Mylar Sails

Report #6 - Nick Brown

My crew, Keith Leslie, and I had a most interesting afternoon trying out Frank Bethwaite’s trial kit for the Tasar Mylar sails. Keith and I have been sailing together for about ten years at the Concord and Ryde Sailing club and have developed a combative (we tend to argue) although conservative style that relies on moderate winds and a good knowledge of our bit of the river. We contest the second fastest spot in the fleet with several others, so our report probably represents the average experienced Tasar sailer with a combined crew weight and age of about 130 kg and 115 years.

The biggest impact is, of course, the all round view, which helped greatly on our sometimes crowded course. Seeing the jib leach was very interesting, and quite important with this new design, which was very sensitive to jib sheet tension. We spent the first half of the race playing with this on the works. The wind was 5-10 knots and switching a bit with some quite large holes at times, so we were able to observe the effect of different wind speeds and realised that a lot would be gained by getting this adjustment right. The extra roach and batons make the jib behave quite differently, or so it seemed, as I have never been able to see the leach so well! I have since learned that the Jib is also sensitive to luff tension, but we didn’t try this out.

I was able to observe these sails briefly two weeks ago when Brad Stephens trialled them. On that occasion Brad had some problems with the rotation handle jumping out of the boom hook and commented on the lower half of the sail being very flat. Both these problems had been fixed for our trial (rotation handle stiffer and diamonds tightened a bit). We were able to get quite a bit of power into the main, so our reaches made some good gains on our old foes, who had managed to escape us while we experimented with the works. We were definitely going faster than we would have with our normal sails and it was an easy job to get all the woollies and leach ribbons flowing nicely. I can say all of them because they were all beautifully visible!

The fluky conditions of the afternoon made it difficult to judge if our race result was better or not. Unfortunately, the North Easter didn’t arrive until about 20 minutes before the race started, so we couldn’t practice beforehand. But we had a good result and a very enjoyable afternoon. These sails should give the Tasar an extra dimension to play with and I hope to be around when that happens. Mine would probably have a couple of strategically placed clouds painted on, to provide some shade from the sun, but without losing the all-round view!

Thanks to Tony Keevers, our very effective Class Captain, and Frank Bethwaite for letting us play with the new sails!.

Posted 2005-04-06

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