Wednesday, June 22, 2011

J-Class Adopts J-Sprit style gybes

J-Class 130 footer* The J-Class had a few good days of sailing with many J sailors amongst the crew of only 30+ people that were man-handling these 140 foot giants around the race-track.  What's interesting is that the big J-Class sailboats have taken a page out of the asymmetric crowd and have started to use the asymmetric gybe, tacking one corner of the chute to the bow and simply doing an outside sheet gybe (where the sheet is led in front of the boat), therefore making it a much safer and easily controlled gybe-- the loads on these 300,000 lb boats are only a few dozen tons or more--- so avoiding any sudden loadings are a good thing.