To update my comments regarding Cuben Fiber, I asked Randy when he called me just now on his way back from Tampa, where he coached Bora Gulari to the US Olympic Team berth for Nacra 17.
Randy concurred with IslandPlanet.
Regarding the cost of Cuben: since North bought Cuben, the quality has gone down and the prices doubled. They seem to be much more interested in using Cuben for small area, super light weight applications such as high end backpacking
equipment where the super light weight while still being strong is great, and the small amount of material needed means the 2.5x cost of the Cuben over, say, Dimension-Polyant Lite Skin cloth, is a small handicap.
Also, we discussed the Challenge cloths. Bob Bainbridge concentrates on woven cloth, while other cloth manufacturers concentrate on various kinds of laminates. While the Challenge cloth is likely better woven sailcloth than anyone else has ever made, woven sail cloth does not hold shape anywhere near as well as laminates. So it may hold up, but "you won't want to look at it."
Sails made from woven cloth will exhibit all the features we all experienced decades ago before we all went with higher tech solutions: the sail gets baggy,
draft goes aft, weird shape distortions when you reef or furl, etc. Those graybeards among us know woven very well, and woven cloth has the bad to go with the good.
One thing that I really liked about soft finish tight weave woven dacron that Hood used to make and as now made by Challenge (again, probably better in every way than the old Hood cloth) is that the sails are MUCH easier to handle. In heavy conditions, when green
water is sweeping the
deck, that feature matters a LOT.
So Dimension-Polyant Lite Skin might be the best way to go for everything but storm sails, and those are probably best made from Marblehead.
Ten year sails? Until recently, I had never in my life used sails older than about 6 years, and those were well and truly trash. This includes soft cloth dacron 35 to 50 years ago. Those soft sails would get ugly and explode, with the thread failing due to crimping at the sail surface, and chafing where the thread is inside the cloth, and chafing where the cloth and thread rubs against anything anytime. I remember well repairing sails at sea...
Like my old Muscle Car, the memories of
reliability are simply not true.
But recently I have sailed on some low speed cruisers with 10 to 15 year old sails, and they still
work fine. Several members of this board have sailed around the world with one set of sails. So I think modern cloth is an improvement over the past.
But mildew is a problem. That is a fact. Some things can help of course, but even the most OCD owners and captains I know have problems with mildew on sails and mildew on
boats in general.
What have people found that works for the mildew on sails that can be performed by the crew aboard the boat?