Folks who remember my old schooner Windfall remember her black hull, white trim and tanbark
(dark red) sails. When I first acquired the boat in 1985 she had a white hull
and white sails. My ideal dream
vessel in those days was the Baltic schooner Lindo (later Alexandria), a three-masted beauty which just happened to have
a black hull, white trim and tanbark sails. Immediately upon purchasing my new
schooner I painted her black and ordered red sails.
My sail maker tried to talk me out of the red sails. “It was a 70’s thing,” he said, “Get
over it.” He was right, of
course. Sail makers are always
right. Whatever you may know about
sails, you don’t know diddly squat.
Ask any sail maker.
It’s true that in the 1970’s lots of boat owners began to
sport tanbark sails. Some insisted
they were traditional, dating back to the Age of Sail when men-o-war with
darker sails were harder for an enemy to spot at a distance. Others argued it was just the opposite:
in the late 19th Century when steamships were making their
appearance, a fishing schooner with dark red sails would be less likely to be
run down in the fog than one with fog-white sails.
Hell, I don’t know.
My own argument was that I spend a lot of time staring into my sails in
bright sunlight in order to keep them trimmed properly and there’s less glare
from tanbark. But truthfully? I was smitten by the Lindo and it was, after all, my boat, my money.
And speaking of money, some of the purveyors of tanbark
sails in the 1970s claimed that the darker sails were more UV resistant than
white sails and would last as much as 40% longer. I found that somewhat
plausible. If you’ve ever kept a
nylon American ensign past its prime, you might have observed as I have many
times that the white stripes begin to deteriorate faster than the red stripes.
“Horesfeathers!” said my sail maker. “If anything, the dyes used in the
tanbark sails render them more vulnerable to UV rays.”
Either way, there’s no getting around the fact that tanbark
costs more. The three new sails I
just purchased for my schooner, Windfall II, would have cost $400 less if I’d settled for plain vanilla. Cheap
bastard that I am, I would have done just that had my wife not weighed in. “White sails on the schooner Windfall?” she cried. “That’s like Coca Cola painting all their red signs blue!”
If I was enamored of the old black hull/ tanbark sail theme
of my old boat I wasn’t nearly as much so as she was. In the spring of 2010 when I replaced my old schooner with
the smaller Windfall II, a white
fiberglass boat with white sails like 95% of the sailboats in America, Sundae
insisted I couldn’t sail her home from New Jersey before painting her
black. That was easy enough.
But replacing her perfectly serviceable sails with tanbark
was going to require me to write another $5000 check on my sorely stressed bank
account for nothing more than sentiment.
I had read somewhere about staining white sails with Minwax so I asked
my friend Steve whose opinion on such things I trust. “Why not?” he said and I
never looked back (although I probably should have – kids, don’t try this
at home!) It sorta worked but the sails always looked tie-dyed. People were always asking me if the
sails were made of leather! Ah well, my mamma always told me that if I can’t be
a good example I should at least be a terrible warning.
Having recently been charged with the task of ordering a new
1200-square-foot mainsail for the skipjack Wilma Lee, I was impressed with the price I got from an Asian
sail maker and asked them for a quote for new sails for the Windfall
II.
They came back with an offer I couldn’t refuse. After all, there’s a limit to how many
times a guy can explain why his sails look all weird. I was there and ready to move ahead.
My new sails shipped out of Hong Kong Tuesday evening. The Fed-Ex truck pulled into my yard
this afternoon (Friday) at 1:30.
The photo you see here was taken just after 4 p.m. I’m impressed.
Let’s go sailing!
