New Blog 2: Halyards

Friday 9 November 2012

Halyards

This article is about nautical rigging. For the Scottish castle, see Halyards Palace."Jumping the halyard" is a technique used to raise a large sail quickly by employing a few crew members to work simultaneously on the halyard. The person jumping stands next to the mast and manually grabs the halyard as high as he can (sometimes this necessitates jumping) and pulling it down as fast and far as possible. While this crew member reaches for the next heave, a second crew member 'tails' or takes up the slack created by the jumper, on a winch. When the person jumping can no longer pull up the sail simply by hanging on the halyard, he must "sweat" the line.To "sweat" the halyard is to take as much slack out of it as possible.[1] This may be done with a winch, or manually. To manually sweat a halyard, the sweater grasps the line and, in a fluid motion, hauls it laterally towards himself, then down toward the deck, letting the tailer take up the new slack.[2]A square rig sail with a halyard is mounted on a lifting yard that is free to slide on a short section of the mast. he halyard is used to raise (hail or hal) the yard when setting the sail.A gaff rigged sail has two; a throat halyard to lift the end of the gaff nearer the mast, and a peak halyard to lift the outer end.A more modern triangular a or "Marconi") sail has only one halyard which is attached at its uppermost point (the head).