Opinions on Gooseneck

[sy_gilana]

Hello. We recently broke our boom, 5 days out of the Canaries. We jury rigged and crossed the rest of the Atlantic without much ado. It broke where the hydraulic kicker attaches and was my fault for pumping down too hard to decurve the main off the spreaders while running.

Our boom is free to rotate at the gooseneck. Without sails or sheets rigged it can go round and round. The idea is that on a broad reach, the sail and sheet opposing each other will apply a torque to the boom and this torque is stopped by the gooseneck, and that is where many breakages occur.

During the repair I made the clevis that attaches the kicker also free to rotate, as it did not previously and that force is what weakened the boom by metal fatigue, and the fact that a hole was made for the mounting, just where the boom experienced maximum tension at the underside.

How important is this rotation? are there any other booms out there that can swivel?