Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

Added a third when we went cruising...

We don't have a stormsail or a second track for one, and we didn't have time or the budget to add one on, so I had our loft put a deep third reef on our sail. We've used it once, but even when we were in 70kts of wind off the NJ coast for a 45 minute storm we only had two reefs in (with no genoa) and did OK. In retrospect, a third reef probably would have been good as we hit 9.5kts through the water (don't know what we did over ground) with just a double reefed main, fairly calm water (3-5ft seas) running in front of the wind. I brought us real close in to shore so there was no room for fetch to build. Not bad for a boat with a theoretical hull speed of 7.7kts.

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