Pig Tails on Jib Clew?

If you do it right it absolutely does reduce the amount of sheet you have to pull for the next tack.

Once on the new tack you should take up some of the slack on the lazy sheet as you are already sitting by the jib car anyway. If your crew forgets you can just do it yourself and they probably won't notice. If you pull too much you will distort the jib by moving the clew, but just enough and the lazy pigtail will be pointed back at the mast instead of hanging below the jib clew. The block is essentially already pre pulled back to the other side. So yes with a 12" pigtail you are now pulling 2 feet less sheet when it's time because you were already able to move the block before the tack. Yes the jib moves the same distance but it's the reduced distance the block moves that saves you some sheet.

Even if you don't have pig tails you probably have an excess of sheet flopped around the front of the mast that you could take up the slack on before your next tack..

It works better upwind since you can't ever tack fast enough and if you do it downwind it's hard to pull the lazy pigtail back without pulling the jib in a little bit because the leech tension is so low. You aren't pulling in near as much sheet when jibing anyway so it makes less of a difference.

Saves your crew from about 1 arm pull of sheet so it's worth probably .5 - 1 second per tack.

I am a sucker for a good engineering discussion, so here goes, last and final attempt at explaining this. This time through a sketch. A and B represent the different jib clew positions going from one tack to the other. Diagram 1 is without pigtails on the clew blocks. Diagram 2 is with pigtails. All slack taken out of the sheets in both cases before the tack.

As you can see, in each diagram, the clew travels through the exact same distance as the blocks, 10 units. The only difference is the relative position between the clew blocks and the cleat blocks.

Or another way to look at it- In Diagram 1, the distance between the right-hand clew block and cleat block in position A is 16 units. In position B (after the tack), it is 6 units. 16 - 6 = 10 units displacement. In Diagram 2, at position A, the distance between the right-hand clew block and the cleat block is 12 units and in position B it is 2 units. 12 - 2 = 10 units displacement.

Since the blocks travel the exact same distance, the amount of jib sheet pulled in is exactly the same in both cases and since it is a 2:1 system, that equates to 20 units in both cases. Hope this helps.



sm

Thanks sm, that is similar to what I drew up and reached the same conclusion

(for the bonus point I added the extra degree of difficulty of moving around the mast)

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H18 Newbie, Too heavy for the 14

Not quite, see srm's diagram, above.

The problem is that the section of jib sheet you are eliminating wouldn't be going through the block anyways. Are you reducing the overall length of jib sheet? Yes, but you're not reducing the amount that goes through the blocks on each tack! You're only eliminating the "doubled up" section of jib sheet that is left once the jib is fully sheeted in - that section of sheet was never going to go through the blocks, it was just going to sit there at the expense of extra weight on the boat/jib clew.

Looking at srm's "diagram 2," the jib clew needs to end up in the same position every time, so the clew is travelling the same distance every time. The sheaves too are travelling the same 10 feet, they're just closer to the jib blocks when sheeted all the way in, reducing the amount of doubled up jib sheet remaining once the jib is fully sheeted in.

You can't avoid the fact that this is a 2:1 system. No matter what you do, to move the clew "x" feet is going to require "2x" jib sheet. You'll just "bottom out" sooner with pigtails... but you can't pull the clew that far back anyways, so that extra length of jib sheet was just added weight. The only way to pull less sheet is to re-cut the jib (or more accurately genoa) so that it doesn't overlap the main, or reduce the purchase to a 1:1 system.