New Sails for Bella Star

We’d booked a long weekend in Port Townsend to have Bella Star measured for new sails and have her rig inspected.  Sure, there are sail lofts and riggers in Seattle, but we’d heard excellent things about Carol Hasse’s Port Townsend Sails and Port Townsend Rigging.

Carol Hasse is the biggest name in sails in the area—and for good reason.  Her loft makes all their top-quality sails in house using the finest, most desirable methods.  And she and her team are just so darn nice!  But delightful personalities aside, their craftsmanship is superb and really can’t be topped.  The downside of all that stellar work?  The price, of course!  It’s a good thing we won the lottery last week or we’d be up a creek.  Oh, wait.  I only dreamt that.  Shoot.

It doesn’t help that we love the color of our existing tanbark sails (which is a very unique shade of reddish brown often found on traditional and classically designed sailboats harkening back to times when sails were dipped in tannins from tree bark to prevent mold and mildew).   We went back and forth about it—tanbark or white?  White or tanbark?—but in the end, tanbark won, and we decided to cough up the extra 12%.  Cough-cough. Maybe it’s because I’m a redhead, but I like to be a little different. :)

Photo from the Port Townsend Sails website showing the hand-worked detail and the tanbark color.

A new 90% genoa will replace our existing jib as our furled headsail.  And a new main will provide an added measure of safety (this is for you, mom!) by raising the boom up so as not to conk Aaron in the head.  We’re keeping our hanked-on staysail, storm trysail and storm jib and will decide on a light-air, downwind sail once our checking account rebounds. 

A side note on the storm sails: We knew a couple sails were tucked down under the Pullman in an oh-so-hard-to-reach cubby, but we assumed they were the original sails kept as spares.  Imagine our surprise when we pulled out the sail bags to find two storm sails in near perfect condition!  Score!  It doesn’t appear that they’ve ever been flown since they were made in… 1985.  That’s right; they’ve been sitting there waiting for us for 25 years.  Score, score, score.

Not much to add on the rig inspection.  The rigger checked everything out and said that we’re in good shape—which is just what we wanted to hear.