[MHml] Slack suckers.

[Roy Mills]

Gougeon said that they used a length of line from each stay forward 
to a 4 part tackle at each bow with bungee running in the blocks. 
They also said that There were lots of different ways of doing it and 
various opinions as to the best way. So FWIW here is what works for me.

	THinking things through for myself it seemed to me that the 
slackness in the leeward shroud was magnified because the slackness 
in the windward shroud had all been taken up by the mast leaning to 
leeward until the windward shroud was tight and  Straight. So I 
thought if the tightening of the windward shroud could be used to 
take up that leeward slack all would be well.  So I have a length of 
1/4 inch nylon starter cord running from about 8 feet up one stay, 
forward to a small block at the bow, across to a similar block on the 
other bow then back to the other stay about 8 feet up. It is snugged 
up tight at rest and so puts a forward "kink" in the stay at the 
attachment point of the starter cord. It's not really a kink as such 
but I didn't know how else to describe it. So when the windward stay 
tightens into a straight line it pulls back on the starter cord which 
in turn pulls the leeward stay further forward and takes out much of 
the slack. To get the rest of it out a length of Bungee pulling on a 
small block on the centre of the cord span between the hulls works 
very well, the mechanical advantage of a "swig" on a line is very 
high. This bit of bungee is dead ended at the centre of the front 
cross beam. So this set up works well on my cat but may not suit a 
tri. My stays have considerable slackness at rest so that the 20 inch 
wide wing mast can be turned 90 degrees either way, and when it is 
trimmed that far around there is no slack in the leeward stay as it 
is all taken in wrapping around the curve of the mast. People with 
smaller mast sections will not need that much slack.