Wed Jun 08 2022 19:54:00 GMT+0800 (Singapore Standard Time)

This blog post is about our really big sails — the ones that bring speed as they puff out like huge balloons, making our boat look like frigate birds in mating season. We own three big sails. We own an asymmetrical spinnaker, a Code Zero and a Parasailor sail. Today, we used the latter.

That may sound funny to some people (who don’t sail) that, after ten years at sea, we are still building confidence. However, sailing provides a lifetime of learning. In 2019, Mother Nature kicked us in the pants when one of our big sails (the Code Zero sail) ripped a hole at the waterline of our boat. This caused our port bow locker to flood. At the time, we were 25 miles offshore in the Bahamas.

Heeding experience

As our friend and fellow St Francis catamaran owner, Ren, reminded me today we need to start conservatively and build up to using the full power of our downwind sails. Ren has been sailing for 50 years. When I asked for his advice about flying and bringing in the Parasailor sail I heeded his advice.

The Parasailor sail adds noticeable speed, and it flies well above the deck. This provides great, all-round visibility. Far be it for me to criticize a design that is thousands of years old, but I find the typical triangular-shaped sails work like poorly thought-out eye patches.

On our Parasailor sail we have a bright-orange air vent/foil. The rest of the sail is blue and white. The foil is a stand-out – visually and as a unique technical feature. It not only provides lift, like an aircraft wing, which helps hold the sail up, but it also provides lateral stability to help prevent the sail from collapsing.

In contrast, the spinnaker and Code Zero sails are like potato mashers in the kitchen drawers of the sky. With these monster sails, you must respect the sail, know the sail or, as we found our with our Code Zero, the sail will make you pay.

I have literally been whipped at the mast by our Code Zero sail. I have wrestled with it on the deck, as it threatened to lift me up and throw me off of it.

Flashback to April 2019: The Day our Code Zero Sail Ripped a 4″ Hole at the Waterline

In April 2019, a toe eye gave way to the force of our Code Zero sail, which ripped out our bowsprit (that’s the long pointy bit at the front), and left a hole in the side of the boat. A four-foot section of fiberglass dangled in the air.

Sorry. So sorry. Code Zero.

I do not want to repeat the family experience of seeing Rick dangle and dunk in rough waves to repair our boat. And, seeing our son, Paul, then 11, summon courage inside a leaking bow locker as he worked with his dad to apply the essential lock nuts to hold the patch.

 Later one of our kids said, “I thought my dad was someone with a desk job but now he’s all like ‘ta da’”.

Paul Escher after helping his dad perform an emergency repair offshore in the Bahamas.

The hole was repaired with fiberglass and reinforced a few days later at the R&B Boatyard in Spanish Wells, Bahamas. For preventative maintenance, we removed the other toe eye (on the starboard side), re-fiberglassed the area and installed a new backing plate.

Bringing in the Parasailor sail for the night

We are a little bit wiser from the ‘hole’ event of 2019, and after reading Ren’s texts, it seemed prudent to bring in our Parasailor sail for the night. We may have lost some speed, but we have our sail and sanity intact.

Detail-oriented folks will be interested to know that we began to drop the Parasailor sail at 5:03 PM today. By 5:16 PM the deed was done and we were beginning to put out our Genoa and main sails again. If you saw our track you would have noticed a dip in speed from daytime to nighttime.

Flying with Waxen Wings

I know of two families where the Parasailor sail did not work well and their sails ripped. We are sailing tonight at about 5 knots without the Parasailor sail. We are not out to break any speed records. Still, when you are 2000 miles and 300 hours from somewhere, it is nice that the Parasailor allows us to increase speed and travel at about 7 knots and in comparable wind. I can’t wait to fly ours again in daylight tomorrow.

As we grew more confident with the Parasailor, we misjudged Mother Nature’s attention-seeking streak, and she made good on her threats to throw a wrench in our plans. But that is a story for another day.