18 Rig Checks That Will Refine Your Boat

Does your boat’s weather helm bother you, or does she go better on one tack than the other? Toby Heppell explains how to iron out the foibles with proper rig setup

- Toby Heppell

Have you ever wondered why your boat seems to point better and sail faster on one tack that the other? Or found that the helm remains light in some conditions, but develops a mind of its own in others? The answers to these and many other niggles with your boat’s handling, may lie in how you’ve got the rig set up.

Setting up your boat’s rigging can seem a complex task. Each piece of rigging has a distinctly different effect on a boat’s balance, feel, and response, and each setting change can have a knock on effect, meaning a single adjustment often leads to something else being set up incorrectly. Due to this, many of us tend to just set and forget our rigging settings. When was the last time you thought about shroud tension for example? I’m willing to bet not recently, unless you’ve noticed your shrouds going slack when they usually would not. But setting up your rig properly can make all the difference to how a boat sails, whether she is manageable in heavy weather, or can keep making headway in light airs. Get it right, and sailing is much more fun.

I spent my younger years competing at international sailing events in dinghies before moving on to racing keelboats. In both of these sports, keeping track of rig settings in minute detail was a major part of the sport. When I moved into the world of cruising for fun, I was amazed to discover so many people barely touched their rig setup from year to year, let alone morning to afternoon. Having raced on a great number of keelboats and tested many new yachts for magazines over the years, my obsession with understanding the numbers has not gone away and continues to be one of the first places I look when a boat is not sailing as well as I might hope.