Every year at about this time, sailing magazines feature articles with titles like "Preparing Your Boat for Spring Sailing." These articles tell the do-it-yourselfer how to check engine belts, wiring, through-hulls, and other boat details, and they invariably describe techniques for inspecting rigging. "Look for cracked swages", they'll say, or, "Run a rag up and down the wires, to check for broken yarns." And as a rule, these are very helpful pieces of advice, that have no doubt prevented many rig failures. But they might have caused even more.

You see, the advice invariably comes in the form of a checklist, an attempt to identify and address all the components that are likely to cause problems. Similar checklists are used for structural members, engines, plumbing, and electrical troubleshooting, but these subjects have a huge advantage over rigging: most sailors understand them, at an intuitive level, as systems, because we all grow up with structural members, engines, plumbing, and wiring. After long, intimate exposure to these systems, most of us see them as more than a series of components; we see them as integrated ideas, so that the value and significance of each component is clear. If an electrical terminal is corroded, we are likely to understand, not only that efficiency is impaired, but that excess heat will result, which could pose a fire danger. We know this because we "get' the principles of electricity. Likewise, if our engine has been running a certain number of hours, we will see to it that the oil gets changed, even though there is absolutely no evidence that the engine is in any trouble. We do this because experience has taught us that delaying oil changes can lead to disaster.

But most people are far from intimate with the nature of rigging. We see the wires and the turnbuckles and the tangs, we understand that the failure of any of those components could ruin our day, but surveying and maintaining them can be like correcting an essay written in a foreign language, armed only with a dictionary and knowledge of a few basic phrases.

That is why the "checklist" approach to rig maintenance can get us into so much trouble. Until we can see the big picture, until the items on our checklist have been informed by knowledge of how all those items relate to each other, we are in danger of missing the things that matter most. For many sailors, the barrier of ignorance can act as a stimulus to learning, but there is a frustrating lack of useful, consistent information on the subject rigging. For other sailors, ignorance only stimulates a state of denial, a feeling of, "Well it hasn't broken yet, it's still shiny, and I was just out in 30 knots last week, so don't talk to me about maintenance." And still other sailors live in a state of apprehension, putting off a thorough inspection for as long as possible, and then hoping for the best. Too often, they wait until the last possible minute, and one of the scariest opening lines I hear as a rigger goes something like this: "We're heading offshore next month, and I was wondering if you could just jump aloft and see if everything is okay."

Oh, how I dread that one, always delivered in an offhand manner, the phrase "jump aloft" always inserted as a talisman of vernacular, as if to ward off any possibility that I might actually find something up there worth worrying about. These last-minute surveys almost always result in delayed voyages, because we almost always find the terrifying results of too-long-delayed maintenance, and/or less-than-intelligently-engineered modifications, and/or problems that are simply the result of poor original design.

So no matter how sailors respond to holes in their knowledge of rigging, their rigging tends to get them in trouble. Obviously, ignoring the problem, hoping for the best, or doing whatever patchwork of attention you can are poor substitutes for reliability. How, then, do we go about arriving at a deeper understanding of rigging? How do we overcome a lifetime of culture-based ignorance, and learn to appreciate the tension/compression structures that make our sailing vessels work? And how do we then apply that knowledge, so theory can be put to work in day-to-day upkeep? If you, the sailor, have the answers to these questions, your rig will do its job better, safer, for less money, and for longer. You won't end up in one of those grimly fascinating rigging stories, the ones about dismastings in far-off places. And you won't be lying awake nights, wondering if all those strings that hold up your mast and sails are going to make it through the day, or the season.

Admittedly, this is a deep, complicated subject, and I certainly can't do more than give a general answer here. But here's the heart of it: Get to Know the Materials; Get to Know the Machines, Get to Know the Loads; and then Track the Flow of Forces.

Let's start with materials. The first thing to understand about rigging materials is that they are elastic, and that repeated stretching affects their long-term integrity. Even if your boat is just sitting at the dock, it is going through teensy, cumulative load cycles. And if you're out sailing regularly, you are producing greater elastic movements. Materials strength, and ductility also figure into the mix, both in terms of rig design and rig longevity. And, on an economic note, which materials you choose can reflect the cost/benefit of each material. but only if you understand both the cost and the benefit. Rod rigging, for example, tends to be much more expensive than wire rigging, but for some boats, the combination of its unequaled corrosion-resistance and its performance advantages can outweigh its monetary cost.

Machines, in a rigging sense, can mean something as complex as a roller-furling system, but it also means turnbuckles, terminals, blocks, winches - anything that modifies how force is applied. Every machine has its own requirements and its own quirks; much of the work we do at our loft involves addressing problems brought about by inattentiveness to the needs of rig machines. Winches, for instance, need regular cleaning and lubrication, but they also need to have their pawls changed occasionally, plus they can be damaged by oversize loads, insufficient turns on the drum, improper assembly, especially of self-tailer stripper arms, and we too often see winches destroyed by corrosion, just because the original installer failed to isolate dissimilar metals.

Speaking of corrosion,it comes in many forms. Stainless steel, for example, can corrode, and still be shiny and strong-looking. And aluminum can crumble away just from being in contact with stainless steel. Climate is also a big variable, with materials in the sunny South corroding far faster than the same materials in the cool North. Plain old oxidation can degrade even high-quality fittings, given enough time, and plain old salt, especially in combination with heat, light, and load, can destroy materials in a hurry.

Next, let's look at loads. It is apparent, to the eye, that the standing rigging holds up the mast, and the running rigging holds up the sails, but appearances are very deceiving. The standing rigging actually acts to connect the force of the wind to the force of the vessel's own inherent stability. In the design phase, determining rig loads involves a complex juggling act of load magnitude, acceleration, and distribution. Fortunately, there are well-established calculation shortcuts available, so that ordinary folk can work out the appropriateness of their rigging sizes, with only a modicum of study (For more on this -and everything else in this essay- take a look at the "Rigger's Apprentice" or other rig design books). A good rig inspection should, by definition, have a design aspect to it, to see if the wire is the right size, and compatible in size with tangs, turnbuckles, and the mast itself.

Similarly, running rigging doesn't just hold the sails up; it shapes and balances the sails, so that they can work most effectively in relationship to the wind and the hull. Accordingly, the halyards and sheets must be strong enough to withstand appropriate tension, inelastic enough to maintain shape despite variations in tension, supple enough to be easy to manipulate, and still be tough enough to resist abrasion and ultraviolet degradation long enough to justify their cost. As with the standing rigging, determining rig loads is the key to proper selection of size, construction, and material for a given job. And as with standing rigging, rig inspection must involve more than a condition assessment; it must determine appropriateness.

Finally, there's the flow of forces. This is perhaps the most critical component of thorough rig appreciation. The pull of the jib on its stay, for instance, stresses the stay and its attachment points. But it also stresses the backstay, and thus the stern. Depending on hull structure and load level, the stress on the stern can also affect the alignment of the prop shaft. But wait, there's more. Some of the jibstay load is lateral, so that the upper shrouds are also stressed, siphoning so much of the load away that one can almost always make the backstay smaller than the jibstay, which reduces windage and weight aloft, as well as reducing rig cost. The upper shrouds, in turn, compress the spreaders, and all the wires at the masthead compress the mast. And so it goes, with the force from that one sail flowing around corners, in tension and compression, and intermingling and interacting with the forces from other sails as it makes its way to the water. If you can see this flow, really see the rig as a dynamic system, you will automatically be in good shape to anticipate trouble, to make the most of your check list, to avoid missing significant relationships as well as significant details.

This "Flow of Forces" notion can be expressed in terms of vectors and the like, if you are engineeringly inclined, but any sailing vessel rig is a wonderfully complex thing, very subtle in its particulars. In addition, sailing rigs come in such a vast array of types and variations on types, each of which is likely to comprise a distinct combination of hardware and layout, making a completely logical assessment difficult at best. Simple attentiveness and receptivity are key to hearing what a rig has to say. Reaching a moment of gestalt can be at least as valuable as an affinity for trigonometry.

Having said all that, let me finish by saying that checklists can be a very good thing, especially if you don't survey a lot of rigs, and therefore need to carry your database around on paper. But that checklist will mean a lot more, be a lot more effective, if you use it to complement an innate sense of the rig as a system.

   Fair leads,

      Brion Toss

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Last modified: March 7, 2000