TUNING
Sail choice and tuning a 5.5. Metre Christoph Burger is the 5.5 Metre specialist Switzerland. A double world champion in the class, questions on sail choice, rig setup and trim tabs.
Q: What sails do you have on board when going out for a whole day and you don’t know the conditions? A: Usually you can narrow down the conditions and therefore the sail choice to prepare for a light to medium – or medium to heavy wind day. It is important for me to provide a set of sails for crews that don’t want to spend money for the whole sail range North Sails provides. For this reason, if you get the AP Mainsail (MNi-1) the Medium Jib (Mi-1) and one S-2 Spinnaker you can pretty much sail in any condition. However, you miss out on the opportunities compared to optimised sails for light and heavy conditions. You also can age a sail much quicker if you use it in the wrong conditions. You can use a light wind jib up range, but the sail is built for a max windspeed of 12 knots TWS. The next time you use the same jib in light wind it may look not the same anymore as the material aged in the heavy wind. It is even worse to use an S-2 spinnaker that is built out of Superlite 50 Contender sailcloth up wind range as Nylon once it is stretched out doesn’t go back in its original shape. The crossover to the S-3 is at about 16 knots TWS. If you expect light to medium wind conditions, ideally you take the following sails onboard: AP Mainsail (MNi-1) or if the conditions are for sure light then the Light Wind Mainsail (LMMNi-1), Light Jib (Li-2), Medium Jib (Mi-1), Light Wind Spinnaker (S-1), Light-Medium
60 • fivepointfive • april 2020
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he answers some common
Spinnaker (S-2) and the Medium Spinnaker (S-3) as a spare Sail. If you expect medium to strong wind conditions, ideally you take the following sails onboard. AP Mainsail (MNi1), Medium Jib (Mi-1), Heavy Jib (Hi-1), Light-Medium Spinnaker (S-2) as a spare sail, Medium Spinnaker (S-3) and the Heavy Spinnaker (S-4). The following chart shows the sail choice in an overview
