Ocean day sail with fast spinnaker run back home

 5/12 - started 9am finished 2pm (dock to dock).  Sailing with Drew.

Sailed upwind (North) until around 12:10pm.  We reached a point just north of the lighthouse.  Turned south, dropped the jib sail and raised the spinnaker.  The autopilot, the spinnaker sock and the new spinnaker pole setup made this quite doable with only two of us.  Wind was around 11 to 13 knots NNW when we started downwind.

GPS speed and boat speed during the trip…

At around 12:15 you can see where we put the spinnaker up.  Upwind was pretty consistent around 4.4 knots boat speed on around 9 knots apparent wind speed.  Downwind we went up to 6.5 knots to 7.5 knots at high.  

We gybed the spinnaker 2 times.  Each time went pretty well.  We started with a quick briefing of steps we were going to take.  

• Turn downwind (around 175 degrees).  
• Foredeck person goes forward.
• Spinnaker flyer (SF) stays in cockpit and centers the spinnaker downwind.
• Foredeck releases spin sheet from pole end.  
• SF gybes the main.
• Foredeck slides the pole back to clear the forward end under the forestay.
• Foredeck puts spin sheet into the pole end, slides the pole forward and clip it to loop.
• Foredeck returns to cockpit and helps SF.   Turns boat upwind to around 150 deg true wind angle

The spinnaker sock is a little compromise on performance but a big gain for being in control.  This small boat means things are very cluttered AND we usually have only 2 crew.  When we raise the spin it is all contained.  We can sort out the lines easily.  Raising the sock to fly the spinnaker is a smaller step now.   Talking down the spinnaker is quite low drama with one.  Just point downwind, lower the sock and then sort out the storage and lines.

My spinnaker pole setup - the pole on my boat has storage brackets on the foredeck.  The pole also had the traditional bridle for the uphaul and foreguy (which I call downhaul).  It seems like we always ended up with some part of this getting rigged wrong when putting it up or taking it down.  There were just too many variables to get right in a hurry with only 2 people.   

I changed the pole setup to match what some people in the Santana 20 fleet have.  On their fleet website a few people describe their trolley system.  They store the pole on the boom and pull it forward or back for setup, takedown and gybes.  On my boat I ran a thick bungee cord from the aft end of the boom all the way up to the boom, around the front of the mast.   The aft end of the spin pole is secured to the trolley line with a small soft shackle.  I did try just running the trolley bungee line through the end of the pole but it was prone to some bad tangles so I now use a soft shackle.  That works very well.

I also leave the uphaul and downhaul lines attached to the forward end of the spin pole.  No more bridles.  This also works very well.