Modern Rigs 101

I pretty much took rigs for granted when I first started sailing on other people’s boats. After all, unlike exciting, moving, tweakable things like sails and running rigging, masts and booms were just there—a part of the structure of the boat. I took no part in their maintenance or tuning. So as long as they kept the sails out of the water, all was well.

It wasn’t till I got my first sailboat that I started paying more attention to my own spars and standing rigging. And it wasn’t until I had to order a replacement rig for my 1973 Norlin 34 many years ago that I truly began to understand the sparmaker’s and rigger’s jargon. By far the most common configuration these days is the sloop rig with aluminum spars, so that’s what we’ll talk about here.

MASTHEAD/FRACTIONAL

Once upon a time there was a clear separation between these two types of rig. A masthead rig had its forestay pinned to the top of the mast and had straight spreaders. If the boat was designed to a racing rule (as most were), it had large overlapping headsails and a tall, skinny main. A boat with a fractional rig, on the other hand, had its forestay attached ¾ to 7/8 of the distance from the cabintop to masthead, had well-swept spreaders, carried a larger mainsail and smaller jib, and had a spar that was designed to be tweaked with adjustable backstay tension. Hence, for many years they were commonly found on racer-cruisers rather