Scott Easom: Straight talk about rigging

Scott Easom of Easom Rigging has been serving the sport from his base in Northern California since 1977. Easom, whose business and sailing skills are known worldwide, offers some no-nonsense rigging advice to the boating community.

Scott Easom

People, please stop using leather on your spreader tips. Leather becomes 60 grit in a very short period of time. It’s also very hard for your riggers to access the tips without cutting the stitching.

Regardless whether you are a racer or a cruiser, your tips should be the same except for a little more padding on the cruisers tip.

What to use? Once the tip is clean, install rigging tape first, closed cell double back foam tape second for cushioning for an irregular shaped tip, and finally extruded Millionaires tape. This tip will minimize the time the sail spends on the spreader tip itself and speeds up the tack.

Also, there are some incredible sails on the market today for the racing sailor. The top end carbon products are outstanding, but seriously, these sailmakers should only sell these products once the customer proves he or she has no stretch halyards.

It’s in the sailmaker’s best interest to have their products and their customer do well, but these customers are throwing money away on expensive sails if the halyard stretches when the breeze is on.

It’s not good for a sail to overload the halyard to try to remove the stretch because when you tack and the sheet tension is gone, the halyard recoils and stretches the luff, often times damaging the sail, especially around the tell tail windows. With a bad halyard, the sail shape you went into the tack with will be different from the sail shape you exit with, not good.