Thanks Arne.  I only touched the lines that Victor had led to the starboard side (halyard, THP and YHP).  As you said, there is also a tack line, led to the starboard side and currently tied off to the old genoa car, but I thought it was part of the anchor lashing until I traced it to the mast when untying the anchor later, so assume it was not doing much on that day!  I am off to the UK for the next ten days, but hope to spend a lot more time on the water when I return and will come back with an update then.

The other thing I wondered about is the gap between the sail and mast.  The sail is fairly well off the mast on starboard and the batten parrels have a lot of slack when the sail is down.  I am sure I remember reading somewhere, perhaps in your writing, Arne, that they should be pretty tight with the sail down as mast taper will loosen them anyway.  Could this have made a difference?

For the time being, I am happy having got her out and confident enough now to experiment more next time.

Mark

Having spent much of the last two weeks looking around Victor Winterthun's old IW31, Kari II, I decided to take a break from creating the very long job list and see how she sailed. I only had an hour and a half (an extended lunch break), but my 11 yr old and I got her out on the fjord in about ten knots of wind and raised five panels. Victor did not stint on sail area (48 sq m) and anyone who misses grinding a genoa sheet is welcome to haul it up - a workout that I compounded by not noticing that the forward end of the first four battens still had a sail tie around, so I was lifting pretty much the whole sail! Oops.

Once up, though, everything worked as it should, although the slightly zebra like pattern of the sail suggests a sail cover would not go amiss. She tacked smoothly through 90 degrees in flat water with tell tales flying well and no backing of the luff. No instruments aboard so I am not sure how much speed I gained by heading off a bit - something for next time. I have popped a few pictures into an album - not great pictures, but more will come.

There was one oddity though - on the first long tack out of harbour, on starboard, she displayed a noticeable lee helm. No real surprise, as the mast is well forward and I suspect that stronger wind or a full sail would have heeled us enough to neutralize it. However, when we tacked, the helm was perfectly balanced - so much so that I sailed across the fjord (about a mile) without touching the tiller.  I tacked a couple more times to make sure and it was consistent - significant lee helm on starboard and none on port. Is this common? Can anyone explain?

Overall, I am very happy. The sailing was everything I hoped for, and the rest of the work just needs to be, like Arne said, split up into manageable chunks and done a bit at a time.

Mark