Hey,

I’ve been thinking a bit about what to do on an ultra-light cruiser if you see a storm approaching. Obviously trying to reach a nearby harbor before the shit hits the fan is the preferred option, but that’s not always going to work, even if you’re right at the coast. Personally I’m not too happy with the amount of time it would take the get an entire Dierking-style crab claw rig down, and a smaller rig with a single storm jib up, particularly if you get into storm gear first. If you are trying to make a rush for the harbor, then if you are safe in the knowledge that you can get you sail down quickly, especially if you could do so without even going on deck you could carry a larger sail a little bit longer.

I’ve always found the similarity between a lateen rig, spinnaker, and crab-claw rig remarkable, particularly with the ‘true’ crab claw rigs with the curved battens: they are essentially a hybrid between a lateen rig and an upside-down spinnaker. At least that’s how I like to think of them, and that gave me an idea: just use a spinnaker sock. I’m probably just reinventing the wheel here, but I made a quick (and terrible looking!) sketch which hopefully illustrates the idea.

Now here is the tricky question though: How would you shunt this thing?

Snuff, shunt, redeploy seems a bit slow to me, but some other elegant solution on how to prevent the spinnaker sock from getting in the way while shunting, getting all tangled up somewhere, or getting stuck under the base of the crab claw yard, thus pinching it in place and preventing you from snuffing the rig at a later point in time, eludes me thus far. Any ideas? 😊

Marco

It just occurred to me that getting the mast down to the windward side as well, may not be such a good idea, because you can’t get it, or any other mast (e.g. a smaller storm mast) up again as easily. You definitely need crew acrobatics on deck for that one! Maybe it would be a better idea to leave the mast up, using the same one to support the crab claw, and carry the storm jib, and just leave the snuffed crab claw lying on the leeward side, right next to the base of the mast. If there is a line which holds the crab claw down onto the deck tightly (which you would need anyway to reel the thing in), then there’s no problem with it sitting there either. Plus you could conceivably have 2 crab claws lying there, both ready to go (albeit potentially the wrong way around), a large one and a smaller one, plus the storm jib which is stowed, but ready to go, somewhere as well.

If you really want to reduce windage of that mast then you could always just fit a freely-rotating streamlined fairing around the round mast, that would get the drag from the mast down to almost nothing and wouldn’t be too much work…

Marco