Boat Works: How to Optimize Your Boat for Easier Sailing

Are you happy with your boat? Few of us are, at least not 100%. There’s always something that could be improved or altered. There are also many things you can do to make your boat easier and safer to sail. If you have trouble finding crew, or perhaps you’re not in the first flush of youth and find the boat a little more difficult to handle as each season passes, following are some ways to make life easier on yourself.

Gear Up

There are plenty of ways to make a bigger boat easier—and safer—for a couple to handle. Few issues on boats cannot be solved by either hard cash or ingenuity. I started off by replacing all the 30-year-old blocks and deck organizers on board with new plain or roller-bearing items, depending on the application. This made a noticeable difference to the effort required to pull in the mainsheet without the help of a winch, for instance. You can also cut friction even more by identifying and changing inefficient line leads. I have sailed many boats with poor furling line leads that made it much harder than necessary to furl a genoa. You can swap out old-style jammers for easy-to-release rope clutches. If your boat doesn’t already have self-tailing primary winches, perhaps take advantage of West Marine’s annual BOGO (Buy One Get One free) winch sale each spring (no, I don’t have an association with West Marine). You won’t regret it, and you should have no trouble selling your old winches.

Master Your Main

If you are having trouble raising your mainsail, it’s well worth investing in a set of low-friction luff cars or a complete track-and-car system. At the budget end, the Dutchman or Tides Marine systems are popular with cruisers; higher-end setups like those from Harken, Frederiksen, and Antal are still more efficient. You won’t believe how much easier it will be to manage a heavy, fully battened sail if you have the right gear. Of course, if you have in-mast mainsail furling you’ll be smiling to yourself by now.

Until I hit my 60s, I was a vocal proponent of reefing at the mast, but now I’m happier to deal with the spaghetti in the cockpit. It’s not that I’m scared to go forward, just that I prefer not to in second- or third-reef conditions. After a near-death experience while reefing my previous boat in a gale, I decided I’d be better off with all mainsail control lines brought aft.

If there’s one painful lesson I’ve learned, it’s that your lines should either be all at the mast or all led aft. I installed a Seldén single-line reefing boom, and along with the reefing lines, I brought the main halyard, outhaul, boom vang, cunningham, and topping lift lines aft to clutches on either side of the cabintop. Two-line reefing, with both tack and clew lines led aft, is even more friction-free at the expense of even more line tails in the cockpit, but I didn’t have the real estate for three pairs of clutches. If I were to do it over again, I would go for (sharp intake of breath) an in-mast furling mainsail. Yes, these can jam, but so can roller-furling headsails, and no one complains about them (much).

Many years ago, I met an 85-year-old who sailed every day, year-round, on his 30-footer, which he had equipped with an aftermarket roller-furling mainsail as well as a roller-reefing headsail. Facnor and CDI are the best-known makers of behind-mast units, which are basically headsail furling extrusions mounted to brackets at the masthead and gooseneck. These may not sharpen the performance of your boat, but after all we’re talking cruising here, not racing, and they will make the sail much easier to handle.

If you don’t want to go that far, adding lazyjacks and a stack pack system to contain the sailcloth when the sail is dropped or reefed will be a big improvement. This is what I’ve done, and the only question is why I waited so long.

Electric Assist

Once upon a time I was a sailing purist, right down to the wooden boat with hanked-on sails. Then I met electric winches and was lost to the dark side. Actually, the slippery slope was a lot shallower, starting with furling headsails and progressing through electric windlasses, but I became a fan of electric sheet winches after sailing a big Hinckley from New England to Bermuda a few times. The ability to trim a big headsail in a blow with no more effort than pushing a button is seductive in the extreme.

Harken, Lewmar, Antal, Andersen, and Seldén offer new electric winch packages and often aftermarket kits to convert your existing manual winches. Harken’s Rewind electric system is reversible so you don’t even need to ease the sheet by hand, while Seldén has achieved perhaps the ultimate in easy sailhandling with its Synchronized Mainsail Furling (SMF), which connects an electric motor in a furling mast with an electric winch for the outhaul, so you can make or shorten sail with a fingertip.

Another way of going electric is to retrofit an electric headsail furler, which, if you’ve ever had to reef a big genoa in a squall, is a tempting idea. A few years ago, I had the manual drum on my Furlex 304 jib furler upgraded to the 304S electric version. As a solo sailor, I’ve found the push-button furler to be a much more useful item than I’d imagined; sailing in typical squally Caribbean weather, I can reef or unfurl the jib in seconds to match changing wind speeds without breaking a sweat or wincing while a flogging headsail tries to shake the stick out of the boat as I’m cranking in the furling line. Seldén, Facnor, Harken, Bamar, Profurl, and Reckmann all produce well-proven electric furling gears.

Electric winches and jib furlers are high-ticket items, though, and there are more cost-effective, if less sophisticated, ways to enjoy electrical assistance with your sailhandling chores. I sailed a few thousand miles on a 47-foot performance catamaran whose heavy mainsail was a bear to raise despite its 2:1 purchase halyard. Our savior was “Millie,” a 28-volt cordless Milwaukee drill equipped with a winch bit. It not only raised the mainsail in double-quick time but proved invaluable for hoisting our 200-odd-pound skipper up the mast. It was not long before he became so fond of Millie he was using it to trim the sails, hoist the dinghy, and anything else that required a winch. Since my bunk was directly under the starboard sheet winches and we sailed for thousands of miles on port tack, this did not please me, but so long as the skipper’s happy…

Millie’s chief flaw was its weight, which was a little much for the weaker member of the crew. It was also a little ill-mannered in that it would kick back nastily from time to time. A lighter, better-behaved, and tailor-made product, the Ewincher electric winch handle looks like an excellent piece of labor-saving gear that’s perfect for the less muscular sailor. And, you can use it on your existing winches, so with one purchase, you can upgrade all of your winches to electric-assist, rather than buying and installing new ones.

There are still plenty of holdouts who swear by their unbreakable manual windlasses, but I am not among them. I believe an electric windlass is an essential piece of safety equipment that will not only save your back from strain but possibly your boat from grounding. Should you ever find yourself dragging quickly toward a rocky shoreline, would you rather be cranking up a few links at a time or hauling up 100 feet of chain a minute at the press of a button?

Hold On

Offshore, falls can have serious consequences. If there is one thing most modern production boats have in common, it’s a lack of handholds. On deck, there are usually one or two token rails each side of the cabintop, almost always stopping short of the mast so as not to spoil the clean lines and incur the stylist’s wrath. Down below, things are typically even worse, with cavernous interiors unmarred by anything resembling a decent handhold. If there are any, they probably run along the overhead where they can’t be easily reached by anyone much under 6 feet tall.

Adding a few strategically placed handholds is one of the best things you can do to keep your crew safe. One of the cheapest and best upgrades I made was to fit handholds on either side of the companionway. I could not believe that no previous owner had added them, nor that they had not been fitted as standard. Stainless steel or teak grabrails in varying sizes are readily available and easy to install. One in the heads, another in the cabin where you stand to put your pants on, and so on; you’ll work out where they need to go.

If it’s not possible to permanently mount a long handrail, a length of rope rigged between strong points when you go to sea will do the job. A few years ago, I saw a boat that had bus-style straps attached to fore and aft rails so you never had to let go when moving around. Today’s wide cockpits can be dangerous too, unless there is a solid cockpit table to break your fall downhill when the boat is well heeled. I had the top lifeline replaced with stainless steel tubing from the stern rail to the front of the cockpit and feel a lot safer for it. It’s a solid handhold where it’s needed most.

Lift Smart, Not Heavy

In terms of back savers, I bought an outboard crane this year, another bit of gear I highly recommend. It lets me get the motor on and off the dinghy singlehanded, and I also use it to lift water and diesel jerrycans on board.

I also made up a 4:1 purchase handybilly that is long enough to lift someone out of the water when connected to the main halyard. Its tail is taken via a snatch block to a sheet winch. I’ve used it to lift all manner of heavy items, including batteries and a stove, on board. Not so long ago I would have just humped all that stuff up the ladder rather than taken the time to rig it. It also makes easy work of lifting the dinghy onto the foredeck when clipped to the spinnaker halyard. I have not yet tried it on a 200-pound crew, but I have no doubt it will work.

Work Smarter

It’s a matter of being smart. There’s a reason why women have long been competing on equal terms against men in long-distance singlehanded races, wrangling powerful, heavily loaded boats; they use brains, technique, and technology to compensate for any disparity in physical strength. The rest of us can do the same. We’d be stupid not to.

Former SAIL Editor-in-Chief Peter Nielsen is cruising in the western Caribbean and always optimizing his Pearson 39-2.

June/July 2023