Hooray!

I picked it up and a spinnaker pole from the marine exchange store, together they were under 600 bucks which is pretty amazing.

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Getting the pole (which is almost 16 feet long) back home in my tiny toyota corolla was a bit of a challenge, but she coped like a champ

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So for those people who don’t know what a spinnaker is, it’s a massive sail made of light cloth, that basically is like a giant kite. It’s designed for running with the wind behind you in really light air (where normally my sails wouldn’t move me).

They are traditionally brightly coloured – if you see a colourful sail, 99% of the time it’s a spinnaker.

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(pic taken from www.macgregor26.com)

For any type of serious world sailing, a spinnaker or an equivalent is pretty much essential.

The downside is that the sail area is so huge that it’s really easy to get into a terrible situation where the wind picks up, or the sail angle changes, and suddenly you are on your side flat in the water and being pinned there. This is Not A Good Thing.  Or a line wraps around something and destroys it. Or strangles someone.

In fact 90% of the accident stories you hear involving sailboats involve a spinnaker – BUT I’M SURE I’LL BE FINE. Once I figure out how to rig it up, anyway.

spinnaker-rigged

Looks simple right? Sigh.

 

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