Sea Trials With Our New Mainsail
Motor testing only tells you so much. To really know if a rebuilt boat is sound, you have to load it up under sail and see what happens.
Paikea had already been out under motor to test the new front beam, longeron, folding propellers, rudders, flush skin fittings, and fresh antifoul — enough to confirm the boat moved and steered the way it should. But none of that puts real load through the rig or the front beam the way sailing does. Before setting off anywhere serious, we needed to proof-load the rig and the beam properly, under real sail loads, and find out whether everything held the way it was designed to.
A new headcar gaff lock
One of the quieter additions going into this test was a headcar gaff lock, machined by Shayne and inspired by the gaff lock systems used on large performance multihulls. It lets the head of the square-top mainsail release cleanly and flake away neatly into its bag — a small mechanical detail, but exactly the kind of thing that makes handling a big square-top main considerably less of a fight.
The full mainsail reefing system this lock is part of — including how the halyard lock, cars, and reef line setup all work together — is covered in detail in Our Custom Mainsail Reefing System: How It All Works.
First real load on the new front end
With Shayne and Ollie working the mast, and the breeze building from around 12 knots up toward 21, this was the first time real sailing loads had gone through the rebuilt front beam and longeron. Composite sidestays got tensioned by hand, watching wraps carefully to keep control over how much load was going in as the breeze picked up. Reefing got tested too — pulling load on and off the rig deliberately, rather than just seeing what happened in steady conditions.
One imperfection, traced and understood
Sailing the boat properly for the first time also surfaced a small issue from the original build: the head webbing on the mainsail, positioned by guesswork the night before an earlier trip to France, was sitting slightly too high. That knock-on effect showed up in the cunningham attachment points across all three reef positions sitting higher than they should, creating too much slack for the cunningham to do its job properly through the gooseneck. The fix is simple in concept — reposition the webbing — and genuinely tedious in execution, since it means unpicking the head, pulling the batten, and starting that section over.
Given the sail itself was built from scratch during lockdown — a 72-foot delivery main converted into a square-top using sail design software with no formal sailmaking training behind it — one webbing position being slightly off is a small price for how close the overall build came out. The batten car system runs smoothly on the way down and needs a manual nudge over the sheave on the way up, a minor quirk rather than a real flaw. The 3D-printed batten inserts, made by a friend at the eleventh hour during the original build, are still doing exactly what they’re meant to.
What the test actually confirmed
Between the proof-loaded rig, the front beam holding up under real sail loads, and a new gaff lock system working as intended, this sail confirmed the structural side of the rebuild was sound. The one issue that turned up — a webbing position slightly off — was a build detail, not a structural concern, and easy enough to trace back to exactly where and why it happened.