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In recent months, we’ve been fooled by the weather every time we scheduled a clinic. If we scheduled a spinnaker clinic, it was blowing too hard to leave the dock. When we scheduled a foul weather clinic, it was bright and shiny with light winds. Now we schedule both and actually do the one that makes sense.

This last one turned out to be both – spinny and foul wx. Larry Pruitt tells the story.

The recent SailTime Spinnaker Clinic was a jibing workout. Around 1130 Captain Dan with Sailtime members Bahram Jalali “BJ”, Jesse Dowler, Dean Lesiak and Larry Pruitt motored out of the slip and found the fog yielding less than a mile of visibility in very light winds. We motored out a couple of miles to the vicinity of oil platform Gina. We turned the boat around and killed the engine.

With only 4 kts of wind we ran the assymetric spinnaker up the pole in its sock.

After a caution about not losing control of the control line (a show that brought consternation and acute embarrassment to Capt. Dan on the last clinic), we slid the sock to the head of the sail.

It seemed like the sock contained an acre of light-weight nylon, and even in the light air it filled massively and powerfully. After hauling in a mile or so of sheet, the SailTime logo appeared as the thin material inflated and began to lift the boat forward.

Light air is where these big sails really shine. Capt. Dan told us that this spinnaker-boat combination is good up to about 8 kts of wind on a close reach. Above that, you have to fall off until about 15 knots, when you can only go on the deepest reach, though not dead downwind as the sail will collapse.
Above 15 knots, it will eat your lunch, trying to roundup, roll you over and pitch you out of the boat.

We had just come up to speed (aprox. 3 kts in about that much wind) when Capt. Dan started the next lesson – jibing the beast!

We each took turns at launching the sail, steering, trimming and bagging the sail in the sock.

Finally, we learned to jibe,  steering the boat around under the sail, loosing the sheet so that the spinnaker was streaming in line with the keel and then bringing it up on the new working sheet.

That took some practice, patience and coordination with the crew that was releasing the sail while the helmsman steered the boat behind all that flying cloth. Over the next couple of hours we jibed around that chute so many times that we sometimes lost our bearings.

As we approached the breakwater we were encouraged by our salty leader to come into the harbor flying the big sail; afterall, our image, pride and manliness were at stake. As our lines began to tangle and the spinnaker began to flog all over creation we were humbled into quickly bagging that bad boy and then motoring on in. We had a great time in the clinic! So, give us the big sail and some light air and we’ll make a good day of sailing out of it.

–
Larry Pruitt

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