headsail rigged. This meant that the head- sails were relatively small thus fairly easy to trim with the winches available. The only really big sail was the single-luff spinnaker that the rules dictated had to be trimmed to weather of the headstay so could only be used dead or almost dead downwind. On reaches a light ballooner overlapping the mast like a genoa was set; the sheet loads were still manageable as the sail was only used when the wind was aft of abeam. The genoa had recently been invented*


and could now also be used beating to wind- ward but in the early 1930s they were still small and only used in light air… however, by the time of the first Endeavour challenge in 1934 the headsail game had changed. More significant still, by 1934 the J-Class


rule requiring the spinnaker to be trimmed inside the headstay had been discarded and the double-luff symmetrical parachute spin- naker made its first appearance in the fleet. Also discarded was the triple headsail rig,


replaced by a double headsail configuration comprising a much larger number 1 jib top- sail (the yankee) set over the staysail. The name Yankee comes from the Shamrock IV


56 SEAHORSE


challenge. She had a big jib topsail made by Ratsey and Lapthorn City Island. They referred to it as the Yankee as it had been made by Ratsey US rather than Ratsey in Cowes. The name is still given to a big high-cut jib used in double headsail trim. In the 1934 challenge Endeavour had


expected to be racing with another secret weapon: a quadrilateral jib invented by legendary aircraft designer Charles Fairey (Vanderbilt claimed that L Francis Her- reshoff sketched one for him to use on his M boat Prestige in 1927 but that he turned the idea down), who also raced in the big 23 Metre class (in between Cup matches many 23 Metres were re-rigged to rate as Js). Fairey believed that the last 30 per cent of


a yankee that was overlapping the staysail was not doing much work and backwinding the staysail. He undertook wind tunnel test- ing that seemed to prove his theory. Now Fairey had made a big yankee with the clew corner sliced off, leaving the leach of the sail parallel to the luff and trimmed by two sheets. He tried it out and reported his find- ings to Tommy Sopwith. They agreed that they would not use the new sail type in the


UK so as to keep it secret for Sopwith’s next America’s Cup challenge. However, Fairey did use his new sail


briefly in one race in Cowes and unfortu- nately for the British the famous American yachtsman Sherman Hoyt, racing a 6 Metre on the other side of the Solent, could still pick out its shape well enough to sketch it out and send his sketch back to the States… With its twin sheets the quad was


certainly much easier to trim well than the triangular yankee. Interestingly, when the Js were revived in


the 90s, when it was blowing too hard to use the genoa they often raced with double headsail rig of triangular jib plus topsail; when I enquired why, the sailmakers told me that their own wind tunnel tests con- firmed that the triangular jib topsail was now more efficient than the quad. Based on history and my experience with


a full-sized quad I felt they were wrong. When the original Endeavour first set her quad Sopwith’s aircraft engineer Murdock, in charge of the design of the rigging of both Endeavours, checked the backstay load. It was two tons higher than it had been


BETTMAN/KEYSTONE/GETTY


THE MARINERS MUSEUM AND PARK


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