Why would you make your lazy jacks difficult? Brion Toss offers a better approach.

There’s a Gary Larson cartoon with the caption “Inconvenience store,” in which all of a shop’s merchandise is crowded onto a tiny shelf, far above the heads of the customers.

Lazyjacks can be like that, a system whose entire purpose is to make your life easier, but which can make it so hard that you are actually better off without it.

Okay, that’s a bit extreme, since even a badly designed lazyjack system is — usually — better than nothing. But why settle for less than actual convenience? Why bring that shelf only a little ways down the wall, when a little more thought and planning can put it at eye level?

Lazyjacks are there to catch your mains’l when you want it caught, and to stay the heck out of the way the restof the time. You want lazyjacks to be light, stowable, unobtrusive, effective. You don’t want them to interfere with anything else.

So you don’t want to have to make expensive custom cutouts in your sail cover for them, you don’t want them slapping on the mast or snagging the headboard of the sail, you don’t want them fouling the belays of other, more vital lines, and you certainly don’t want them to be fat and heavy. But I have just described perhaps the majority of systems out there.

And it gets worse. Because lazyjacks are a component of the larger mains’l raising and stowing system, the same level of design shortcomings tend to manifest in the whole.

So we are also likely to encounter sticky luff slides; sail ties that blow overboard; sail covers that are tough to apply and remove, even without custom cutouts to deal with; and halyards that come adrift, tangle, and chafe.

If one assumes that problems like this are an inevitable consequence of conventional mains’l handling, then no wonder the popularity of mechanical furling systems.

Which, to get back to our inconvenience store, is like installing a bulky, expensive electrical device for lowering the shelf to the floor instead of installing a proper shelf, properly. There are, of course, good reasons to have a mains’l furler installed on some boats, but it should never be because a simpler system isn’t working optimally.

What, then, do ideal lazyjacks look like? Since design varies with boat size and configuration, there is no all-inclusive answer that I can give you here, but I can mention some factors that should be part of every design:

1. Light
   I use Spectra, usually 1/8-inch or less, for most of the pieces in our systems. This is light, low-windage, slick, durable, and costs no more than the fatter stuff that we might think looks right. We always splice a piece of larger-diameter Dacron rope on as the part you will handle.
2. Strong
   Lazyjacks don’t have to take much load, so you would think that you could be scant on scantlings for them. But I like to see them as emergency topping lifts, and scale the gear accordingly. Cheap insurance.
3. Handy
   If your lazyjacks belay well aft on the boom, or amidst a tangle of other lines on the mast, or if they chafe on spreaders on the way to the belay, then someone wasn’t paying attention to the layout process.
4. Retractable
   The way to avoid those sail cover cutouts is to configure the lazyjacks so that they can be taken forward when they aren’t in use.
5. Positioned
   This is the toughest layout item for me, to position the anchor points for the boom pieces such that they capture the mains’l cleanly. Not as easy as you might think, and if you get it wrong then large bights of sail will spill outside of the cradle and make furling harder. If this is happening to you, take a close look at the configuration, and see what might be changed.

In closing, I am going to make a bit of a detour here and talk about you, the reader, as part of the rigging system, the part that has to handle that mains’l, and might be considering going to a wind-up sail.

Are you working optimally? Or are you investing in that furler (or electric winch,or, shudder, motorboat) because you are resisting a much-needed upgrade?

I am not going all Luddite on you here; there is no bigger fan of mechanical advantage than I. But just as it makes sense to have well-maintained winches, the right tune on the shrouds and properly-spliced halyards, it makes sense to keep your personal machinery in good shape.

An increasingly common consequence of people failing to do this is that they come to rely more and more on electrics and hydraulics, and then find themselves unable to make things work when the machinery fails. Machinery also tends to isolate us from events, so that we can become both less appreciative of the beautiful things that are happening and similarly, less likely to notice when things are going wrong. In the latter connection, I could just about fill a book with (often horrific) stories about interesting side effects of electric winch use.

Finally, we all have physical limitations, and these will be worsened by age, injury and sickness. But if we are to participate fully in our rigs, we need to avoid artificially increasing those limitations.

To whatever extent possible, let machinery be an extension of you, not a crutch.

About Brion Toss

Brion Toss Yacht Riggers Inc. is a yacht rigging company in Port Townsend, Washington that specializes in rigging cruising vessels for offshore voyages. Brion has rigged everything from small daysailers and racing yachts to large square-riggers. An author and teacher, Brion regularly consults on rig design, layout, fabrication, and installation of rigging for naval architects, boat builders and yacht owners.

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