So, glorious spring day today. Brushed the cobwebs off the boat - I spent the autumn/winter series on a J/80 so it must be September since I sailed it last. Having a pleasant sail with another Stealth and a Dart 15 (mainly showing off to the sailing school Wayfarers with their brand new, first time out, beginners). And then I put the spinnaker up. Well, in actual fact, I put it about 2/3rds of the way up when something jammed. On inspection - the cover of the halyard had parted. So my next trip to the chandlers requires me to pick up 20m of suitable string - 5 or 6 mm double braid I guess. My question (finally) is this - do you think it's worth tapering the retrieval end of the halyard to reduce wear on the spinnaker? If so, how much cover would you suggest removing?

(Off to practice on what's left of my old one now - if I can find my fid anyway....).

Thanks

George

Glorious spring? Not on our side of the north sea, we have snow, hail and wind, and lots of it! Attached is a picture taken on friday, while rigging our new snuffer bag. No need to say that the club was deserted I guess.

http://www.catsailor.com/bb_files/103947-Bilde023.jpg

Here is a picture taken today:
http://www.catsailor.com/bb_files/103947-Bilde029.jpg



I am a bit confused over what kind of line you are going to use. I take it you are thinking about a double braid core (spectra?) with regular nylon cover, and not a pure double braid with no cover.
Since we installed our first snuffer we have stripped the cover off the retrieval end of the halyard. The first trips out we ran with the cover on, and had burns on the spi panels where the friction between cloth and line had been too large. Since we stripped the cover off we have not had this problem to the same extent (far from it). When stripping, you should at no point remove more of the cover than you absolutely have to. The core is very slippery to handle, and if you sail singlehanded, it might be worth it to keep the cover on. On our last halyard/retrieval line, we removed the cover from the tie-in on the spi patch and down until ca. 1 meter from the foot of the spi. That way we minimized the length of core to be handled when retrieving. It's far better to err on the short side than the long side..
Others (like Wouter, I seem to remember?) have had no issue with keeping the cover on for the whole retrieval line. We discussed this at length some time ago, so if you make a search here on the F-16 forum you might find more opinions. Hope I understood the question correctly.

We run some very light stuff with about 600mm of heavier line where it cleats on the mast. That system has worked flawlessly so far this season.

Tiger Mike

I've not had any trouble with wear due to the rope - although plenty of nicks due to untaped hardware on the forestay.

How much have you stripped off, Rolf? My guess that you only need to strip the same length as the distance between the lowest loop on the kite and the top loop - I'm assuming that the wear occurs once the kite is at least partially in the sock.

Paul

The goal is to ONLY have the part of the line you are handling or cleating to have the cover on it. This helps with the line running through the blocks and decreases weight (ya gotta be good to make that weight difference count!!!)
My suggestion is to take the cover off on a small section first then if you need to you can take more off. A little more work but you do not want to try to pull on the core of the line to snuff the spin. You may get away with last couple feet being the core, but nothing more than that when snuffing. I use 1/4 (rather large compared to what a lot of people use I think) warpspeed that has a dyneema (aka spectra) core. I actually over did one end so I switched around and tapered the other end! So the halyard side is tapered which doesn't create a problem because it isn't nearly the 25 or so feet long to create a prob raising the spin AND the snuffer end is tapered also to about the right length. I coudl probably take off another couple feet but I haven't noticed a problem at all. You can taper almost any line that is double braided but you need to make sure the core is braided (some older 3/16 line has parallel core which wouldn't work to taper for obvious reasons). 3/16 crystaline might work well but that line has a lot of problems with "hockling" I guess would be the term- where it bunches up sometimes where it goes aorund blocks or through cleats.

With a spi retriever light weight line will help nearly everybody. Reason being that in light wind heavy line quite substantially changes the shape of the spi by just hanging from it.

Tiger Mike

good point about pulling down on the spin with the weight. What I was mainly referring to is how everyone hypes lightweight stuff in general on boats but in the end that weight diff will only make the slightest bit of difference to only the best sailors in the world.

Thanks for your help everyone. It's all become a bit irrelevant as my chandler didn't have any taperable 5mm line and I didn't want to go up to 6mm - so I'm just going to go with untapered 5mm Excel Racing. Which at 89pence a metre gives me a significantly lower repair bill than the other Stealth that was out on Saturday which had the bottom mainsheet block disintegrate....