Evan Gatehouse wrote:

Hi,

Our boat is a cutter and came with a roller furling genoa &
furling staysail. Tacking the big genoa through the slot is
a pain. It doesn't blow through very easily and short
tacking up a narrow channel is a bit of a pain.

It's pretty common to have a removable inner forestay - but
using hanked sails, not with a furled sail on it. I suspect
that if I try removing it and moving it aft, I will be
likely to bend the furler extrusion at some point when
moving it back & forth.

Anybody have any thoughts? I rather would prefer to have a
hanked on staysail, but it's a very nice Harken furler and
it's SOOO convenient when it's blowing 25 and I just unroll
that little staysail and keep on blasting to windward.

It took us awhile to learn to tack with the staysail stay there making
the slot so much smaller. It is definitely a pain to short tack, so
we don't do it if we don't have to.

We don't have a big genoa - just the yankee jib which BTW is quite a
big sail - it isn't some tiny little sail like some experts on this
group tend to indicate. It is just that the foot is cut up a bit so
we can see under it. Anyway, what we do is come through the wind, and
not until the main and staysail (which are both self-tending) are
drawing do we pull the jib through. Sometimes we will furl it a bit
first but not usually.

I don't know if that helps.

grandma Rosalie