Turbo sailing, using your staysail
More and more on the race course we are seeing staysails becoming increasingly prevalent again. Once upon a time the staysail was a very popular sail. In the days of the RORC rule in the late 60’s it was commonplace for every serious racer to have a reaching rig of overlapping staysail and a series of yankee’s for different wind conditions. In the IOR days that followed there spawned a whole range of “under the spinnaker” style staysails, mostly sporting ridiculous names; Tall Boys, Lazy Boy’s, Golden Dazy Staysails and even the ubiquitous Blooper and numerous others as all sorts of combinations and rigs were tried. As the IMS and later the IRC rules came along, the staysails narrowed down to two main groups, sensibly called the Spinnaker Staysail for off wind work and the Genoa Staysail as the name implies for closer to the wind. The use of these sails requires a lot of thought and attention, if not used correctly they can slow a boat down drastically, but when used ac