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For Want of a Nail

The breezy afternoon quickly turned into an extremely breezy evening; the cutter first reefed its jib, then its main, then its jib again, and finally started the engine and furled both sails altogether. Or not quite, as there weren't enough turns on the drum of the jib furler to get the sail completely in.

It's a fairly common problem, rooted in the fact that most of us sail most of the time in fairly mild weather. So we seldom see, for instance, the kind of wind and wave action to which our mooring lines are properly scaled, seldom see the kind of vessel heel that gives yacht designers nightmares when they are struggling with ultimate righting moment points, and of course we usually reef and furl sooner than we absolutely have to. So it can come as a surprise to us when we encounter the conditions that our boats and their gear were designed to deal with. In the case of the cutter, there had always before been enough turns on the drum to furl the sail completely, but that was because the crew had always furled before the wind got really intense. On this day they waited a little too long to begin furling, so that when they finally began to wind it in, the sail wound around the foil much more tightly than it ever had, and this required more revolutions of the foil, and more furling line per square foot of sail furled.

If this seems like an odd concept, picture a jib that is winding up in light airs: you pull on the furling line and the sail very docilely wraps around the foil. Given loose sheets, the turns of sail go on loosely, bulkily, so that every subsequent wrap goes over an increasingly bulky series of other wraps. The sail winds up quickly, without using up the furling line, because the furled circumference is so big.

Now imagine furling in the same conditions while keeping a strain on the sheets: the foil turns and the first layer of sail lays against it, fitting like a glove. The second turn goes over the first, just as tight. Rather than the folds and airspaces of the previous furl, we now have extremely snug plies of Dacron, so the foil has to make many more revolutions to wrap it all up. If the rigger didn't anticipate such a tight furl, it is possible that there just won't be enough furling line on the drum to finish the job.

And now imagine the same tight furl, only this time with a sail stretched out a bit by prior use, and stretched even more in the strong wind blowing while the furling is happening. You can easily, as the crew of the cutter found out, end up with a quarter or more of the jib still exposed, and no handy way to finish the furl.

In these circumstances, some people will assume that a bit of gear is just stuck, or that the wind load is so great that one can't furl by hand. Either way, that's what winches are for, right? So they crank away until the furling line breaks, and now they're dealing with a 120% Genoa, or larger, in forty knots of breeze.

Another, somewhat wiser approach is to let the sheets go, then sail in circles to wind the sail up. This can actually work, given enough sea room, but our cutter was very close inshore when this problem occurred, and of course it was a lee shore, so that scrap of sail was driving them onto the land, with no room to maneuver. So they just snugged up the sheets and started the motor.

Trouble was, as they came up into the wind to get a bit off the land, the same scrap of jib began flogging violently. And that flogged the sheets against the shrouds on both sides. Hard, repeatedly, violently. And that caused the sheets to chafe right through and part, leaving two short bits attached to the flogging clew, and two longer bits in the water, where they quickly went astern and wrapped themselves profoundly around the propeller.

Okay, no engine, can't get off this shore under main alone, we better anchor. But now the foredeck is being lashed by sheet remnants, pieces of 9/16" Dacron that could probably kill you if they hit you, so how can you set the anchor? And even if you could dodge those lines, the shore is right there, and the bottom is not optimal holding ground at the best of times; you are on the rocks.

Some version of the above happens with discouraging regularity. Sometimes the problem happens in a marina, or at anchor, or in the haulout yard (set the sail to dry it or check leads when there's little or no breeze, furl it after way too much wind suddenly comes up). Sometimes the sail won't furl, not because there's too little rope on the drum, but because the turns of rope were wound on loosely when the sail was set, so the turns bound on each other when the sail was furled. And of course there are a whole host of other potential roller-furler disasters that people have to deal with. But, given good-quality hardware, it always comes down to poor installation, poor use, and/or poor maintenance. Whoever installed the furler in the cutter that went ashore did not put enough turns on the drum, and no one on the crew did so subsequently. This, for all practical purposes, is equivalent to installing an engine and propeller that will only drive the boat 3 or 4 knots. Not a problem, since that's as fast as you need to go getting in and out of the marina, right? But of course engines and propellers are properly sized with the possibility of heavy duty in mind.

In the case that I'm thinking of, the cutter was pulled off the rocks with relatively minor damage to the hull, but this scenario often leads to much more serious damage to vessel and crew, and all for want of a few turns of line on a drum. The moral, of course, is that we need to remember the extremes. We need to remember that, as the saying goes, "Anyone can take the helm when the seas are calm." We need to allow our vessels their full, awesome strength.

Fair leads,
Brion Toss