Best handling sailcloth?

[CarlF]

In considering a new mainsail for a large cat (50ft), I care a lot about how easy the sail is to handle.

How well will it drop into the stackpack without me having to leave the helm to stuff it in? Will it be damaged by being creased in the stackpack or when reefed?

Current contenders are: Challenge Warp-Drive, DP Pro-Radial, Hydranet, DP SXI laminate - something else?

[Jim Cate]

Only personal experience is with HydraNet... and it is very stiff when new. Ours is now some 5 years old and is still stiff, but not as bad as when new. It has maintained shape very well, but not nice to handle or flake.

Jim

[sailjumanji]

I think the bigger factor is not sail cloth, but whether you have roller bearing cars for the battens (not slides), as well as full batten sail. We have both, and also use Harken One Drop to lube the cars. We have to keep a single wrap on the winch dropping the mainsail, to keep it from slamming into the boom.

If its a square top main, the sailmaker will also need to set it up properly.

That all done, our main and jib are Dimension Polyant GPL Lite Skin - carbon laminate. It's pretty stiff. But again, I don't think the sail cloth matters whether it drops fully into the stack pack, or stops short. IMO

[Kestrahl]

For woven cloth to perform well it has to be stiff, and the stiffness is either due to the tight weave and/or resin used. When the resin breaks down the cloth loses its stability and stretches. From my experience warp drive will soften quicker than pro-radial, but also won't last or perform as well.

SXI I think is a reasonably okay handling cloth, but will need to be quite heavy as it doesn't have that much dyneema content. You could also look at DYS or Contender ZZ-U, which have more dyneema and therefore can be lighter.

The film layer in these laminates is what makes them stiff. We are doing a lot of filmless membrane sails at the moment and they are really nice to handle, as you just have the fibers (technora and dyneema) and the taffeta without any stiff film layer.