worn out sail

How do I determine when a sail is too worn out to be used in serious regattas? In my case it's a Pentex sail.

Thanks for your advice,
Kai

Can you see thru it?

Does it feel like a soft bed sheet, of is it crisp?

Are you no longer keeping up eith the competition like you used too? ( could be one factor)

Is the downhaul bottoming out?

Is the mainsheet going block to block easier?

Is it more than ~ 3 years old?

Is it nice and flat or bagged out between the battens?

Either you make an evaluation on your speed, pointing, control in gusts, subjective looks and feelings, or you can download accumeasure and try do do an analysis. This is easiest to do if you have pictures from when the sail was new, taken from the foot/boom and up.

http://www.ukhalsey.com/accumeasuredl.asp

If you want some opinions, post some screenshots from accumeasure here, send them to your sailmaker (or the original sailmaker) and get several opinions.

Lay the sail on the ground, remove battens and see if it have stretched, like Hobie1616 suggests. If it have gone that far, you will probably want a new one. It is very subjective though.

Thanks guys for all your replies. Unfortunately accumeasure will not work on my computer since I'm on Macintosh.

My sail will be three years old at the end of this season, however, until last week I had no reason to complain about it. I'll tell you what happend, don't worry, I will not bore you with the whole story.
For some silly reason I had to let flutter both my sails for about 30 mins in strong winds with gusts over 7bft (with shaking mast and banging boom ...). This damaged the window of the main sail. My sailmaker said, that the foot of the sail and in the area close to the leech, below the first batten, is strechted. This might also have happend by falling into sail what happend several times this year. However, he said the luff looks meticilous.
I haven't sailed it after the repair yet but have to on a regatta next Sunday.

If all the issues are below the first batten you could talk to your sail maker about re-cutting it.