Hello all |
Merlin sails dont have reef points....you could always roll the sail round the boom, but you'll probably be the only one to reef a Merlin! |
You could even try a mainsail off National 12 |
Or a Firefly sail, they're even lower. |
All these alternatives will ruin the balance of the sail plan - the answer is to keep at it and keep the boat flat. |
Tom, you have quite an old boat and I don't know what your rigging plan is but on a modern (deck-stepped particularly) merlin you do 2 things to depower: http://www.national12.org/downloads/tuning_guide_revised_2004_v1.pdf |
You can try getting hold of a Firefly main, it will probably not be that devastating for the balance of the rig. Any attempt to wrap the sail round the boom to reef is doomed IMHO as you will never get an acceptable way of attaching kicker and mainsheet & the sail shape will go to pot. Without a raking rig your method of depowering is to yank on LOTS of kicker and cunningham, pull the outhaul tight and set the now flatter main at a slightly greater angle (your controls must work & be able to achieve this!). If you are a total beginner, just accept you will do a lot of swimming, we all have, and ideally get some instruction from someone more experienced either crewing or helming, go out in progressively stronger winds as you gain confidence and experience. |
I agree that rolling up the sail doesn't work unless you can sort the kicking strap and mainsheet problems. If your mainsheet is transom mounted, and your main is not loose-footed, then you can solve the kicking strap problem by rolling a sail bag into the sail as you roll it up, leaving the neck and ties showing. You then have something to which to tie a temporary kicking strap. Effective solution but loses the balance in the same way as a smaller sail would do. |
...but the conditions in which you want to reef are those in which you need a lot of kicker on. I reckon a Merlin kicker full on is about 200+kg of load and a sail bag tie simply won't do. |
I entirely take the point, but I don't think that a boat with sail number 1681 is going to be putting 200kg load on anything. |
Apart from the helm in his pants when the wind gets up................... |
I beg to disagree - I had a very efficient winch on 1498 as did a lot of contemporary boats, gave an easy 10:1 advantage with lowish friction. The Proctor D needed a lot of kicker to get the top to bend. |
1728 has a winch/ratchet type system which can really wind up the tension when you pull the rope. A lever drops down and prevents the whole thing unwinding and to ease it off the lever is lifted with the rope used to pull the kicker up tight so quite easy to pull on and off. |
Thanks for all the feedback. Someone mentioned the idea of rolling some webbing or some such in with the main round the boom, but I was concerned about resilience, especially on any kind of run. |
I have reefed a Merlin (much to on looking purists horror) when introducing my children, as they were then, to sailing in a Merlin. Whilst this was an old boat by today's standards (Proctor MkXI) and had no modern sail controls it worked . The kit was simple wrap an old sail bag in the main which from memory we wrapped around the boom 3 times making sure that the drawstring dangled below the boom about a foot to connect to the kicker. Yes proper reefing strops are availbale but the sailbag gripped the sail perfectly and the stronger the wind the tigther it is held. From memory we never lost the kicker sailing down wind. The tricky bit is putting some extra tucks in sail at the transom end of the boom on the first turn to lift it, otherwise it sags impossibly low. I cannot remember how the outhaul worked but it did. What was interesting was that because of the high aspect sail plan only 2 or 3 turns of the boom made the boat very easy to control with a young light crew even with stronger winds. |