Given my current problems[1], yes, physical limits to prevent hardware for over-tightening does sound like a great idea.
In addition to the points that Brian raised, though, I have two additional concerns with your suggestion, Mark:
- How feasible is it to get – and keep – the maximum sail tautness and the stop point of the mast choker exactly coordinated? If you err in one direction, you’re giving up the ability to get the sail as flat as you may need it. If you err in the other direction, you’re risking over-tightening and doing damaging in the course of setting it up.
- If you’re doing a lot of motoring, or storing the sail that way while not in use, couldn’t this lead to a lot of extra stretching to the sail and accelerate loss of shape over time?
For avoiding overtightening, a good discipline (although admittedly one I forgot) is simply to not pull the choker more than hand-tight when the sail is down.
On my friend’s N36, he’d always followed the approach you suggested, Mark. One time we weren’t quite sure the mast was all the way against the boom. So, we put the choker on the winch then, too. Rigging the sail clew so that the boom was stopped by the mast did indeed protect the sail track from getting pulled out. Instead, we broke a block on the choker tackle. (And, when we repaired that, also discovered a lot of chafe on lines that’d been trapped between the mast and boom.)
With that in mind, what I’d say the lessons are comes down to:
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lash the sail so tightening the choker takes the boom close to the mast, but don’t worry about getting it perfect
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if you’re going to be motoring with sails down in heavy conditions, tighten the sail hand-tight, and find some way to counter the boom’s side-to-side swing with downward preventers to avoid chafe against the mast. Two alternatives that occur to me are:
(a) use a small weight to toss a line over the boom on each side, then secure the line ends to side cleats; or (b) pull the reefing lines tight so that those lines are pulling on the boom as downward counterforces to the boom hangers. -
Whatever you do, don’t use winches to tighten running rigging when the sail’s down.
This all makes it sound complicated and risky, perhaps. The important thing to remember is that we’ve got pretty well-made, pretty forgiving boats. My friend Phil had been keeping his boat set up that way for 17 years before his problem occurred, for example.
– Bob
For those not following the other thread, I made the mistake of going for a taut look on the sail cover by putting the choker on a winch with the sail down. The result was that forces intended to be distributed over 40+ feet of mast track were concentrated entirely on the bottom 2 feet of track. This pulled about 28 inches of track off the mast. ↩︎