Roller Reefing

February - 2014

When we bought Tra Bhui she came with her original sails. With nearly 20 years of fairly hard use they were past their best and in need of replacement. Rather than buy a full suite immediately we decided to first replace the jib and mizzen.

The jib in particular was showing its age. The original sail was simply hanked on to the fore stay and had no provision to either furl the sail or reef it. As we planned to mostly sail Tra Bhui with a crew of two we decided that the new sail should be capable of not only being stowed away with the minimum of effort, but that we should be able to vary the size of it to suit the weather conditions.

Rather than the traditional Drascombe furling system which is designed for stowing the sail around the fore stay we decided to install Plastimo's 406S roller reefing system. This consists of a bottom drum, a mast head pivot and alloy fore stay tube

Reefing drum assembled on the workbench

The system comes in component form and is easy enough to assemble. The final section alloy fore stay sleeve requires cutting to the desired length to suit the boats rig. The only thing that we found we had to adjust for was the nearness of the fore stay to the mast head on the Gig which means that the top swivel is very near the fore stay tensioning blocks.

The reefing system is slightly heavier than the reefing system due to the heavier fittings and the fore stay tube.

Reefing drum fitted 

Mast head fitting

Having used the roller furling for two seasons now we are very pleased with its performance and would certainly recommend it over the more traditional furling system