Purchasing the new spinnaker pole and spinnaker was the easy part (except for the checkbook impact).  The harder part came with the rigging the boat to support the additional lines required to fly a symmetrical spinnaker.  The boat was never really designed to run a symmetrical chute, so a number of considerations had to be made for rigging the sheets, guys, topping lift, and downhaul.  In addition, Vitesse has a baby stay that gets in the way of doing dip-pole gybes.

Moving the baby stay

Vitesse has a baby stay that leads to a point on the deck in between the mast and the forestay to keep the mast from pumping in heavy wind conditions.  This is great for cruising stability, but obviously gets in the way of the spinnaker pole when gybing.  To be able to gybe the pole we needed to be able to temporarily move the baby stay while sailing downwind with the symmetrical spinnaker.  So we had the boatyard install a new fitting put in the baby stay to allow us to unclip and temporarily secure it at the base of the shrouds.

New running rigging

The optimal place for the guy to come back inboard is toward the middle of the boat, far enough forward (and outboard) such that when the pole is all the way forward and on the headstay the guy is not torquing either stanchions or lifelines.  Initially we had pulleys on a fitting in the deck but that proves to be too far inward when sailing hotter angles.  We’re looking at locating them out on the rail on a short loop attached to the cleat at that position, similar to how the sheets are run.  From there, the line comes back to the primary winches on each side.

The sheets need to come far aft on the rail, through a turning block, and back up to the cabin top winches.  The cabin top winches seem more than up to the load, although at times it seems like the boat is short a winch, for example when you need to raise the role under load (need a winch to grind up the tip) but the sheet is already on the cabin-top winch.  We’re also going to investigate rigging some twingers to keep the sheets off the boom when reaching at hotter angles.  I’ll try to get some pictures of twingers to show what I mean. 

There was already a track on the mast, so we simply needed to add lines to adjust the position of the car.  Blocks for a new topping lift were also added, which runs back to the cockpit with the other halyards.  All the work of attaching the new fittings to the mast (for the inboard pole height adjustment and the topping lift) and deck (for the downhaul) was done at the KKMI boatyard in Richmond.

And after everything was installed and ready to go, the hardest part came with teaching the crew how to gybe the spinnaker under typical San Francisco Bay 20 knot winds.  :)

Next: Asymmetrical Chute on the Pole

Next on the list will be looking at how to fly a big asymmetrical chute off the pole, America’s Cup style.  Since there is only one tack and one clew on an asymmetrical (they don’t switch during the gybe like on the symmetrical), we need to rig an additional foreguy to act like the downhaul does on boats with bow poles.  This line will run through the end of the pole and will hold the kite down and out in front of the boat while the pole is switched to the new side during the gybe.  But right now we don’t have any blocks to run it through up to the bow (the pole downhaul occupies the only route forward), and we’re not certain if the anchor plate can take the upward load of a full spinnaker in 20+ knots of breeze.  The anchor plate would seem to be well designed to downward torquing loads, but I wonder about upward torquing loads.  Both loads would seem to to be trying to lever the anchor plate out of the deck, but I’m guessing there is far more force applied by a full spinnaker than anything swinging on an anchor could produce.