As mentioned before I need to sort the effort involved in raising the sail. This was forced on me by injuring my hand while on holiday.

The sail on Owl is easy to pull up; that on Custard is too hard. They should be about the same as, while Custard’s sail is almost twice as heavy as Owl’s, Custard has a pulley system that should negate the extra weight.

The first thing to tackle are the batten parrels. These were ultra-short – normally junk rig parrels are quite long allowing everything to move around. The main reason for them being ultra-short was that I didn’t build them into the sail early enough but left them as something to sort out at the end. By that time I didn’t have much option but they seemed to work ok.

The parrels are secured with plastic rucksack clips. I’ve used these on Owl and they work well. They should be a bit faster to fit than the buckles used previously – important when you’ve got a couple of kids waiting for you to finish rigging the boat.

The downside of this modification is that I may have destroyed the shape of the front of the jiblets. We’ll see. The shape is very sensitive to slight changes at the edge of the panels. Worst case is I’ll have to make new jiblets with better parrel anchors but I probably should do this anyway – the jiblets have too much angle of incidence built into them limiting how close we can sail to the wind.

I haven’t had time to put the sail up and see if it works yet. Hopefully I can update you soon.