Who notices something completely new on Yohelah? Or better yet, what is something that’s now gone? We’ve never had a colored cover on our jib, and now we do. Today we dropped our original jib for the last time, and we say goodbye to a sail that has lasted us 20 years, 32,000 ocean miles, countless weekends out anchoring in the Salish Sea, and plenty of PSCC races and cruises.
Here is the old jib on the dock getting folded up one last time. It’s headed home to my studio to be cut up into something new – likely purses and bags and maybe even a sun shade for our deck at home. You don’t have to look hard to see how beat up this sail is, and if you zoom in on the clew you see the quality of work done by the sailmakers in the old PT Sails loft. The thread has given up on both sides of the sail and the clew still is holding tight. The white sunbrella cover was removed long ago, and there are threads coming apart literally all over the sail.
What do we do for a new jib, now that Hasse & Company are no longer in business? Well luckily we had them build us a new jib several years ago, and it’s been sitting in the bag waiting for the right time to make an appearance. Now that we’re about to head off on a big voyage around Vancouver Island, it was definitely time to hoist the new and say good bye to the old.
They’ve used some new technology in the new sail and no longer have the rings sewn into the pennant, like this very old version. But again, look how good this is holding up after so many years and miles. And believe me, we gave this sail a good workout sailing across the Pacific Ocean and back home.
The cover on the new sail is charcoal grey, like our sail cover. This is another bit of wisdom we learned from Hasse, that sunbrella color matters. She shared with me a chart that sunbrella had given her showing the solar protection properties of their different fabrics. The ones marked in yellow with a * have the highest properties of UV protection. Once we learned this, we converted from our old Cadet Grey sail cover and white jib cover to Slate for maximum sun protection.
It was fun to hoist that spanky new sail today, and we can’t wait to get going and roll it out for a test sail as we head north later this week.
