External track

I am going to ramble on about obscure sail technology for a few paragraphs, but bear with me - I might have a point at the end.

External track is an old technology for attaching sails to spars. It's one step up from lacing and mast hoops. Lacing is impractical if you have to raise and lower a sail. Mast hoops are impractical if you want to attach anything else - spreaders or shrouds, say - to the mast over the length you're raising and lowering the sail.

External tracks are lengths of stamped metal that are screwed to the mast. The slides attached to the sail are stamped metal or sometimes cast bronze. Pieces of track just butt up against each other so the tolerance between slide and track can’t be too tight or the slides won’t be able to pass the joints. But they usually work okay unless a joint gets really misaligned or a screw backs out a bit too far.

When extruded aluminum masts came along, spar builders quickly realized that it was quicker and easier to make the sail tracks part of the extrusion, usually inside the mast section. So the slides on the sail were round (slugs) or flat (called, boringly enough, flat internal slides). Because there were few joints or no joint and any joints were well aligned by the mast sleeve the slide tolerances could be much closer. As a result, the internal tracks were a great improvement over external track.

Then, along came full battens (I’ll talk in way too much detail about battens some other time). Before full battens, sail slides rarely had to bear any load when they were moving. Sails usually go up and down when the boat is head to wind and the sails luffing, so there is very little load on the slides. Full battens are now almost always attached to slides and they put load on the slides all the time, sometimes quite a bit. So, any friction between sail slide and track was enormously magnified. Raising and lowering full battened sails can be a real chore. Consequently, over the past few years a great deal of work has gone into creating low friction sail slide systems. Most of these are tracks that are attached to the outside of the mast, but the tracks have no joints or have self aligning joints, the tolerances are close and the slides ride on low friction plastic or even ball bearings. They reduce friction to the point where you almost feel you have to jump out of the way when you let the halyard go. This development is great, because internal tracks are not practical on carbon fiber masts which, so far, are laminated, not extruded.

I recently had a chance to look over a very handsome schooner that was put together at a local boatyard. The boat belongs to the yard owner, and he has spared no effort to make her a thing of beauty, both traditional in appearance and entirely practical in function. He has plenty of sea experience, including a circumnavigation, so he has deeply held opinions about what works and what doesn’t under the stresses of an ocean passage, of which I’m sure he hopes to make many in this boat

She is a wooden boat, and the wood work is gorgeous, above and below decks. If you didn’t look too too closely you would think her spars were wooden also, but you’d be wrong. They are carbon fiber hand painted to look like wood. This is an entirely practical solution. Carbon spars are much stronger and probably 1/3 the weight of wooden spars. They will never rot or check or need varnish. Maybe a little paint touchup, now and then.

The problem is these beautiful modern spars are fitted with external tracks. They certainly blend with the traditional look. But, for me they stand out like a sore thumb. Given the technology available today, I would consider going to sea with this track to be a safety issue. Sure, a nice Antal track might not look quite as in keeping with the rest of the boat, but there are pleny of other non-traditional bits. After all the first thing you see when you descend the companionway of this boat is a very modern, very white microwave oven.

I guess what I'm driving at is that boats all reflect their owner's personality, complete with prejudices and blind spots. No matter how rational and practical we pretend to be, we often make the wrong decisions for the right reasons and sometimes the right decisions for the wrong reasons. So, what else is new...