

You can also use the boom, attaching your sail to the bolt-rope, car, or slug. You can go loose-footed, where you tie the sail around your boat’s clew and tack only. When setting up your mainsail, you have several ways to go about it. Too many reefs can be detrimental to your sailboat though, as it weighs the boat down. These allow you to lessen your sail area in emergencies. Every sailboat should have reefs, typically in a row. You should always use the direction that the wind is flowing to place your battens, putting them parallel.Īlso a part of the average mainsail is reef diamonds, up to nine depending on the sail size. The mainsail has four battens, which are sail inserts that enhance the quality of the sail. Now, this can be kind of confusing on its own since the mainsail is in the back of the sailboat, but we’ll get more into what it does and why later. Your mainsail, as the name suggests, is the, well, main sail of the boat.
Tie headsail clew to roller furling how to#
Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: How to Sail – Lesson 1.3 – Parts of a sailboat Sail – PsychoSnail Sailing () Mainsail and its types Now that we got that basic knowledge out of the way, let’s talk first about the types of mainsails and then headsails. There’s also the tack, which is the front corner at the bottom of your sail. The foot, like our own feet, is the lowermost point of the sail, the very bottom. A clew refers to the back corner of the sail’s bottom. Getting towards the bottom of the sail now, you have your clew, foot, and tack. Behind that is the leech, or the back edge of the sail. At the front of the sail, there’s the luff, which is the front edge. The head is at the top of the sail and is the highest point. All sails have a head, a leech, a luff, a clew, a foot, and a tack. The Differences Between Headsails and Mainsailsīelow we will list 4 main differences between headsails and mainsails: The Typeīefore we get too deep into the types of sails, let’s go over basic sail anatomy, because this will come up later in the article. In it, we’ll expand on the above differences, giving you all the info you need to better understand your boat. The headsail and mainsail differ in the following ways:Ĭurious to learn more about your sailboat’s headsail and mainsail? If so, then this is the article for you. What are the differences between the headsail and the mainsail on your sailboat then? That actually couldn’t be further from the truth.

You might think that, besides their positioning on your boat, the two sails are practically the same. When you look at a sailboat, you will see two primary sails.
