Nylon Sheets for Downwind Sailing

[DefinitelyMe]

I’m ashamed that it’s taken me this long to figure this out! I’m sure this will be a familiar scenario: you’re sailing along on a long down-wind leg and the breeze starts to drop out. Before long the boat starts to roll erratically. Each roll knocks the wind out of the genoa and then it re-fills on the return with a BANG that feels like it’s about to rip the track right out of the deck. Well, it’s taken many years and literally hundreds of hours of enduring this before my brain finally engaged. We use nylon for anchor snubber and nylon for dock lines because it is strong and, most importantly, stretches. The stretch absorbs shock loads in those applications. So I took a dock line, tied it onto the genoa clew and wow! What a difference. End of boat destruction noises, a better night’s sleep. Why on Earth didn’t I think of this sooner?!

Only problem is chafe. The line stretches by a good 5 inches with a big shock load so it’ll chafe on anything at all given half a chance. Running it through the end of a pole seems to be particularly damaging. Until now I’ve just cut off the end of the line every thousand miles or so but I’m going to try and get a bit of hose on there somehow for the next passage.......... 3,500 miles to Mauritius. Should be a fair test.