Paikea’s Synthetic Rigging

A broken strand on one of Paikea’s original wire sidestays set off a full rethink of how the rig is held up. Rather than replace like-for-like, we moved the whole boat to synthetic standing rigging — continuous filament, unidirectional Dyneema DM20 — and took the headstay along with it, which meant solving the furling problem too. This is where that whole project lives: why we made the change, how the stays are actually built, and what’s different about sailing on synthetic rigging day to day.

Build Series

• Replacing Wire Sidestays with Synthetic — the failure that started it, why a like-for-like wire replacement didn’t make sense, and how we landed on DM20 over the other Dyneema grades.
• Synthetic Headstay Furling Explained — why a synthetic stay can’t run through a standard furler, and how a torsional headstay cable solves it.
• Inside the Fabrica Workshop: How Synthetic Rigging Is Actually Made — a visit to Fabrica’s Valencia workshop to see the stays actually built, inspected, and specced.

In the Library

Members get the extended cut of the Fabrica workshop visit — the full safety factor breakdown, how we measured Paikea’s stays for spec, synthetic loop and strop engineering, and Fabrica’s on-site mini-braider tool — over on the Members Library. For the wider rig-tuning context this project sits inside, head to the Performance Sailing Hub.