Sail Heavy Weather in Comfort — Storm Trysail
To sail heavy weather comfortably, the Sailor must:
Firmly understand the fundamentals of sailing.
Have a strong boat with its critical systems ready for operation.
Posses experience (pre-departure) that guides them to select a well-rounded inventory of heavy weather equipment, including: robust running rigging setup; reliable reefing system; sea-anchor & drogue deployment strategy; and, a Storm Trysail.
Practice the deployment of each heavy weather system & method aboard their boat underway in preparation for, and before encountering heavy weather.
Draw upon their experience managing progressively more challenging heavy weather sailing conditions with varied severity: high winds to heavy seas.
Soundly understand the human-relation factors their crew will be required to demonstrate using their hands, mental capacity, and, physical ability in the oceanographic world where risk of injury (or death) is high for anyone venturing into heavy weather.
Storm Trysail by UK Sailmakers aboard Paul Exner’s SV Solstice, a full keel Cape George Cutter 31.
In this post, I aim to detail my recent heavy weather practice using my Storm Trysail when I purposely sailed into the Alenuhaha Channel between Maui and Hawaii Island to train my crew how to handle 30-40 knot winds, gusting to 50!
Here’s how I approached this mission with safety in mind, and how my preparedness produced a comfortable experience for my crew, with minimal wear-and-tear on my vessel’s equipment while sailing with my Storm Trysail.
The Primary Advantage of a Storm Trysail as a Management Tool for Heavy Weather — the Storm Trysail fundamentally exposes a “smaller” sail area to high winds, built for a configurable sail shape, and constructed to a standard that provides a sail which can be rigged safely to handle extreme wind conditions.