Rig styles (sloop)
An article from AES.
Rigs (modern) generally come in four flavors. There are masthead and fractional rigs and there are swept spreader and inline spreader rigs. Combine these and you have four possible combination s, I would like to propose to you an interesting set of generalizations one can make about these four flavors.
- Masthead Sail Plan with Inline Spreaders
- Racer IMS / Cruising
- Downwind Racing Isp=I (sleds)
- No Runners (unlikely but possible)
- Large yachts, Large Crew
- traditional cruiser
- Masthead Sail Plan with Swept Spreaders
- Full on Cruising
- No runners (probable, quite possible)
- MPS or no Spinnaker
- Yankee, furled reacher
- Large yachts, small crew
- Fractional Sail Plan with Inline Spreaders
- Full on Racing PHRF, IMS
- Masthead Spinnaker 'ideal'
- Always have runners
- Fully crewed racing
- Small yachts, large crew
- Fractional Sail Plan with Swept Spreaders
- Racer / Cruiser
- Masthead Spinnaker for Racing
- Fractional Spinnaker/MPS for Cruising
- No runners (possible)
- Short handed cruising, short handed racing
- Small yachts, small crew
These comments about four basic configurations are obviously just rules of thumb, and at first it looks fairly confusing, but it works for us and whilst there are exceptions to these rules due to a wide or narrow chainplate width and genoa overlap considerations, these observations are things that you might find useful. Now, speaking about chainplate width in particular, not enough people seem to realise how important this is. For example if you have chainplates a 1m off centreline and you move them out to the gunwhale at say 1.5m from centreline that is a 50% increase. The loads in the side rigging will therefore drop by 33% and in a lot of cases, the savings in rigging weight and mast weight will be far greater than building your mast in carbon fibre!! The savings in cost of a light alloy mast and light side rigging is also something to be considered, you save money and you save weight. A carbon rig with chainplates on the gunwhale might be lighter again, but cost can be a factor. We have to say that self tacking headsails make a lot of sense for cruising or short handed sailing or to just plain keep costs down. This does not mean that you must have less sail area, though for a racing yacht the rules kind of mess this up (we know). The point is that you can not put on wide chainplates if you have an overlapping headsail because it ruins the sheeting angle. A properly designed sail plan with a self tacking jib can allow very close sheeting angles and no loss in power with the right size of sail plan. So, whilst non-overlapping sail plans with wide chainplates are not suitable for everyone, the saving in cost and weight is worth considering in many yachts.
