[Jeff_H]

I really enjoy sailing on gaff riggers. They require a completely unique set of skills to sail well. They can be extremely challenging in changing conditions or a seaway but that challenge is what makes them a lot of fun to sail.

Unlike more modern rigs, gaff rigs are quite dynamic, changing sail shape with each roll of the boat. As a boat rolls the boom lifts and moves toward the centerline of the boat and with the additional sail cloth in the leech of the sail, the gaff sags off to leeward further. The result is a sail that has too much twist during part of the cycle, with the head over eased and the foot over trimmed. Proper sail trim can make a big difference in the performance of the boat (both speed, heel angles, and motion comfort), and so care should be taken to try to find that ideal middle setting.

In changeable conditions, the comparatively large stretch in the halyards, the fact that the geometry of the peak halyard changes relative to the throat halyard as the sail is eased, and the previously mentioned dynamic nature of a gaff sail, means that halyard adjustments (typically peak halyard) are very critical and need to be made quite frequently in changeable conditions. Failure to keep up with the adjustments can result in fairly large differences in speed.

Big gaff rigs take good sized crews to sail as it takes a lot of strength to sweat up the throat and peak halyards in unison. While the multi-part tackles reduce the loads on the lines, much of the mechanical advantage is lost to friction. Jibing, the multiple sails of a typical gaff rig mean the need for a lot of sail adjustments and great care is required with the running backstays to keep the rig in the boat and not damage the partners during a jibe.

Gaff rigs are expensive to build and more difficult and expensive to maintain than a more modern rig. Because of their inherent inefficiency, gaff sails tend to be much larger than their Bermuda equivilients and so are more expensive to replace.Like a mainsail on a modern rig, the foresail and mainsail are up all of the time that the boat is sailing, which when combined with the large leech loads and greater chafe,need more much frequent replacement. Chafe against the running backstays and shroud rigging is a constant problem. The hoops and spars need near constant attention as the very act of sailing these craft abrades the finishes. There is a serious chafe problems with the halyards, since they pass through so many blocks and also on most reaching courses abrade against the jaws of the gaff. The halyard are way longer than Bermuda halyards and so with all of that abrasion, need more frequent replacement.

Gaff rigs do not point or run very well. There are a lot of reasons for this. Beating their comparatively low aspect ratios and larger diamater spars offer a lot of wind resistance relative to their drive. The tendancy of the gaffs to sag off to leeward, makes optimum beating sail shape difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain. Running the tendancy of the gaffs to sag way off makes it hard to project the entire sail area to the wind. On stayless rigs, when the boom is eased to close to beam on, the gaff is actually sagged past abeam and so there is actually lift generated in the wrong direction. When trimmed with the gaff perpendicular to the wind, the boom is not fully eased.

Historically, the gaff rig is at its best when used on boats which are limited in their ability to go upwind by a lot of factors (inefficient hull forms and low inherent stability relative to its drag.) They are fun to mess with but make poor rigs for voyaging.

As to the schooner rig, Schooners do only one thing really well, they provide a lot of drive on a reach for the amount of heeling that they induce. They do not point and they do not run. But take a boat with a lot of drag for its stability and the schooner is a great rig.

Schooners, more than any of the other fore and aft rigs, are really a series of rigs. They vary from the modern unstayed cat schooners (like the Freedom 39), to Fengers experiments with wishbone schooners, to the traditional two masted gaff schooners, to the early 19th century square topsail schooners, to the knockabout and the staysail schooners of the late 1930’s, to the 4, 5 and 6 masted cargo schooners of the late 19th and early 20th century. Each of these have distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Schooners in one form or another, have been around for a very long time. Like most multi-masted rigs, they evolved in the days when breaking a rig into a lot of smaller sails made sense. Multi-masted rigs resulted in a rig with a greater number of smaller low aspect ratio sails. These proportionately smaller sails reduced stretch within the individual sails, made it easier to manhandle the sails and make sail shape adjustments. This was a time before before winches, light weight- low stretch sail cloth, high strength- low stretch line, and low friction blocks. In the days before these important advances these proportionately smaller sails powered up less in a gust as compared to having larger sails. While multiple small sails are less efficient, the hulls of the era were so inefficient that this loss of sail efficiency did not hurt much.

Multiple masts, along with bowsprits and boomkins, allowed boats to have more sail area that could be spread out closer to the water. In a time when stone internal ballasting was the norm, this was important as it maximized the amount of drive while minimizing heeling moments. Multiple masts meant more a little more luff length and more luff length meant greater drive force on a reach or close reach. But multiple masts also meant more weight aloft and much more aerodynamic drag, increasing heel some and greatly reducing the relative efficiency of the sails. Multi mast rigs also have the issue of downdraft interference, meaning that each sail is operating in the disturbed and turbulent air of the sails upwind of it, which also further greatly reduces the efficiency of multi mast rigs.

Schooners are best suited for high drag, burdensome vessels with comparatively little stability. They are best used in sailing venues where they predominantly will be reaching between 30 degrees above a beam reach to approximately 50 degrees below a beam reach. Because of the geometry and inherently high drag of the schooner rig they are not very good rigs upwind or down. Upwind, the large amount of aerodynamic drag from the spars and, in stayed rigs, rigging, coupled with the low aspect ratio sails typical of a schooner rig, and the down draft problems of a multi-masted rig, results in very poor windward perforance. When compared with Yawls that can drop thier mizzen when beating without much consequence, a Schooners primary drive sail(s) are acting in the wind shadow of the entire rig.

Probably the highest upwind efficiency is achieved in schooners with lug foresails. On a schooner, lug foresails are not actually ‘lug rigged’. In the case or a schooner, the term ‘lug foresail’ means a gaff foresail (not a jib) that foresail that over laps the mainsail in much the same manner as a genoa over laps the mast on a modern rig. This rig was common in American working craft in the 19th century as there was no boom to deal with on the working deck. It was used on such boats as the yacht America’s original rig, Tancock Whalers and on many Atlantic coast pilot boats. Lug foresails need to be tacked around the mast in much the same manner as a genoa is today.

Downwind the problem of downdraft interference is a major problem as well. The large mainsail again tends to block the air on the sails forward of it and schooners really do not have a tall forward mast on which to fly a meaningful spinnaker. While there are all kinds of kites that can be flown from a schooner, and early working schooners often carried square sails on their foremasts, most of these attempts at trying to improve downwind performance really come into their own on a reach.

Because of the proportions of the rig, it is also quite difficult to get a schooner to hove to with any reliability.

I once had a great conversation with Olin Stephens about schooners. Someone had asked why the schooner rig had died out. In the course of the conversation it was pretty much concluded that as hull forms became increasingly efficient, the schoonber rig could the inherrent lack of efficiency of the schooner rig not keep up with the increased hull efficiency. Great efforts at all kinds of schooner rig improvements were tried but in the end the inherent limitations of the schooner rig was ill matched to the improved hull forms of the early 20th century.

Today, traditional schooners are wonderful to look at relics of a bygone age. Traditional forms of the schooner rig are complicated rigs that are expensive to build and maintain. They generally lack the strength of staying of a more modern rig. They are limited in their ability to beat to windward, hove to, or go dead downwind. They require greater skill to sail well and are pretty labor intensive to sail in shifting conditions. Still there is nothing like the romance of gaff topsail schooner with a bone in her teeth.

Respectfully,
Jeff