Trouble with the headsail

We have been having trouble with our headsail since we got the boat.

Sometimes it worked just fine, and other times it was REALLY hard to pull out or to roll back in. We had a yankee cut sail on the roller furling, so its a pretty small sail that shouldn’t take a lot of power to unfurl or to furl back up.

Yet we kept having problems with it.

When we got back from our week long family trip we knew it was time to investigate. We broke out the bosun’s chair and up the mast I went.

Once I reached the top I saw the problem right away. The halyard for the fore-sail was sheared almost all of the way through. The cover was completely cut, and the core of the rope wasn’t far from failing.

The halyard had been wrapping around the fore-stay every time we tried to unfurl or roll in the sail. This chafing had eventually caused the rope to rip apart.

Views from the Top of the Mast

I helped the sail turn as it should, still at the top of the mast, so we could fully unfurl the sail in order to pull the sail down to the deck. Ben released the halyard and pulled the sail to the deck.

We had been wanting to try out the big genoa anyways, so we thought this was a good occasion to switch sails. First we had to fix or replace the halyard. Rather than going through the hassle and expense of replacing it I decided to try to create a new splice in the part of the line above the chafed part. There was just enough space left to do the splice we needed. After a lot of frustration with the fids (splicing tools) we have, and 3.5 hours, I finally got the splice done!

A Splicing Gallery

On Sunday, before heading out with some friends, we pulled up the big genoa. This sail is HUGE. Compared to our small Yankee sail, this sail is a monster.

We got it up and it looked like it was sitting right at the top. There is a metal piece where the halyard is attached to the top of the furler. The sail is attached to the bottom of this piece. The top is supposed to spin around the furler as the sail is pulled in or out to keep the halyard in one place, but allow the sail to spin around the furler. This metal piece catches on a black plastic cap to keep the halyard in place.

The problem when we had the Yankee up, is the black cap was set for the Genoa, not the Yankee, which is much smaller. So the metal piece was nowhere near the cap to keep the halyard from spinning with the sail.

Our first weekend out with the new Genoa went great, and the sail worked exactly as it should! We were psyched.

Now, as I write this, a week later, we are back to the drawing board. As we were out today we suddenly couldn’t pull the Genoa back in as we tried to tack.

One issue with how big the Genoa is, is that in order to tack around the staysail, we have to furl the Genoa in almost all the way as we tack. Except it would only furl in about 1/4 of the way before it stuck.

We aren’t sure what the problem is, but we ended up having to douse the Genoa to the deck since we couldn’t furl it in. So now we still have a problem, and a deck full of Genoa. The plan is to pull out the manual for the furler and see if we can figure out what is going on. Updates in a future post.

Then we plan to put the Yankee sail back up, after lowering the black cap to the appropriate height and hopefully we will have a fully functional headsail again.