My wife, Jean, and I have had a Drascombe Dabber for the past six years and have come to the conclusion that, while the standing lugsail is unlikely to contribute significantly to the bringing of the America’s Cup to these shores, it is by no means as useless a sail as is popularly supposed. However, it needs setting carefully to give its best.

Consider its merits as a mainsail:-

1 Unlike most others, the luff is not attached to the mast — so there can be no fouled up lacing, wedged gaff jaws or luff rope jammed in its groove to interrupt hoisting and lowering: as a sail which can be got up or down rapidly in an emergency it is hard to beat.

2 Area for area, it uses a much shorter mast than a Bermudan sail and shorter too that the corresponding gaff sail, as there is no peak halyard block to support.

3 Unlike the gaff, it requires only one halyard and, unlike the gunter lug, reefing presents no problem either.

One disadvantage — for effective sailing, one sometimes needs to change the yard from one side of the mast to the other when manoeuvring, but this need not be difficult.

So here are a few odds and ends of wisdom (?!) on lugsail handling with apologies to members who feel they are being taught to suck eggs!

There are three sail controls in addition to the sheet: the halyard, the tack downhaul and, an addition of our own, a tripping line.

1 The halyard: the height of the yard on the mast affects the angle of the sheet at the clew. If, when close-hauled, the sail is set too low, the sheet pulls almost horizontally, making the foot of the sail tight, but allowing the upper sail to ‘wind’, so that the yard falls away to leeward and the upper part of the sail flogs instead of drawing (see fig 1).

2 Tack Downhaul: the halyard is not attached to the yard at its centre, but towards the lower end, so the peak is kept up by the tack downhaul pulling down on the forward end of the yard via the luff rope. The downhaul needs adjusting to keep the sail curve smooth and free from creases (see fig 2).

3. Tripping line: except when making the briefest of short tacks, windward efficiency is considerably improved by getting the yard to leeward of the mast and, consequently, changing it to the other side every time the boat goes about. This can be achieved with a tripping line. After trial and error, we have ours rigged as shown in fig. 3. It is not perfect, having neatly flicked off the crew’s hat on more than one occasion, but it is the best we have come up with which can still be operated by the helmsman when single handed.

When reefing, the system both tightens the tripping line and shifts the mainsheet block abaft of the skipper’s head! Experience has shown that there is a critical point just before the boat comes head to wind when the foot of the yard can be pulled easily round the mast with the windward line (see fig 4). A simpler system is just to have a single rope hanging vertically down the luff of the sail, but then a crew is needed to pull it at the crucial moment.

The Dabber goes to windward quite well, given a reasonable breeze. We attribute this to the high peaked mainsail being shaped so that the head virtually acts as an extension of the luff. Having cruised in the company of a friend and his Wayfarer, I would have to admit that the latter sails rings round us in light winds — but given a gusty force 4 to 5 or more, and a bit of a chop, we are quickly reminded of the merits of our handy ‘inshore fishing boat’ rig!