Evaluating the old mainsail
17 June 2017
• North Sails Loft
by Unusually warm in San Diego
Here I am with Eric at North Sails examining the Cascade's 30 year old mainsail. Summary, it can definitely be repaired and strengthened, but not enough to make it reliable for crossing the Sea of Cortez for the next decade or more. He said he would do whatever we wanted, but that it would take a complete re-stitching of every single seam to begin to approach the kind of reliability I'm after. Even then, he felt with the age, we would always be chasing problems. Quality maintenace will cost half as much as a brand new one. I would get the new one, but it is just too expensive for our current budget. There is a third option, of course; what they refer to as catalogue. These are used sails, typically good ones that were traded-out for racing sails, rated from A+ downward, that can be cut to fit if they are close enough, then modified as to the fittings on our particular sailboat. These are also half the price of new, or less, but we start with something much newer. We left the old mainsail with Eric with a promise from him that a quality replacement would be undertaken this summer.
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