Riot Stretches Her Legs
I hate spinnaker socks. At first I was drawn in by their allure: an easy way to set and douse the spinnaker in all conditions. I mean, who doesn’t want that; especially when the wind comes up on you unexpectedly!
But in my experience “troublesome” is a much better word than “easy” to describe spinnaker sock use. They love to get fouled up during the set: bunching the spinnaker up inside the sock so badly that you have to drop the whole mess and pull the sock off to unfoul it. Screwing with the trimmer by interfering with the tack while the chute is flying. Hiding corrosion that leads to shrimping. Fouling up gybes.
Of course, one can have a splendid time in spite of a spinnaker sock:
Of course, I cut out all the footage of us struggling with the sock on the set and the gybes. And all of the audio of me griping about socks under my breath as we sorted it out.
At the end of the day the sock accomplished its most important job: a quick and easy douse. I’d still consider a spinnaker sock single-handed or double handed on a 50+ footer. It’s a tool, not a magic wand.
Have your own story about being pleasantly surprised or disappointed by a bit of gear. Please, share it here: I read every response!
See you out there.
This is missing my attempt to fly the spinnaker while we were in Acadia. It ended with me with one hand clutching a cleat on the mast, the other hand holding the sock retrieval line, stretched as far as I could reach arm-to-arm, with the spinnaker ballooning open and pulling the sock up by itself.
After a few moments, I realized I was going to get hurt and could just let go of the retrieval line and we could douse the spinnaker the hard way.
We had a lovely sail, and then gathered the crew to pull the spinnaker in on the foredeck. We only dropped a small part of it in the water, but we did stuff it onto someone’s bunk in the v-berth and got their gear wet. Oops.
Turned out there was a knot tied in the sock line somehow. I didn’t know much about them at the time, and sent a picture to the sailmaker who had serviced it for me. He said “that’s not supposed to be there” so I undid it before our attempt in this video.