The words ‘pink spinnaker’ are enough to send a chill down the spine of anyone who’s ever watched Cowes Week disaster footage. There’s Atalanta of Chester, which dis-masted when their fuchsia-coloured kite wrapped around the anchor of a tanker in August 2011. And who hasn’t seen the iconic image of Silk II as she nose-dived into the Solent in a 40-knot squall? It’s enough to put you off the big, billowy things for life. But, like it or not, as you bear away through the wind angles you need additional downwind sails to maintain good passage speeds, rather than languishing under white canvas. The good news is that in the last two decades we’ve seen huge advances in sail design and sail handling technology. Asymmetrics, code sails, snuffers, furlers and laminates have all become much more accessible to us humble cruisers. But which of these sails would most suit you, your boat and your cruising plans? I joined Mathias and Sybille Keim on board their brand new X5.6, Pure Fun, in Southampton to compare their gennaker, Code Zero and Parasailor spinnaker.
Under the old racing rules a spinnaker was any sail where its width halfway up was 75% or more of the foot length. A sail with a 10m foot length would need to be 7.5m across at the mid-height to count as a spinnaker. Anything below this was a headsail. These days, there’s a complex spectrum of sails which fall between a spinnaker and a genoa but few industry-wide definitions for these hybrids. Terms such as cruising chute, gennaker, asymmetric and reacher can all be used to describe the same sail. However, code sails, asymmetrics and the Parasailor are fairly distinct families.
CODE ZERO
At the closest end of the scale to the genoa is a code sail, sometimes known as a Code Zero. These are big reaching sails, which set independently of the forestay on a furler.
They’re usually made of a laminate if they’re designed for close-reaching, and spinnaker-style medium weight nylon for larger sails and beamier angles. Much of their power comes from the vast sail area, but shape is also important. There’s usually a semi-rigid cable in the luff which gives stiffness and allows the sail to be furled, although some ‘cableless’ sails are now in production. Whilst the luff is straight, the leech is curved like a spinnaker which accelerates the airflow over the top of the mainsail. This creates power in
