Sailing Paikea Archives | youngbarnacles

Sailing Downwind on One Rudder: Balancing a Broken Boat 800 Miles from Land

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Kite Setup for an Atlantic Crossing

Kite Setup for an Atlantic Crossing Read More »

How We Reef Our Mainsail Sailing Downwind

How We Reef Our Mainsail Sailing Downwind Reefing downwind has a reputation for being awkward, and on a lot of boats, it genuinely is. Paikea adds a few of her own complications to that reputation — a mainsail halyard lock, a sticky spot in the mast track from a locking mechanism that was filed in

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How to Trim the Jib Upwind on a Catamaran

How to Trim the Jib Upwind on a Catamaran Most people’s relationship with a jib sheet starts and ends with a winch handle — pull it on when you head up, ease it off when you bear away. That gets you moving, but it’s a long way from actually trimming a sail well. Getting real

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Our Custom Mainsail Reefing System: How It All Works

Our Custom Mainsail Reefing System: How It All Works A lot of reefing complaints come down to the same root cause: an undersized system trying to do a job it was never built for. Small 24mm track with basic sliders jams under real load, sails get hard to hoist, reefing downwind becomes genuinely difficult —

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A Winch Override Trick, Wing Foiling Barbuda, and Everything We’ve Broken So Far

A Winch Override Trick, Wing Foiling Barbuda, and Everything We’ve Broken So Far Some passages are about getting somewhere. This one, from Antigua to Barbuda, ended up being about a lot more than that — a genuinely useful winch fix, an afternoon of wing foiling with an unexpected turtle cameo, and a moment of total

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