Sail Repair Seminar

Last Fall I took Carol Hasse's excellent two day sail repair seminar. For my own reference I wanted to photodocument a few of the things I did in the course. One of the most valuable things we did in the course was hands on practice. The second most valuable thing for me was the hour we spent pulling sails out of bags and evaluating them under her guidance. I learned a lot about what makes a sturdy sail and how to check my own sails.

Here are the two pieces of dacron we worked on. The top is all machine stitching repairs any of which can also be done by hand. On that piece we reinforced the edge of a sail as if it had been chafed or damaged and repaired holes in the sail with either more dacron or a dacron sail patch. The piece underneath is all hand sewing.



In the hand sewing section of the course we sewed on a ring such as you might sew a hank onto (a hank is used to clip a sail onto the wire that it is hoisted up on) and then in another pressed ring we sewed on our own hank:





A hand sewn sail slide:



Leather chafe protection:



And a hand sewn reefing point inside of a hydraulically pressed ring:



We also reinforced an imaginary ring:



I have a number of repairs to make on our own sails including resewing the sun protection strip on the two headsails, installing chafe gear on both of those sail pennants and perhaps adding some metal sail slides at the stop and bottom of the mainsail.

- L