temporary jib set-up

[sailorman_10]

I sail a Helms 30 on a lake in Texas. My boat has a 160% genoa on a furler. I can furl/reef this sail about down to about 75% of original size before it begins to lose too much shape to be effective. Normally this works great for the conditions we have in Texas but occsaionally we get strong winds for days at a time. Heres my question, can I rig an inner forestay off the bow cleat and fly a hank-on working jib from that. I could hoist the stay with an un-used spinnaker halyard and hoist the jib with another un-used halyard. The bow cleat is about 1 foot behind the furling drum. Is this a feasable solution for flying less sail? Is there a better way? Thank you for the input.

Randy

[Jeff_H]

Trying to rig a temporary stay in a 30 footer is a lot of work with perhaps not especially rewarding results. Bow cleats are designed for loads essentially parrallel to the deck. Vertical loads will stress the hull/deck joint and the thru bolts on the cleat. You can add a tie rod down to knee but it is a lot of work. Stretch in a spin halyard would result in a pretty powered up sail when you least need it.

Most furlers these days have a luff bolt rope track that would let you drop your big genoa and go to a 100% to 110%, or so, jib using the same track and halyard. I would have the smaller sail cut as a jib rather than a #3 genoa which should give you a wider windspeed range.
Jeff

[VIEXILE]

Would there be anything wrong, though, with adding a detachable inner stay that would be attached at, say, a chainplate to a bulkhead aft of a chain locker for the sake of throwing a hank-on spitfire or storm jib on when conditions dictate? Bring the center of effort down and aft? If attached at the masthead, runners wouldn''t be necessary would they?

[Sfilson]

On a boat I used to sail for we had added such a feature, but it was a little different and we used once to add sail area on a downwind race where spinnakers were banned. The owner of the boat was a machinest. He built a renforced pad eye with a plate on the underside of the deck. On the 34'' boat, the pad eye was located at tbe nearest deck beam. He also made a pair of jibs to be used with this rig. One was a storm jib and the other was a nylon light wind sail. Both had a larger than normal cable luff rope. Since the "stay" didn''t have to support the mast, he made it part of the sail. The light air sail worked out good. In the years of sailing on that boat we never used the storm setup.

The boat also had wire halyards.