Spinaker sheet / grip

I'm wondering if any of you recognize the following issue:

Lately I've to do quite a bit more efforts to control the spinaker sheet. It slips thru my gloves, and when sailing the kite I have a lot of trouble to sheet it in a few inches. The pulling force is very high in my opinion. However I cannot remember that it was always like that. Maybe I need some more training, but I wonder what else can be the cause. I have no problems with the mainsheet whatsoever, it only occurs on the spinaker sheet. Especially when sailing a longer track it's difficult to hold it. (due to the force, or due to bad grip?)

The gloves I use, I use already for a longer time, and seems ok to me. The sheet is more or less original I think (Nacra Inter 18) Although we had two, but with the first set up it ran a bit more difficult thru the blocks (we could barely get it in). To make it run more smoothly we shifted over to the slightly thinner version sheet and larger blocks on the beam. Can this be the reason?

We rig the sheet like it should from my hand to a block on the beem, to a block on the side which has a break included.

Any ideas?

Could it be that your auto-ratchet blocks are stuck on non-ratchet?

Are you pointing too high with the spinnaker, making it too hard to hold?

Are the spinnaker blocks ratcheting? Did you put the sheet in the correct direction?

If you think it is the spinnaker sheet which has become hard to hold/handle, can you "end for end" switch and then be holding a different section of the line (or is it tapered?) to determine if it is just that part of sheet that is slippery?

No the blocks are racheting ok. Of course this was the first thing we've checked. I think we all had the case once that we used them in opposite direction, and that happens only once ;-)

As the spinnaker is quite old it's rather bunchy (is this the right word?) But we have the the pole quite low, see picture of yesterday.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/lhQXAFI.jpg?1[/img]

Yes sheet goes from hand cross the trampoline to the beam block to the racheting block on the stay.

We use a sheet out of 1 length, so shifting is rather difficult.

Seems to me the luff tension is a bit light (too much luff curve).
Also, the older spin may be a bit blown out and have more drag. That could give you additional tug on the sheet without corresponding boat speed.