Catana Headstay Issues

[Mike Meer]

Interesting point. Two headstays coupled with poor upper angle could enhance the problem. Seems Catana would have thought of that, right?? What's the solution. Install a soft-luff furler on the genoa with a 2:1 halyard?

[Brion Toss]

Hi Mike,
Yeah, it looks like a geometry problem, and yeah, you'd think Catana would have seen that. And they might have. At the very least, the tune doesn't need to be the same on both stays; the lighter-air one should be much slacker. Ideally, the shrouds will only be opposing one (loaded) stay at a time, at least when the loads are highest, on the wind in serious air.
Next, runners could be helpful; you could tune the heavy-load stay for light-to-medium, and crank on the runners when driving hard. This would also have the virtue of lowering the standing load on the Dynex shrouds, dialling down the creep.
Finally, assuming that the Dynex is typically massive, in terms of break strength, you just don't tune it like wire. My long-aborning "Fair Leads" on Dynex will cover this in detail, but the short form is that, since tuning is about anticipating stretch, and since low relative load means very, very little stretch, then you tune Dynex nearly slack, and still get net 1x19 performance.
Fair leads,
Brion Toss