Running back stays...

A very interesting lecture, some important reading, and the best concise riff I've read on the Indiana stupidity yet (though BadTux comes close)...

The other day someone mentioned to me that they'd never have a boat with running back stays. The reason given was that they were an accident waiting to happen and it got me thinking. Mostly about how so many attitudes regarding the practice of sailing have changed and not all for the better.

Running back stays make a lot of sense. They're really quite simple to use and add a big safety factor to a rig. That said, folks who don't like running backs think just the opposite and suggest they add a lot of difficulty to the sailing workload (apparently akin to doing calculus in your head while juggling a mixed fruit bowl) and, more importantly, that they are inherently unsafe and the cause of many lost rigs.

Admittedly running back stays do add a couple of lines to deal with but, difficult? Done right it is less work than a jib sheet and set up with a modicum of intelligence hardly worth talking about. So, I just don't see the difficulty.

As for running backs being responsible for lost rigs and suchlike. I've yet to hear of a single case of a running back stay being the cause of a lost rig. Point of fact the cause of every instance I've come across is someone doing something stupid. Case in point an uncontrolled gybe is not caused by a running back stay but by someone not paying attention. So, hardly fair to blame a stay (or the boom for that matter).

I still think something like the publication "Accidents in North American Mountaineering"
geared to sailing would be no bad thing in sorting out the nuts and bolts of why things go bad on boats and people get hurt. If we did, I suspect, running back stays would have a much better reputation and we'd all be a lot safer...

Listening to Mr Elevator & the Brains Hotel (and getting my Farfisa/Iron Butterfly groove on)

So it goes...