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Oct 20, 2005 - PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE OF SAILS
by Al & Beth Liggett


	Beth on the foredeck with sewing machine and mainail? - Or maybe it's the furling yankee. This was in Chagos 3 years ago.

Everything on a sailboat needs maintenance at some time or other. Some equipment seems to demand attention more often than others, like the engine, or pumps for instance. Irregularities or failures in those sorts of things you know about right away - then the spares and tool kits come out, and the faults are corrected.

However, it's easy to forget about one of the most important (and expensive) pieces of gear aboard your boat - your sails. You put them up, take them down. They live quietly on the boom or in their bag. They don't complain unless something goes dramatically wrong. Then it's big-time repair or replacement.

It's hard to offer exact advice on preventative sail maintenance. What you do will depend on the age, use, and existing condition of the sail. For instance, we have a storm trysail. It is 29 years old – original equipment! Yet we have never used this sail. About every 10 years we drag it off the shelf and out of the bag, look it over, then put it back. Looks like it's time for another inspection. Maybe we'll just sell it this time.

The biggest maintenance factor is protection from the sun. ALWAYS put on your sail covers. ALWAYS bag your headsails. Make sure the furling sails don't look like candy canes, with gaps of sail between the UV cover. If you won't be using a sail for a while, store it below. Try to wash down your sails with fresh water and make sure they are DRY before stowing them. Squirt the hanks on jibs, and any other hardware, with your favorite lubricant. If you are leaving the boat for a while, take ALL the sails off, clean them, and store them below. I know it's a hassle, but worth the protection from sun and mildew. Your sail's sheets will benefit from the same sort of treatment too.

We do have a close look at our regularly used sails and their hardware before every major passage. You can catch things like chafe, a worn batten pocket, stitching failure on a seam, or a rip in the sunshield panel of the roller-furling sail. Then get out the sail sewing kit and make the repair.

Nevertheless, surprises do catch you. Our cruising chute is a 1996 edition. Well used, and well patched. Looked fine when we had it up for inspection. Yet our first light-air day on passage to Addu early this year saw it develop a long tear right across the bottom lateral panel. It had not caught on anything, and there certainly wasn't enough wind to cause that either. We laid it on deck and put a bandage of sticky-backed spinnaker tape on the rip. A corner of the tape didn't want to stay put. In re-working the patch, Al pulled the cloth tight – and another rip went zinging along the panel. The material is just rotten. We were eventually able to make it a useful sail again. Later, a sailmaking friend told us that the lighter the color, the faster the deterioration in spinnaker cloth. In our case, the panel is a very light blue. So now we have to decide if it is worth replacing all the light blue panels in this sail, or just getting a new sail altogether. Probably the latter – in the light airs of this part of the world, we do use the chute a lot.

We carry a number of supplies on board to deal with sail maintenance and repair, maybe more than most people normally would have. This is because during the interim between our first boat and Sunflower, we moved to Guam. The sailing community on the island was booming just as the general economy was during those years. But there wasn't much available in the way of marine services for the boats. As a sideline, Al and I opened up a sail repair, awning and canvas business. We bought a heavy-duty sewing machine and a bunch of materials and supplies to deal with most kinds of repairs. When we left Guam in 1976 we sold the business, the big machine, and most of the materials, but kept anything that we thought would be handy for us to use with our own awnings and sails.

Probably the most used items are needles and thread, and a sailor's palm for hand sewing. As far as palms go, one size doesn't fit all. I have my own; Al has his. (You can get left-handed palms too.) We have threads of different weight, plus a flat waxed thread and a brown whipping twine. There are needles of different sizes, both round and triangular for different types of sewing. But none of the needles are big. I think many people try to do repairs with too big a needle and too big a thread. All you do then is make big holes – and the next time it will "tear long the dotted line" so to speak.


Al framed by "Helen" - our multipurpose cruising chute. The upper lateal light blue panel is the culprit needing renewal. Proabably all the light blue panels, so maybe it's time for a new sail entirely.

Another well used set of tools are our grommet punches and dye sets. We carry 2 sizes - #1 and #4 spur grommets. Spur grommets have little "teeth" that bite into the fabric and are peened over in the set. They simply don't tear out.

I also have a sewing machine on board. It's not a heavy-duty type, or even one that is sold specifically for doing sail repair. It is a good quality Sears Kenmore household machine. That machine is 25 years old now, and still going strong. I use a #18 needle (bigger would be better) with V-69 waxed Dacron thread. It will sew a surprising number of layers of sail or acrylic. When the fabric gets too thick to punch through, you can usually finish off with hand sewing. The biggest problem is that it has a small throat – the space that the material feeds into. I simply can't roll up a sail small enough to get to the inside areas of a large sail.

Another problem is space to lay out the project and sew. We have a large flush deck, which becomes the "work table" when I drag out the machine and operate on a sail. Not the greatest, but I can usually accomplish what needs doing.

In 1994 our front awning blew apart in a squall. We went to the local awning shop and bought some good quality vinyl and had the shop weld 2 sections together. My Kenmore easily completed the project with nylon tape reinforcement and hems. Two years later the stitching on the awning was getting worn and broken from sun damage. I restitched it with Gortex thread. Now it's nine years later and I have not touched the front awning again. The material will probably wear out before the thread does! This thread simply does not break
down in the sunlight like regular thread. So why doesn't everybody use it? It costs about 5 times more than regular thread. But the big drawback – and one I haven't solved – is that it is NOT user-friendly. I have a terrible time getting the thread to sew correctly in my machine. I have finally resolved to just accept the skipped stitches and get on with the job (but I still swear a lot!).

Coming back from Chagos in June we noted some things that could be better about our now 3-year-old mainsail. We are on our way to Thailand as I write (to deal with another kind of maintenance – dental). There are sailmakers and sail repair facilities in Phuket. Hopefully we will be able to cross the sail repair items from the perpetual "TO DO" list.