Hi EightMegs,

This can be a relatively easy thing to do if you are prepared to compromise… Fitting cringles like the sailmakers use requires equipment that is outside the range of amateurs, and don’t bother with the cringles that you hammer in yourself – they are flimsy and of little use in this case.

The big question is – do you have access to a strong sewing machine with zigzag stitch? If not, the desk is stacked against you and I recommend you contact Edge Sails (other sailmakers are available). I know Edge Sails make good GP14 cruising sails with reefing points, post your sail to them and they’ll post your sail back with support for two slabs of reefing if you ask and part with money.

If you do have access to an industrial or sailmaking sewing machine with a zigzag stitch (not straight stitch) you can cheat and graft the clew and tack from two old GP14 sails onto your current mainsail at the right places and all the reinforcement is already built in, or use another sail as a template and reinforce your sail using sail material to similar specifications. Use double sided sticky tape to assemble the sail pieces before sewing – materials available from Kayospruce and the 9mm wide tape is fine for this use.

The cringle is difficult, and not insurmountable – see youtube for videos of how to sew a cringle into a sail.

If you have a sewing machine you can also not bother with cringles through the sail and attach a short loop of dyneema or a short tape with a block attached so that you get 2:1 purchase just on one side of the sail where a cringle would go through the sail itself.

It’s a lot of work, and you need to ask yourself how confident you would be of your DIY reefing point given that you are applying a safety item to your sail which you are planning to rely on when sailing gets difficult. i refer you to my first sentence… is this something worth compromising?

Oliver makes very good points and I agree with them all, and also…

If you are hoping to help some inexperienced helms transition from sailing a Bahia to a GP14, I recommend that you make as many things as similar as possible between the two vessels, to maximise their immediate comfort and recognition of things learned when they step into the GP14.

Learning to sail has a high cognitive load for beginners, and some people are already overloaded with incoming senses – it is a highly kinaesthetic environment – before then learning to sail a boat that will feel very different – tiny, nimble, tippy compared to the Bahia.

So my recommendation is to fit the centre main, using a split tail mainsheet if you can (minimises mainsheet rope length), and maximise their familiarity with techniques already learned.

Yours, Steve.

To add to everything that Oliver says, and with pictures…

Please forgive me that the boat I’m using to show you this is not a GP14, it’s the one I have to hand to take pictures of. I use exactly the same technique with my GP14.

Firstly to stop the boat moving aft on the combi trailer I tie the boat at an angle from the bow (foredeck cleat, around the centre thwart to the road base (padding the route)) so that it can’t jog backwards. This is not under tension, but as you can see it’s a lot of rope so it holds the boat in place firmly but the bow is not under tension and being cinched hard against the front of the launching trolley.

The spreader bar helps to direct the force of the centre strap downwards, and you are right to protect the hull from the crush force of a strap. I know that the Flying Dutchman fleet in the late 80’s/early 90’s all used spreader bars for towing as they measured their boats carefully and how the boat was strapped for towing changed the hull measurements. The FD I sailed did not use strapping for the spreader bar for towing, instead there was a 4×2 carefully shaped wooden spreader bar, and a 12mm steel rod with a hook at the bottom was used each side to connect to the trailer and a thread and wingnut arrangement at each end of the spreader bar which was tightened just enough to hold, with a locking mechanism for the wingnut. I have heard of boats being crushed and physically damaged by over-racheting of the straps because without the spreader bar the force at the gunwhales in inwards, not downwards. I am looking to firmly caress the hull with the spreader bar and strap, holding it firmly downwards on the trailer so that it’s caressed just firmly and held in place.

The spreader bars I make are of wood, and there is shaping to make the underside fit the exact profile of the side deck at the point directly above the strapping point. This can be quickly achieved using a hand grinder and an aggressive disk to cut the material away. You can get very fancy at this point and make the load spread elegantly across the side deck; it does not have to be just a single straight piece of wood, you can add bigger pads and then more generous padding to each side. You can shape the wood to maintain the exact width dimensions of the hull at that point by shaping to hold the inner and outer thwart. The spreader bar needs to be slightly wider than the rubbing strake to allow the strap or rope to clear the width of the boat.

In my experience, the place where the straps wear through prematurely is the two turning points where the strap goes through about 100 degrees of turn at each end of the spreader bar. Making this directional transition as smooth as possible minimises the wear on the strap at that point, and as you can see I have shaped and polished the curve, left material either side to keep the strap on the spreader bar and added sleeving to the strap.

Also consider how you keep the spreader bar on the top of the boat if the strap snaps.

A note about the carabiners – most strapping one can buy terminates in a hook at each end, and they are a nuisance to use if you are on your own as you need to keep upward tension on them or they fall off. Replacing the hook with a carabiner means that there is positive attachment of the strap to the trailer.

I hope this helps.  Steve.

Jamie,

I’m sorry if I’m sounding a bit unsupportive of your venture, but there are other things to consider when contemplating the restoration of a wooden boat that has been stored for so long, and glue is quite fundamental.

The glue used in the 1960’s to glue boats together is likely to be Cascamite, which is a powdered resin turned into a paste by adding water. It is a very good glue and lasts for a long time, but no one building wooden boats in the 60’s could have imagined that they were making something that would still be a thing 60 years later. There is a chance that the glue will have lost bonding strength over the years and every  joint in your hull may be currently held together with a brittle resin which will stand little effort to break. If you repair the bits that are obviously in need of attention, and then lovingly paint and varnish the boat, it could simply break apart on first sailing. I have had an old wooden boat which I spent hundreds on, replacing the hull, only for it to disintegrate while sailing it, and can attest to the death of a hull through wood glue ageing out.

So my suggested order to tackle your issues is to have a good prod about and see if the boat is in fact still glued together. If it’s not, at least it’s easier to take apart to salvage the lovely wood that boats were made from in those days.

There is a sentimental value to attempting to restore an old GP14, and it can take a lot of labour and money to do so, time that you could have spent buying a cheap GRP or FRP GP14 boat and sailing it.

Oliver, as with so many things, it depends… because people have made many legitimate modifications to their GP14s. Some owners have glassed the centreboard pivot into their boat to stop the pivot from leaking, and changed the method of installation to the way that the later models fit the centreboard. (1)

Either the pivot comes out, or the centreboard has a fillet which is accessed through the slot. See the picture below.

As for whether the centreboard comes out from below or above, the decision can be made easily if the centreboard has door-stops as a handle, because it’s then easier to get the centreboard out above. As for the string trick earlier in the posting – I fully agree that this is a good way of settling a replacement in the right place. – Steve

(1) and one owner glassed the pivot in, and had not changed the centreboard mounting method, and it was not possible to remove the broken centreboard without resorting to a grinder 🙂

Laura,

Just a thought about your mainsail.

1. Is the track pinched? Take the mast down, and visually check the width of the mast track where the sail runs up – it could be that there is a constriction in the width of the mast groove. If so, you might need to resort to physical means to widen the track (this can be caused by the mast being run over by a car in a carpark, for instance)

2. Does the sail run smoothly in the track – with the mast on the ground, slide the mainsail up the track – don’t bother with the halyard, just pull the mast along the track – does it run smoothly?

3. Check the halyard – with the mast still down, pull the halyard and see if it becomes harder to pull that last 20%. Put tension on the halyard, it could be that the roller at the top of the mast is worn, and when the halyard is under a lot of load the little wheel can stop rotating, in which case the roller needs attention.

4. Find the friction with the mast horizontal and the sail connected to the halyard – does the sail ‘hoist’ smoothly with the halyard on the ground?

The system is fairly simple, and if it’s running smoothly for the first 80% my bet is on the top sheave being worn.

5. Lubricate the mast slot and the luff of the mainsail with something slippy and made for sails like Holts Silicone Spray. Use a piece of towel soaked in the fluid to run up the jaws of the mainsail track, applying silicone fluid to the jaws. Spray carefully both sides of the mainsail along the luff.

I hope this helps,

Steve.

It looks like Oliver and I are coordinating the minute of the day at which we post – this is pure coincidence.

Splicing three strand is not difficult, and is worth learning as Oliver says. I recommend that learning to work 12 strand / hollow core dyneema / spectra  is just as valuable and having acquired a small number of tools and mastered a small number of techniques it’s also a very useful skill to possess. These modern materials have seen an explosion of innovation, like the ‘soft shackle’ which looks like it would not work and in my experience really does, elegant kicking strap cascades and the enabling of new sports such as kitesurfing.