Square Sail/ Dipping Lug Tacking Aboard a Sixareen
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ก.ย. 2021
- A Saturday afternoon sail in Lerwick harbour aboard the sixareen Vaila Mae. These sessions are great for allowing folk of all sailing abilities an opportunity to learn about, and experience working the traditional square sail rig, in a sixareen.
Brian Wishart is skipper on this trip and is sharing his vast knowledge of sailing traditional Shetland boats, training up the crew in all aspects of sailing the sixareen.
Thank you for sharing this, it’s excellent to see the way the boat is tacked.
My heavens: that is a crazy amount of work for each tack! Gives a whole new meaning to "dipping lug"!
That’s mental !
With a bit of practice the crew get quite slick with the tacking😄
Thanks for the full procedure. I am used to Dipping The Knot on the old naval sea boat whalers but this is a lot more complicated. I admire the teamwork needed. Not a rig for us single handed sailors!!!!
Do you have any footage of those old naval sea boat whalers under sail?
Brilliant Maurice! All stages of the tacking process are there!
Why don't you call it how to tack a dipping lugsail? That's a lug sail not a square sail.
Thanks for you comment, a good point, yes it is a dipping lug, and that title would probably be better suited. We still speak about the square sail rig, and dipping lug interchangeably aboard the sixareen, therefore I never really thought about it. I suggest we do this because the sixareen or sixern sailing rig we have has evolved out of a square sail rig, that was predominantly used for downwind sailing, to what we have here, a higher peaked dipping lug design of the late 19th century, as used on the west side of Shetland. This allowed the sixareen to perform better to windward. In this sail design however they retained the ability to square off the peak of the sail with an upper reef point. You can see us trying it out in this clip ‘squaring reef’ on the return downwind leg. th-cam.com/video/Mr9exxXZJco/w-d-xo.html
With the squaring reef in, it is a closer form to a truer square sail shape of the older rigs, but not quite as square as that last used in the smaller traditional Fair Isle Yoals of around 1900. A longwinded answer to your suggested title.😄
Blimey! Not a single handed vessel then!
I suppose you'd have a bunch of fishermen and/Vikings knocking about who you could bark at!
Wonderful! What is used for ballast?
The sixareen ‘Vaila Mae’ has about 750-800lb of lead for ballast under the tilfers. Traditionally stones would have been used, and as fish and the wet lines were taken aboard they could dump out some of the stone ballast.
Why can’t you just swivel it and retie the bow line?
Because it’s not really a square sail.
It is a dipping lug, in Shetland we speak about it also as a square sail. The reason being that in the older form of the sixern sail it was less peaked and more of a square sail. This one has a squaring reef in the sail that allows you to take the peak out and put the yard more square across, you also move the tack further aft. This gives a very good downwind rig, that performs well improving how the boat handles. You can see us putting in the squaring reef for the downwind leg in this clip. th-cam.com/video/Mr9exxXZJco/w-d-xo.htmlsi=-MhURaqoCBhsELtB
Sehr lehrreich.Danke danke .I be a owner of a28foot gaffkutter.greedings from Thailand. I'm experimenting putting a spwersail on it
Sounds like a nice boat. The sixareen is 30Ft LOA. The sail area is 240 square feet (22.4m2). We have ballast aboard, approximately 880Ib (400kg) of lead.
@MauriceHendersonShetland I have 1.2 ton keellongkeelsteel.its a doppeleander 6.3 ton she is werry heavy. I'm sailing the estcost of Thailand.