Back to the future

Peter Poland tracks the development of modern British gaff riggers

- Peter Poland

A hundred years ago, the winner of the America’s Cup was a Herreshoff designed 106ft gaffer weighing in at around 100 tons. Both the British challenger and the American defender – state of the art racers in their day – were powered by gaff rigs. The next America’s Cup is to be contested in 2021 in New Zealand aboard keel-less 75ft monohulls with deck-hugging sails, flying on huge hydrofoils that can hit 50 knots! Which left me wondering why so many popular modern smaller cruisers have ignored progress, preferring gaff rigs to the Bermudan rigs that succeeded them.

“The gaff still has a lot going for it,” says Andrew Wolstenholme, a leading designer of modern gaffers.

“And with exotic new materials now available, it can be even better and offer even more advantages to modern sailors than it ever did in the past.”

The origins of the gaff rig stretch back over many centuries. It evolved from the ubiquitous spritsail rig, which in turn traces its roots back to lugsail and squaresail rigs before it.

The lugsail attaches to a spar that is hoisted up the mast at an angle, with some of the spar and sail protruding ahead of the mast. As a result, it has a defined ‘soft leading-edge’ that helps the boat sail upwind. The lugsail rig became commonplace on coastal fishing and cargo boats that had to be manoeuvrable and able to sail to windward.