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Today we're gonna talk about steps to smoothly raise your main sail, how to get perfect, halyard tension and how to get great shape on your mainsail.
First we want to untie our halyard. Next, we want to unzip the sail bag. We then want to make sure our reef lines are ready to flow smoothly. So go ahead and open those rope clutches. The last thing we want to do is, go ahead and ease out our main sheet about 18 inches so that our main sail lifts the boom. Now we need to get the catamaran into the wind.
The beauty of a catamaran is that you don't need to be motoring forward quickly to raise your main. You can sit in one spot and gently work those throttles to keep the boat into the.
When you're raising the main sail on a catamaran, it's easy for the battens to get caught in the lazy jacks, so it's best to have someone standing at the mast jumping the halyard.
The person jumping the halyard will be able to guide that sail up just so it's through all of the battens, raise the main sail until it's almost up to the top of the mast. At that point, you can start fine tuning your how your halyard tension. Proper halyard tension tension is super important to your sail shape. Often you will see horizontal wrinkles coming off the cars, which is a sign that your, halyard tension is still too loose.
We are looking for diagonal wrinkles that come off the tack of your sail, or a vertical trough and wrinkle that parallels the mast. Once you've got nice shape on your main sail, you can go ahead and re-tighten your main sheet. Once your main sail is properly tensioned, you should notice that your topping lift has gone slack.
Pro tip, once you retighten your main sheet, those diagonal wrinkles coming off from the tack should disappear and you should have a beautiful wing like sail shape if you still have those diagonal wrinkle. Your halyard tension is a little too tight.