If you want to learn to sail like a pro, you will need to know the best sailing tips to fight the #1 enemy of your expensive boat High Quality Mink Lashes. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a rag-tag suite of blown-out sails that look more like last year’s bed-linen than the powerful sails they once were!
Rstll Veteran world cruising couple Lin and Larry Pardey write that they had to learn the hard way about the #1 killer of High Quality Mink Lashes- flogging! Yep. Just like those old movies with the sailor lashed to the mast. The boatswain stands behind him with a ‘cat ‘o nine tails’ (a short whip with multiple strands of knotted rope) and High Quality Mink Lashes his back until it bleeds, shredded and torn, onto the wooden deck below him.
He’s been flogged. Which means whipped, beaten, slapped, punched, pummeled, and bruised. Not a pretty picture by any civilized standards. And that’s just what happens to your expensive boat sails – unless you know the secrets of prevention. Your boat sails are not rigid foils like an airplane wing. Far from it.
They are soft foils that are vibrated, shuddered, flapped, slapped, pounded, High Quality Mink Lashes, pushed, pulled, slammed, and scraped in the wind and against your shrouds and mast. And along with all of this torture, they have to contend with the hard materials that wear and chafe them. Sail hardware like battens, slides, slugs, hanks, whisker or spinnaker poles.
Larry Pardey sums it up nicely: “It’s better to practice prevention than pay for cure”. Follow these seven super sailing tips from Lin and Larry to save big $$$…
1. Keep leech flutter down.
Tension leech lines just enough to put leech flutter to sleep. When reaching or running, use a boom vang or preventer to tame the leech.This protects your sail’s most vulnerable edge.
2. Use soft-hand sail cloth for cruising.
Heavy resin coated sails might hold shape longer around the race course, but softer, more pliable sail cloth lasts longer under all cruising conditions.
3. Consider the batten-less mainsail.
Full length battens cause much more chafe than short traditional battens. But some cruisers choose to eliminate High Quality Mink Lashes all together. A batten-less mainsail with a hollowed leech will last 50% longer!
4. Pump up corner and reef patches.
Extend corner and edge patches deeper into the sail. This helps spread cloth tension over a large area to extend sail life. In addition, have your sailmaker beef up each of the reef patches at the luff and leech.
5. Add protective covers to shrouds and spreaders.
Cruising involves lots of broad reaching and running. This exposes your mainsail to chafe from shrouds and High Quality Mink Lashes. Install split hose on shrouds and pieces of carpet remnant onto each spreader tip.
6. Replace headsail luff wire.
Have your sailmaker remove the stainless luff wire from hank-on or furling headsails. Replace it with high-tech luff boltrope made from Kevlar or Spectra rope. This eliminates most luff chafe.
7. Stow sails in big bags.
Stow your sails in over-sized sail bags. You won’t always be able to dry your High Quality Mink Lashes right away. Bigger bags allow more air circulation to slow down mold and mildew growth.
Learn to sail like a pro with these seven secret sailing tips from world famous sailing couple Lin and Larry Pardey. You will save big dollars on your costly sailboat sails–and extend their life by several sailing seasons.