboat.

Through the help of Mary Lou Rafelo at Admiralty Yacht Sales, we found a very well kept 1988 Catalina 30 MkII at the Tacoma Yacht Club. After bringing Tinker Toy home to Olympia, and securing her into a berth at Swantown Marina, we started learning about the current state of sailing. For myself sailing is second nature. I literally grew up with the SSSS, my father was one of the founding Members. I was taught to sail and race with or against the founding SSSS Members. Though all of that is ancient history. In 1978 I left The Evergreen State College to join the US Air Force. Until February 2000 I have been traveling around the globe with Uncle Sam. Basically I had not sailed but a handful of weeks since August 1978.

So we are two people trying to figure out the nuances of sailing in the 21st Century. To me, the biggest change in sailing is roller furling. Roller furling is a great and wonderful tool; it has made shorthanded sailing handling an easy reality. However, the mainsail, even with lazy jacks or a Dutchman flaking system, is still a bit of a pain. Since Lori and I almost exclusively sail our boat with just the two of us aboard, we wanted to find a way to minimize the amount of time either of us had to spend on deck. We researched mast-furling systems, but the former club racer in me just could not come to grips with a roachless mainsail. Finally after a couple of articles in Practical Sailor and Cruising World, we got onto the idea of using a boom furling system. These are more expensive, but looked to us as a safer and more logical solution. Should the furling system fail, the sail would still drop to the deck like a normal mainsail; whereas with a mast furling system, if the furler jams part way you can neither raise nor lower the sail. A few weeks of web crawling and deciding that I really did not want to cut a really big hole through our mast, we settled on the ProFurl boom furling system. We found a rigging shop in Massachusetts, Rigging Only, that had what we felt was a reasonable price for the system. Thus began our major upgrade project.

After contacting Rigging Only, they sent me a list of measurements I would need to provide them with and a requirement for an outline drawing of the profile of the mast. The measuring was straight forward: get out the tape measure, stretch it over required distance, take a reading, do it again, fix the reading, you know the drill. The profile drawing was another story. Basically the best way to do this is with the mast off the boat. You take a piece of paper, place it over the butt end of the mast and trace the outline shape. Well I was not yet ready to drop the mast, so how to get the shape transferred. We finally settled on bending two plastic coat hangers snug up to either side of the mast and then placing them on the paper and tracing the shape. This seemed to work. One of the oddities of the ProFurl system is that it uses an absolutely rigid boom vang. This new rigid boom vang requires very specific angles of attachment. These specific angles required that we place the new boom six inches higher on the mast than the OEM boom. Anyway, with all the appropriate measurements and the drawing we ordered the new boom.

Rigging Only shipped the new boom and mast track out to us in two weeks. It showed up in our driveway one night: a fifteen foot long, two foot high, two foot wide cardboard and wooden box with many aluminum pieces and parts inside. The rules provided by ProFurl are very complete and specifically state that this is not a do-it-yourself project; installation is only to be performed by a rigger or ProFurl authorized dealer. As you might guess we sort of ignored that part. For the next week and a half my wife and I dry fitted all of the mast track pieces together. We placed all the fittings onto the boom, and tried to visualize how the sail would connect to everything.

Probably the most complicated part of this whole installation was the attachment of the boom’s gooseneck and the boom vang connection at the mast. ProFurl took the drawing that we had made and pre-bent some sheet aluminum plates to conform to our mast profile. They pre drilled these plates for their fittings. It was then left to us to drill connection holes through the plates into the mast, eight holes in each plate, four plates, two for the gooseneck, and two for the boom vang. And once all the holes were drilled, we got to rivet them together with the provided stainless steel rivets. Putting the mast track on, and then installing the boom onto the gooseneck was very easy. The mast track is actually the same aluminum track used for a genoa furling system; they just adapted connectors to fit in the joints that attach to the mast. The instructions were well written and walked us through all the steps. They even provided a template to use to determine how far away the mast track had to be from the backstay.

ProFurl’s instructions state that this installation can be completed with the mast installed on the boat. This may be true, but I’m definitely not that adept at boson’s chair work. And then there is the whole gooseneck and boom vang riveting aspect, you definitely need an air gun to secure those rivets.

Once the boom was installed, we again hauled out the measure tape and figured out what the dimensions were for our mainsail. We contacted ProFurl of Florida, the national distributor, and got them to fax us the sailmaker’s instructions. We sent the measurements and sailmaker’s instructions off to our sailmaker and waited. One of the advantages of this system over a mast furling system was that there are not any restrictions on battens in the main. So we ordered a new full-length batten mainsail.

After another four week wait, the new sail arrived. Off we went to Swantown to go sailing. The first day we didn’t actually go sailing. It took many hours to fit the sail to the boom, adjust the boom vang so that the sail would go up the mast and roll up onto the boom, and of course to fit the new full length battens to the sail. Since we had a brand new mainsail, we also purchased a new genoa. This too had to be installed and fitted. That took maybe a half-hour.

It has been a couple of months now, and we’ve sailed the boat at least a dozen times with the new configuration. At first hoisting a mainsail up a mast track is very, very difficult. We used plenty of luff tape lubricant, but it took six to ten sail hoistings before I could pull it up past halfway without using the winch handle. Now the sail goes up most of the way by hand, then onto the winch for the last five feet or so. The outhaul is fixed, and there is not a provision for a cunningham, but the ability to control the shape with the halyard is still there. Of course the ultimate ability with this configuration is reefing. You basically have an infinite number of reef points. Though ProFurl does recommend that you bring the head of the main down to one of the mast track connection joints, and use them as a guide or reef point. Bringing the sail down could not be easier, just ease off on the halyard and pull on the single furling line. The same principle applies when reefing, except that when the head of the sail drops down to appropriate point, you lock it in place, and tighten up the luff to the appropriate tension.

All in all we are very happy with our new Roller Furling Boom. If you ever want to look over one of these systems, just let us know.

Al Cameron, Tinker Toy