Hi Arne.  Your drawing looks intriguing and I will have to think about that.  I was intending to take the upper FUP straight from A to C, then forward to D like the lower FUP.  You may be right that the small saddles were the cause of the problem.  It was easy to take up the slack for the lower two panels, but after that the line seemed to get trapped by the nested battens, which fall randomly, one this side, one that side etc.  I think the FUP has a lot of potential though and is worth sorting out.  You can stop fan ups when doing intentional gybes, by hauling in the sheet and doing a controlled gybe, but that still leaves accidental gybes in rough conditions, which are not uncommon when rolling heavily under self steering in rough seas, or in sudden wind shifts..  Besides, it will be nice to gybe with a slack sheet when you wish to.

Hi Arne, that is interesting news about your FUP developments.  I am a big fan of the FUP, but unrigged mine due to the line getting trapped.  I could get it to render usually but it was a struggle and I was concerned for what it might be dong to the stitching on the sail.  But I am going to rerig a version of it again before going cruising this year (about the end of May I hope).  I am going to use two lines of different colours, one starting at the second batten up from the boom and one from the fourth batten up.  Both will come back to the same cleat so can be hauled together.  They will pass outside of everything on the sail.  The idea being, if I only have one panel reefed, I wont be worried about a fan up, especially with the slack taken out of the two lines.  When two panels are down, the lower line is snugged up tight and those two battens cannot go anywhere.  The upper line has the slack taken out of it.  Then the third panel is not a problem since the ones below it cannot lift, and when I get the fourth panel down, both lines are snugged up tight.  That only leaves the three fanned panels, that can come to no harm if they fan up, and I am unlikely to be more deeply reefed than that when coastal cruising and picking my weather.  If I was crossing oceans, I would also put a downhaul on the yard.

Annie,

no, the drogue was towed from the stern, or from the lee mooring bit to be more precise. I never left the cockpit after dropping the lines in our berth. I have fitted that drogue with a permanent line, only about 4-5m long, and with a big bowline loop at its end.

As we motored out of the inner harbour, I slipped the bowline over that port stern bit, so when we were out in open water, I just put the engine in free and tossed the little parachute over the side. With the line pulled out, the parachute opened instantly. Without a drogue, Ingeborg (just as Johanna) would coast forever, but now we were slowed down to drogue speed in a couple of boat lengths. The GPS showed that we stayed below 0.5kts (0.1-0.3 mostly). Best of all, when the sail had been hauled up, the parrels trimmed and the halyard stowed in its bag, we had still just covered a fraction of the bay. The little forward motion was still enough for Ingeborg to maintain a beam to close reach with the tiller locked a bit to leeward (as on that photo).
A bonus was that I only needed the smallest parachute for this particular job. At a square section of only 0.125sqm, it is not more than 1.5 times the area of a big bucket.

I made one of that parachute’s six sections from a different colour to see if the thing rotated under load. However, it stayed so deep and I was too busy at the halyard, so I never noticed. Still, it cannot have spun fast, at least, for when I recovered it after raising the sail, there was no sign of twist on the line.

Halyard hauler! Thanks, Annie, I wondered what to call that thing.
No, my hands are not big. On earlier boats, I used ropes with multifilament in the outer layer, as that was so easy to grip. However, I also found that they were worn rather fast, so changed to monofilament ropes, which have proved to be much tougher and which also seem to run more easily through blocks. On the small boats, Broremann and Frøken Sørensen, it was still easy enough to haul, but on Johanna (48sqm) and Ingeborg (35sqm), I found it annoying, even with gloves. I still have the electric winch handle from Winchrite, which works perfectly well, but I like the idea of being able to raise the sail by hand, at least now and then.

Arne

Today, after a long and chilly winter, something similar to spring has set in here, so I could make the first little sailtrip in Ingeborg.

Before this first trip, I had prepared three things:

·         Last year, it was reported that the line for the Fan-up preventer (FUP) tended to jam if the sail was reefed or furled. I didn’t notice this on my light Frøken Sørensen, but on Ingeborg, I too notice the problem to some degree. My way of solving it has been to run the line outside the lazyjacks, and to only pass the line under the ‘aux batten parrels’ of batten 3 and 4 (from top). Today this looked very good. I will test it more and then add an appendix to the FUP write-up.

·         Earlier this winter I made as many as four parachute type sea anchors, ranging from 0.125 to 1.00sqm in cross section. Today I brought with me the smallest one. After having motored out of the harbour, I chucked the sea anchor over board and prepared for hoisting sail. Ingeborg stopped almost dead and let me hoist the sail without moving more than 4-6 boatlengths, and without accidentally tacking. This was a grand success and since this device is so small, it is easy to stow away together with its 4-5m long line attached. It will definitely be used when hoisting sail where space is limited.

·         A couple of days ago I made the shown ‘halyard handle’, mostly from 15mm plywood. I find that my hands dislike clutching to the slippery 8mm line, even with gloved hands. This device lets me haul in all the 40m of halyard without strain. The muscles used are actually the same as when rowing a boat. This device worked remarkably well, and felt ‘natural’ in use, so I guess I will go over it with sandpaper, then paint it, and finally declare it fully operational.

All in all, a fine day on the fjord ( the boys in the Albin Express that we met and chased, may have been less impressed  -  with their own performance).

Cheers, Arne

(More photos  on Section 6 of my photo albums...)

Graham,

after I, early in the first season, moved the sail of my Ingeborg forward, almost as far as the batten parrels allows them, there is very little batten stagger when reefing or furling that sail, so this cannot add to the friction on my boat. To me it appears that the friction is the sum of several small friction points.

In addition to passing the line outside the topping lift (definitely a friction point), and through hoops on the boom, I will have an eye on what you call the saddles on the battens, and which I called the aux. batten parrels. They may well be made slacker, so they almost hang as a semi-circle: The reefed battens land in no particular order side by side each other, so the slacker saddles should make it easier for the FUP line to run through. As I sit here, I even wonder if I should only let the FUP pass through one or two of those saddles. However, that would be the last resort.

I definitely think the friction problem can be solved, this or the other way, and I most certainly want to keep the FUP.

Arne

PS: In your case, with more random batten stagger, I suggest you lengthen the saddles to keep them from binding the FUP line.