Rigging the Main Sail: Free Online Sailing Lessons

Video Transcript

"Okay before we go sailing we’re going to rig our mainsail and get ready to pull it up or hoist it. the line we use to pull the sail up is called a main halyard, the main halyard runs up to the very top of the mast, comes down inside the mast, comes out the mast and will run to the wench and we’re going to use that wench to help us pull it up. what I want to do when I attach my main halyard to the head or to the top of the mainsail is first look up and make sure that the halyard isn’t twisted on anything, if it’s wrapped around one of the wires that hold the mast up, which we call a shroud the sail won’t go up. so I’ve checked up and made sure that it’s clear, I’m just going to attach this shackle which is the metal fitting here onto the sail. We have names for the corners of our sail, the top corner is called the head of the sail, the forward lower corner is called the tack and the back lower corner is the clue. So I get my halyard attached to the sail, I just want to pull the slack or the extra line out so it can’t get itself caught on anything before I’m ready to pull the sail out. And I just pull the sail up a little bit until that halyard gets tight and then we’re almost ready to do a couple of things we want to check before we hoist our sail. This fitting right here is called a boom vang; in later courses you’re going to see that it controls the back edge or the leach of the mainsail. For right now all we need to know is that it’s trying to pull the boom down and we’re going to try to pull the boom up when we raise the sail. So we want to make sure that our boom vang is loose, we also want to release our main sheet so that the sail can orient itself into the wind that will make bringing the cell up a lot easier. I have some blue straps that are holding the sail onto the boom. I’m going to take these straps off and then we’ll be able to pull this sail up. "