Halyard keeper
Cutting down on windage isn’t only important to the grand-prix guys. It is beneficial to everybody and not hard to manage. If you keep your spinnaker halyard attached to the spinnaker at all times and your boat has non-overlapping jibs, you can use this trick to reduce windage when sailing upwind.
With the halyard attached to the spinnaker, clip it to the base of the mast rather then the base of the shroud. This gets the halyard out of the wind. This great idea came to me from Brent Ruhne at Ruhne Racing. Measure the distance from your hatch, around the back of the jib clew and then to the base of the mast.
Splice in a small loop using 7/64” Amsteel into the halyard that distance from the shackle end. Then add a small trigger style shackle at the base of the mast with a trip cord leading to the weather side. This allows the bow man to trip it open from the weather rail before you go around the weather mark. As the loop uses very small diameter line, there’s rarely a problem with the loop going through the sheaves.
