sail repair toolbag contents

For sail repair, you will end up needing a very small (but very important) list of items. Although they are towering in the wind, responsible for your well being, and a torn one can be life threatening (not to mention expensive), when you get right down to it, sails are really nothing more than a piece of cloth.

To care for your sails, you'll need the following items:

• Some sail tape. Duct tape works in a pinch.
• Sail needles. They need to be big and strong.
• Sail twine. Prewaxed, or carry some wax with you.
• Spare dacron. You should have a piece as long as the foot (bottom edge) or your largest sail. This might sound like overkill, but often sails rip horizontally.
• Sailor's palm. It's like an oversized thimble that sits in your palm, allowing you to use your entire arm strength to push the needle through what could be multiple layers of leather and dacron.

The primary problems you'll have with your sails can be summed up here:

• Chafe. Friction between something (lines, spreaders, other sails) and the sail cloth, over time, will wear away your sails.
• Tears. There's nothing quite as heartbreaking as watching your sail rip in half on a stormy night. Reef early.
• Ripped grommets. Anywhere that you make a hole in a sail, and re-enforce it with metal, that metal might just decide to fly out of the sail one day.

There are some great books out there on sail repair and construction; it would be impossible to write a blog entry getting close to comprehensive. But hopefully this demystifies them a bit, and shows you that to do your own sail repairs all you need is a willingness to learn, and some very basic tools that will last you a lifetime.