Upgrade to control lines

One big annoyance from my first few sails has been the combination on continuous lines and rail mounted cleats. The cleats are uncomfortable to sit on and much worse kept coming uncleared. The main cause of uncleating being over exuberant use of the continuous lines pulling on the backside of the far cleats.

Once the cleats on the rail are undone you have to reach them to recleat, likely a problem as your weight goes to the wrong place.

Looking at rigging pictures I found images of Daryl’s Farr on face book where the cleats were centerline and led through eyes at the rail.

This seemed to fix all my primary issues so I decided to copy.


 Original layout:

Removed and holes filled. Also marked out an extra area for more non skid:


At this point I commented on Daryl’s picture and he replied that he no longer ran lines through the eyes, but instead to low friction rings on elastic. As I thought about this made a lot of sense as it would allow more control from outboard.

So I adopted the idea - Mark 1:

This first version showed promise but had too much friction to extend the lead comfortably so I had another go.

This works a LOT better. If still not good enough I have a plan to switch the eye straps around but first will go sailing. Right now they just use the same hole pattern the cam cleats did on the rail.






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