Mainsail Stack Pack is Done

This weekend I completed the last portion of the mainsail stack pack sail cover.

Wait... "stack pack" - what's that?

A stack pack is kind of like a basket - it captures the sail when it is dropped and keeps it from going all over the place.  Yes, lazy jacks do that too.  In fact a stack pack uses lazy jacks, but it also serves as a cover for the sail when it is not in use - there is a zipper along the top surface which closes the stack pack over the furled sail.

For our mainsail, the stack pack is 18' long - much, much too big to do the fabric lay out inside the boat - I did it on the finger pier next to us.  Because of the height of the sail when furled, the fabric wasn't wide enough so I had to splice a panel at the forward upper end of each side.  Somehow I managed to not take any pictures of the process.

Needs Viagra

When the sewing was completed, it needed to be fitted to the sail and boom.  This turned out to be a non-trivial task.  There is a lot of fabric, the sail is heavy, and there is lots of opportunity to get the straps that go under the sail hooked up to the wrong places.  It took me most of an entire afternoon to get to the point in this picture.

Next the lazy jacks needed to be disconnected from the boom and attached to the sail cover, and adjusted so that the (PVC pipe) battens formed a pleasant curve.  This required a ladder.

Finally, a piece of canvas (lined with sailcloth for added stiffness) needed to be cut to serve as the front cover.

Front cover pattern

I picked a day when it was sunny, warm, and calm (a rare event!) to make the pattern using Sailrite's Duraskrim (highly recommended!  In fact, Sailrite is highly recommended...)

Long time coming - done!

Then a morning of stitching on the Sailrite LSZ-1 produced the product.  Looks pretty sharp!  The stack pack also eliminates the 1-hour long procedure of reinstalling the old sail cover over the sail after arriving at the dock, and eliminates storage of that cover down below while we are off the dock... hooray!

Next on the agenda is a new cover for the staysail - the old one has shrunken to where it can't be made up over the sail anymore.

Mainsail Stack Pack is Done