The Skerry is a wonderful boat, but there are some changes I made to the rigging so it would work better for me. Many of the ideas were inspired by John C. Harris and "Lazlo."
The first problem I ran into was that the jam cleat kept catching when I tried to release the rudder. I replaced it with a cam cleat from Harken, shown here:
John pointed out that I could have placed the supplied plastic jam cleat below the tiller yoke, but I had already ordered the cam cleat.
I found that I wanted to be able to reef more easily and quickly when a wind suddenly came up, so I installed a cheek block at the top of the mast and a halyard. The only problem was that the sail lashings caught on the sprit's fairlead, so I fashioned a fairlead out of wood that allows the lashings to pass over it nicely, as shown:
Now the only problem was that the boom drops when you drop the sail and the sail itself goes all over the place. Lazlo pointed out that all I needed was lazy jacks to solve both problems. Nothing fancy about the ones I made, i.e., no blocks, just knots. The bottom sections of the jacks pass through fairleads at about 35% and 75% along the length of the boom.
The lazy jacks hold the boom up and the sails self-furl fairly well with only a little work to get them all smoothed out.
This end view shows how they "accordion" into place:
(The pictures don't appear to be working in my view during composition of the post. If they do not I'll post the link to my album. The rigging pictures will be on the last page or two.)
