Quote: " if I bumped out the roller onto the bowsprit..."
Why would you set yourself up for misery??? The roller belongs where the shock loads it must necessarily absorb will transmit to the solid hull - not to a sticky-out bit of flimsy wood or
steel tubing.
Bobstay and dolphin striker will brace the sprit against the LIFTING load of the
canvas, but there is NO WAY you can brace a sprit sufficiently against the downwards loads of an
anchor rode loosing its catenary with a hard jerk!
Using the rigging components you already have, bring her back as close as you can to the original sailplan. She'll sail fine. For a
motorsailer. Which is what she is, because that's what she was designed to be. Ye canna change the leopard's spots!
If it's a fast, high-performing
racer you want, you've gone up the wrong street.
But take heart: TrentePieds has the precisely same SA/D, though she is, of course, five foot longer on the
water line and her design displacement is 9K rather than the 7K of the EH. The Salish Sea, my home waters,+ is not much more than a glorified bathtub, and on some August afternoons you're hard pressed to find even a ripple on the
water in the middle of the straits. So it doesn't matter that we're BADLY undercanvassed. So are the boats with an SA/D of 21 :-)
And when it comes up to blow - even a piddling 20Knts - the EH has it all over TrentePieds: The EH is tiller steered rather than
wheel steered, which makes her SOO much more tractable. She is
full keel rather than fin, she has a real
rudder rather than the silly vestigial things that call them selves rudders on modern boats. She will lie decently to her
anchor rather than embarrass you in front of every other boat in the anchorage by lurching back and forth like a terrier shaking a rat.
So it's not all bad:-)
But the key to it all is to get her sailplan back to the dimensions that her
designer meant them to be.
TrentePieds