The Kids Learn to be a Big Boat Bow-man

We decided to finally get our new spinnaker out and give it a try. Actually it's the same gennaker asymmetrical spinnaker we've had since September but we had a sock made for it in Israel by the excellent North Sails owner Easy Swissa. The spinnaker sock is a device that has a fiberglass throat attached to a long nylon tube with a series of ropes that allow you to hoist and douse the spinnaker with a lot less hassle.

Having done thousands of hoists and doused of the M242 spinnaker, you'd think this would be old hat for us. When you have a 1,000 square foot sail it can create huge loads, and they're intimidating. As a result, we haven't used our spinnaker that much. We need it though because in under 12 knots of breeze, if we go onto a broad reach the boat poops out and we end up powering. With the spinnaker up we can get about 75% of the wind speed converted to boat speed -- making going downwind in light air fairly reasonable.

We were tooling along at around 5 knots and on starboard tack. We had just setup the sail on the left side of the boat. The wind shifted a little bit and we needed to gybe or hit a fairly large stationary object that resembled a big rock with a light on it.

Now you might remember that Ross and Jess use their climbing harnesses as teenage jolly jumpers. Well it actually came in handy this time. We rigged the other spinnaker sheet, Ross kitted up with his harness, we put him onto a spare halyard and he swung out and attached the new sheet allowing us to gybe and avoid that large rock in the way.

The next hour downwind both he and Jess practiced the maneuver and greased it to perfection. I guess they're both now ready to be bowmen on TP52's. Cool.