back in the water last weekend, but today was the first day of challenging winds..... about 15 kts gusting to 24.Last year was my first season learning with the boat and also the excellent resources in this forum. I had a standard main and jib and she's well balanced and sails fairly well in moderate winds, lacking power in light winds and easily overpowered in strong winds unless reefed. Since the winds here are more usually light, I decide to buy a Genoa and got a factory standard 150%.
So today was the first day to experiment with the jenny and stronger winds. I was already pleased with the light wind performance from earlier in the week.... HUGE difference, but I was expecting to have problems coping with so much sail area. I started downwind. The jenny is a lot easier to maintain in wing on wing configuration, the jib does ok but tends to snap around much more without a whisker pole. Anyway I was getting a consistent 5 knots which was pleasing. Turning into wind, life got busy. I was doing OK but the gusts were getting a little hard to handle, plus sailing on a river can be busy. Whenever the wind is strong it always seems to be coming smack down the river so there's a lot of tacking involved and there's the barge traffic to contend with. She was tacking ok but it was a lot of work single handed.... seemed like I'd only just got her trimmed and on course before it was time to tack again. Reefing would probably have helped but I was really interested in experimenting with the jenny so I opted to pull the main down and sail on jenny alone.
From last year, I had found that she never sailed well with only the main.... just not balanced enough, and fairly hopeless on just the jib on anything more upwind than a beam reach and fairly impossible to tack. So my expectations for sailing on the jenny alone were not good. Boy, was I wrong!
Started on a broad reach and she picked up speed rapidly, well balanced on the rudder. So I started to see how close I could get to the wind. I winched the sheet as tight as I could, with the leech touching the shrouds and spreader (sheeted outside the shrouds, not between, that's for another day!), and then adjusted heading to get the telltales streaming optimally. It was quite sensitive to get in the groove and stay there but we were maintaining 5.5kts (max recorded was 6.8 ) easily, and again well balanced on the rudder, although it was easy to get pushed off heading and fall out of the groove. Tacking was no problem, I'd head off the wind to accelerate, as much as anything because sheeting and steering by myself was all too quick for me, but once accelerated and close hauled on heading my GPS was showing 90 degrees between tacks. I was blown away by this (no pun intended)! I expect that the river current probably contributed to this but I tried to measure it later and couldn't get it to register, probably less than a knot.
I was truly amazed by the performance. I expected it to be slow, unbalanced, and with lousy pointing, but found that it was a rewarding way to sail in these conditions, especially single handed. And yes, I understand it's probably not a good idea in an
but the has a backstay.
Unless your testing boat limits for MacGregor Yachts, why do this? If you should inadvertently find the breaking point, "OOPS" won't help you.