Hello everyone!

This is almost my first post on the site.

I am an Italian 40+ Laser sailor. Although I still consider myself a novice of this class, over the past 5 years I have learned a lot about sailing with an unstayed rig. And I love it! In this time I had also some sailing courses on big bermudian sloops in order to learn how to sail bigger boats and dreaming for costal cruising with my family. Through these experiences I realized how can be hard to sail a big bermudian sloop shorthand when the wind increase. So I started searching in internet for alternatives. The first ones that I found were cat boats (for example the Nonsuch yachts) and cat ketches (freedom yachts, norwalk island sharpies, etc.). I consider these boats too big or too expensive for a first cruising attempt.

In my search I finally discovered Roger Taylor and his books and with them the junk rig.

Finally I became member of the JRA and thank to Pete Hill and Linda I became also the proud owner of a junk rigged Kingfisher 20+.

The boat is called Shui Jen and it belonged to Vincent Reddish. Shui Jen has an old flat sail that I would like to replace with a self made cambered one in the style of Arne Kverneland. The original sail is about 20 sqm and I thought that probably a bigger sail area would allow better performance in light wind. According to PJR, Pilmer's sail area was 21 square meters, plus a 7.5 square meter ghosting foresail. Adding the two sails the sail area would increase to 28.5 square meters and this would be equivalent to a SA /disp of 24.15. So I speculated to grab the sail plan of Frøken Sørensen and increase the AR to 2.10 in order to get 25.23 sqm and a SA/disp of 21.2. This seemed to me a good compromise. Anyway, a taller and more powerful sail would probably mean to change the original alloy mast with a taller and stronger one. Too much for an absolut beginner, working on his first DIY rig, with a young family and a demanding job (I am a surgeon).

So I turn back to the original sail area and decided just to grab the sail plan of Frøken Sørensen….anyway Mrs Sorensen weighs the half of Mrs Shui Jen (650 kg vs 1315 kg). Would it be a good idea to add a bit of „muscles“ by increasing the camber of the lower panels? If it is, would 10% be a reasonable camber? How many panels should be tuned in this way?

Kind regards

Mauro Pau