I was lucky enough to stumble across an old spinnaker staysail tucked in the back corner of a sail container at the yard here. It was originally built by North Sails for the Swedish Victory Challenge campaign in 2007.
A spinnaker staysail or in this case a SS 2-3 refers to the type and design number of the sail. In this particular case it is a spinnaker staysail design number 2. The number 3 means it is the third one of this design built.
Lettering on the head or top of the sail
SS is the abbreviation for spinnaker staysail. A spinnaker staysail is a small, full shaped headsail that is hoisted when using an asymmetric spinnaker and mainsail. It is used for downwind purposes. Of course when I say “small” headsail, when it belongs to a 70 ft America’s Cup yacht it is actually pretty BIG.
The spinnaker staysail before recut
Although this sail was over 15 years old and was worn in a few places it was perfect for our needs as we could remove the unwanted pieces in the recut. The sail is a radial construction which means that it is made with smaller panels stuck together into a radial shape much like the rays of the sun. Each corner of the sail: the head, clue and tack are each made in this radial formation which gives the sail it’s shape and allows the sail maker to construct a much stronger sail as you are able to take advantage of the directional strength of the cloth used. Each radial “corner” of your sail (or triangle if you like) is then sewn together. The vertical join between the clue and the tack is known as your vertical join and the seam between the tack and clue pieces and the head is a horizontal join.
This radial sail was a perfect choice for us to recut into a Code 0 for our catana catamaran. The staysail had a luff of 25m and our Code 0 needed to be 18m so it was simply a job of removing some of the middle of the sail (or belly section) and reducing the overall size of the sail to make it fit our boat. A Code 0 does have a different role than the spinnaker staysail. As I have already mentioned, a spinnaker staysail is a small headsail used in conjunction with the spinnaker for downwind sailing, a Code 0 is a large overlapping headsail that can be used for everything from upwind to tight reaching in light airs. It is something that we would use to fill in the gap in our sail inventory for those times when we are unable to use our kite (asymmetric spinnaker) but it’s not quite headsail and main upwind weather.
Photo of sail recut and hoisted on the boat
The first part of the process was to measure the distance from the bow pole to the mast head halyard. As we have modified the boat quite dramatically by adding a new front beam with longeron and bow pole so all our existing measurements were no longer correct. We also wanted to be able to sheet the sail at the back of the boat. The description of a Code 0 being an overlapping headsail refers to the clew of the sail overlapping the mainsail and sheeting aft of the mast. We wanted to sheet as far aft as we could so we needed to know our foot length measurement as well.
Once we had confirmed our new luff and foot lengths it was time to remove the existing luff tape from the sail and decide which horizontal join we were going to cut. There were two large windows in the luff of this sail which we did not want to keep so it was decided to cut at this point and remove as much of the windows as we could during the process.
With the sail cut into two pieces ( a top and bottom) it was simply a matter of joining the two pieces back together at the new length. We spent a bit of time overlapping the top piece with the bottom piece to get the shape we wanted before we cut the excess fabric off. The foot length was already perfect so we left that part untouched.
Photo showing the finished Code 0. You can see radial panels quite easily in this photo.
Once we had sewn the new horizontal join and had our new Code 0 in one piece we could reshape the leech and luff of the sail. We reused the existing torsion cable which we also cut to the new size for our boat. Once that was complete we recycled the old head patching and made a new head reinforcement for attached the cable to the sail. We were unable to reuse the existing head as we had originally planned as the new sail was much fuller.
The clew only needed a slight bit of modification to bring it into line with the new leech profile and then I could see the leech and luff tapes back on to the new sail.
The sail fits beautifully on the boat and we now can’t wait to take Paikea out for a sail.
