If we have a short rope tail, here’s a knot that gives us more to grab than the classic figure-eight stopper knot. The above is the sprit extension line on our J/109.

I have no idea what it’s called or where I learned it. Might be Boy Scouts 60 years ago. Anyway, it’s quick and easy to tie and stays put. Looks kind of salty, too.

Here’s the three step process:

And, yeah, I know our J/109 has terrible gel coat crazing. (Looks worse when I have not cleaned lately.) All the Tillotson Pearson boats do from that time. Bad batch of gel coat.

At least it doesn’t let water into the laminate because the first layers are vinylester.

Maybe one day we will fix it…probably not, doesn’t slow her down any.

Adding to my last tip.

It’s pretty unlikely that the port and starboard shrouds are exactly the same length, so if we want to be able to duplicate mast tune in the spring we better not mix them up.

I used to put cardboard labels on, but they get soggy and fall off, so now I just tie a piece of light line with two knots for starboard and one for port. Works great.

I mark both, so if one gets removed, I still have the other.

Quiz

What mental trick do I use to remember which has one knot and which two, without having to write it down or find the photos above? Leave a comment.

Hint, it’s not the colour of the line, I just happened to have some red.

I spent a lot of the summer getting the mast tune exactly the way I wanted it on our J/109. Now it’s time to decommission and I don’t want to lose that.

So I carefully measured the distance between the threaded studs in the turnbuckles for the shrouds and backstay.

To make this work you need accurate calipers, and digital ones make it way easier and faster.

Thanks to member Dick for this tip.

As to getting the tune right in the first place, we have four step-by-step instruction chapters on that.

Reefing horns are a nice simple way to secure the tack when reefed, but they can also foul the sail when hoisting. A PITA, particularly on boats with the halyard led aft to the cockpit.

This simple hack using a piece of fuel hose with the same ID as the horn OD, that I had in stock, solved the problem.

Transparent reinforced water hose would look nicer, but hey, the black matches the carbon sails that came with the boat!

A few days after we published my article about the causes of the tragedy on Escape, I received this unsolicited email from John Kretschmer:

I am writing to commend you for your recent piece,”Lessons from a Tragedy at Sea.” It’s sober but hopefully enlightening to many. You are spot on.

The notion of coming up to reef the main, in a big boat especially, is madness and, simpy, bad seamanship.

We reef Quetzal exactly how you describe reefing Morgan’s Cloud, using the preventer to maintain boom control, easing off to about 100° apparent, and having a slippery track and cars, and stout gear for hoisting again.

I have completed 161 training passages aboard Quetzal in the last 19 years, which is kind of crazy, and logged more than 150,000 miles on this old girl in the process, and we have reefed off the wind every time. And I almost always have inexperienced crew, or at least crew new to Quetzal, so it’s not that this is a strategy reserved for master mariners.

John Kretschmer is one of the most experienced mariners of our time and always worth listening to. I think the most important part of the quote for most of us is “it’s not that this is a strategy reserved for master mariners”.

John went on to provide some tips on reefing off the wind with in-boom roller furling systems, which I will share in a future article.

Most people dead end reefing pennants round the boom with a bowline, but that’s hard to tie tight and even harder to untie after it’s been under load. And don’t even think about using a buntline hitch unless you want to use explosives to untie it.

There’s a better way: the humble timber hitch, finished off with a figure eight, as shown.

Quick to tie, and easy to untie no matter how hard it’s been loaded.

Not sure where I learned this—the sort of thing the great Rod Stephens would have come up with—but I have been terminating reefing pennants this way on all kinds of boats for some 50 years and have never had one fail on me.

We had the jib off, so I just replaced all the standard Harken shackles our new furler came with with Wichard self-locking ones.

We have been using these things for decades in places where wiring the shackle is not a good idea (spinnakers are expensive) and never had one back out on us. Highly recommended and really nicely made.

That said, on an offshore voyaging boat, I would add a drop of Loctite Blue.

You can see how they work in the closeup below.

On a lot of boats with a roller-furling foil, and particularly with no sail rolled on it, the headstay will start to pump once the wind gets up, sometimes to the point it gets quite alarming.

Not only that, all that pumping can do real damage to the rig if left long enough.

But there’s a hack that stops it every time, at least for a boat swinging to the wind on a mooring or anchor.

Set up a spinnaker halyard just forward of the headstay as shown in the shot above. That’s it? Yup.

I guess the halyard causes turbulence that breaks up the laminar flow on the headstay foil…or something.

Anyway, we have been doing this for years and it works.

Thanks to Deborah Shapiro and Rolf Bjelke, as I read the tip years ago in one of their excellent books.

My friend Hans, who advised me while I was writing the article on the tragedy aboard Escape, took me out on his Farr 56 for a demo of hoisting, reefing, and furling, using his in-boom automated mainsail-handling system.

Hans is an incredible resource, since he has owned boats with slab, in-mast, and in-boom furling, as well as being a deeply experienced ocean sailor, including countless trips to and from the Caribbean over decades, and five trans-Atlantics in the last few years—two with slab reefing, two with in-mast, one with in-boom.

I will be sharing his wisdom on all three systems and how to choose which is best for each of us, in an in-depth article.