Single-handed rigging

[Phil Shotton]

I sail with my wife who’s a fairly novice sailor and have been wondering about the advisability of bringing mainsail lines back to the cockpit. My previous Contessa 26 had all lines back to the cockpit for easy single-handed sailing. Have others adapted their Nics similarly? Pros and cons?

[Steve Bates]

This is my over winter project and am also interested if anyone else has tried. It is my intention to drill through below the starboard side of the windscreen and then fit a pair of clutches prior to a winch. It will be a tight fit and I’m still in the early planning stages but I think it will work.

I sail solo and it would be of great benefit to me. I have done some exploratory drilling and can get a 12mm inside diameter tube through the gap under the screen mount, I could just cut a slot but I think it will be more difficult to seal the edges than fitting individual tubes ?

I am sure there will be problems when I start the job but only time will tell!

[Murray Smith]

I am also considering this just as you described but under/forward of the windscreen, I would install bolt down fairleads (ie. Harken H3275) as guides which would also restrict water ingress.  Extending outside, build a cover perhaps 15 inches long to further restrict water ingress with the fairleads at the front again.  I look forward to additional suggests.

[Czarina Blue]

Czarina Blue has two 10 mm lines running through the base of the starboard side of the windscreen, going through their individual clutches to a single small Anderson winch. The clutches are mounted offset 14 to 20 cms behind the inside screen base. and the winch right back almost touching the teak fiddle at the aft edge of the shelf. The screen-base holes are drilled so that they come out just above the interior surface of the dashboard (which the clutches sit on). On the outside of the windscreen base the bottom of the holes stop about 1 cm above the cabin roof. The person who did it has sealed in some oblique-cut grey plastic piping into the interior of the aperture for the rope to rub against. I can send photos if that helps. The use of line-feeders and stand-up blocks on the cabin top further forward may be necessary to get a good lead to the holes, depending on where your lines are fed from. I have never noticed any water ingress through the holes, but have not had green water over (!) and anyway it would likely run down the side of the sloping shelf inside and into the cockpit seat drain.

When I bought the boat the two lines running to the cockpit were the mainsail boom furler and the main halyard. However I have switched to slab reefing when renewing the sail. So now I have in the cockpit my topping lift (adjusted first and last before going forward to make a reef at the mast), and my cruising chute downhaul so I can adjust it from the cockpit (it runs forward all the way to a block at the base of the forestay, but is not permanently rigged). I do all my mainsail work at the mast now.

I copied Peter Needham of S/Y Salara’s main mast set-up (he also single-hands with a slab-reefed mainsail): two clutches on the starboard main boom near the gooseneck act as stoppers for the two mainsail reefing lines ( which I can tension on the starboard mast winch OK). A single clutch is mounted a couple of feet above the starboard mast winch for the mainsail halyard so that that single mast winch can work alternately for the reefs / halyard.

I clip on at the mast and in bouncy conditions I spread my (long) legs and jam my feet against the inside of the cabin top handrails. If I slip, I’m suspended from my harness which is clipped on to the poling out eye above me. It works well for me.

 

 

 

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