Day 2 - Headsail Mania
Another unique aspect of catamaran sailing is that due to boat speed, the difference between apparent wind and true wind is much more dramatic than with a monohull. Because of that, a catamaran has a wider selection of headsails, each of which has a narrower set of optimal conditions in which it should be used. Coda‘s current headsail inventory is (from smallest to biggest):
- Staysail
- Genoa
- (A brand new replacement genoa that we hope to avoid using)
- Code Zero
- Code Three
- Code D
- Parasail
When the sun rose on day 2 of the trip, the seas had settled down a bit, and the wind had decreased. Our next exercise was to put up a larger headsail better suited to the conditions (because 8 knots of boat speed simply isn’t enough!).
The genoa has a luff bolt rope that affixes it to the head stay, and the head stay has a built-in furling system that we had used the previous night to reduce the size of the genoa by only partially furling it. The genoa is the only one of the headsails that attaches to the headstay. Except for the staysail (which attaches to an inner stay, not the head stay), the rest of the headsails are “flying” sails, and are not attached to a stay. They rely on halyard tension and a downhaul to shape the luff of the sail.
We furled the genoa completely, then set about running a new set of guys and sheets used with the flying sails. We also set up a furling wheel that would be used to furl the flying sails. When it was all said and done (an hour and half later or so), we hoisted the neatly wrapped Code Zero. The next step was to slowly unfurl the sail by easing the line, but Wes warned us we would need sailing gloves, because once the wind filled the sail, the furling line would go out rather quickly (which is exactly what happened).
But 10-12 knots of boat speed was too slow! And now that we were old salts at handling headsails, it was time to switch to the Code D. So we furled the Code Zero, dropped it into its sail bag on the foredeck (which is more trampoline than deck), switched the lines to the Code D, and repeated the hoisting process all over again.
The beauty of not attaching the larger sails to the headstay (which itself attaches to the deck on the boat’s centerline) is that the tack of the sail can be moved to either side of the (rather wide) bow of the boat. This creates all kinds of interesting trimming possibilities to optimize the sail shape in various conditions. In our case, the wind was pretty far aft, which meant the headsail was somewhat in the wind shadow of the mainsail. By moving the tack of the headsail to the port bow, the headsail was exposed to more of the wind.
With speeds sometimes exceeding 16 knots, the skipper was finally satisfied with the performance of the boat; the rest of us were speechless that something could go so fast with just the power of the wind.
