Sail size selection

[isobars]

Skill can make big (percentage) gaps work, but there are tradeoffs. I once had a loft make me a custom quiver of something like 3.2. 3.7, 4.5, 5.2, and 6.2. It worked well enough, but if a sail ever got damaged I'd lose shred time and those rare steady days when just the right size makes it epic may not happen to fit my gaps. I now just mumble the half-meter gap mantra. A very skillful bud got by with one-meter gaps from about 2.8 to 5.7 one season before deciding to go back to half-meter gaps. And while gusty and rangy inland winds make picking a perfect sail size elusive and probably pointless, they also make us pay a price at one end or the other if we don't get pretty close to some "ideal" midpoint. I'm rigged right if I have enough power to plane at will for hours on end without ever being afraid to maneuver as hard as I wish, and a half meter off can easily interfere with one edge or the other of that envelope if it's wide.

[nada]

My standard gorge quiver has always been a 4 sail setup of 3.7-5.2 broken out at .5 meter increments. Never had an issue with it, covers just about everything but the lightest days (that's what my bike is for). At 180 I've found that anything smaller than a 3.7 just gets too twitchy for me, so I'd rather downhaul the snot out of it and just hang on.

But sails have gotten more efficient and I was thinking of going to fewer sails with bigger gaps - say spacing it like 5.5./4.7/4.0 and calling it good. Then, after years of being a 1/2ass about it, my wife started sailing with a vengeance and we now split a quiver.

Since we're 55lbs apart, this has led me to add a 3.2 and a 2.8 at the bottom end (plus a couple of tiny boards). Her "big sail" is a 4.2 and her most used sail is probably the 3.7; mine is the 4.7. But with this split, you've got to add a couple of extra masts as well or you're in re-rig hell and I've found that making her life on the water easier makes mine infinitely better off it. Only upside is that one Chinook wave boom will cover all the sails, otherwise its just a shit ton of gear. I know - #firstworldproblems and all - but be careful what you wish for, eh?

[nada]

My standard gorge quiver has always been a 4 sail setup of 3.7-5.2 broken out at .5 meter increments. Never had an issue with it, covers just about everything but the lightest days (that's what my bike is for). At 180 I've found that anything smaller than a 3.7 just gets too twitchy for me, so I'd rather downhaul the snot out of it and just hang on.

But sails have gotten more efficient and I was thinking of going to fewer sails with bigger gaps - say spacing it like 5.5./4.7/4.0 and calling it good. Then, after years of being a 1/2ass about it, my wife started sailing with a vengeance and we now split a quiver.

Since we're 55lbs apart, this has led me to add a 3.2 and a 2.8 at the bottom end (plus a couple of tiny boards). Her "big sail" is a 4.2 and her most used sail is probably the 3.7; mine is the 4.7. But with this split, you've got to add a couple of extra masts as well or you're in re-rig hell and I've found that making her life on the water easier makes mine infinitely better off it. Only upside is that one Chinook wave boom will cover all the sails, otherwise its just a shit ton of gear. I know - #firstworldproblems and all - but be careful what you wish for, eh?

[isobars]