Joe wrote:
No way to reef the main, or rake the mast on the fly.

Not many boats can rake the mast "on the fly" although I
suppose you could say that backstay tensioners have some
effect like that.

However you can always sail a bit, go back in & adjust the
rake, go out & see the effect, repeat as needed to get it
right. I happen to like tinkering with the rig and getting
it right... the difference can be noticeable yet very few
people ever bother... even racers.

Reefing- few small boats can reef the main. Partly because
this adds too much windage, weight, tangles & snarls; and
also because the balance is affected and the boat could be
worse off with a conventional reef. An option is a cut-down
main (flat flat flat, negative roach, no battens) for very
heavy air.

With the main up I was going to go swimming, waters still a bit cold.


Don't be such a wimp (says the guy with 3 wetsuits).


The jib is off a snipe and fits the forstay fully, no way to set it
lower or higher.

Sure there is. To set it lower, put a smaller shackle on the
tack, or even just use a straight bolt w/ 2 washers.

... I did have the perfect twist for high winds going
upwind, With just the jib at 20 kts I was cooking upwind and could
point fairly high, and the sail was clean with no flappin anywhere. My
Labrisa's ideal wind speed in 10 to 15 kts, sortta like Bob 35s5 or it
get real tender and prone to get blown over.


Small boats can get squirrelly in heavy air. But IMHO
there's no finer school for sailing & boat handling.


Yeah the gunion broke while I was up near the mast using a tiller boom
to get the boat to surf some waves when it broke. It got real
squirreley until I made it back to the stern and grasped the top of the
tiller at the rudder, good thing I have a spring clip on the bottom
gunion or I might have had the rudder/ tiller yanked out of my hand.

Had that happen (or something similar) many times. Broken
hiking sticks by the score, broken tillers a couple times,
broken pintles, ripped-out gudgeons, rudder blades that fold
up under stress (actually that only happened once but it was
interesting)... at one time I was the champion of our
sailing club at rudderless sailing... 'necessity' is the
mother of lots of things!

It's one reason I like to carry a paddle in small boats.

I used to race a singlehander called a Force 5 which has a
spring loaded pin assembly for the pintles/gudgeons. This
was held in place by a circular spring clip which would
weaken over time & pop out of it's groove, allowing the
rudder to flop back & forth uselessly on either top or
bottom gudgeon. This happened to me & others several times
before we correctly diagnosed it, often in heavy traffic...
one memorable time at the gybe mark in the middle of a pack
of boats.

Fresh Breezes- Doug King