Case Study
Optimist.
From Liveaboard to the Med.
Edward Collison is the youngest-ever participant in the Clipper Round the World Race. His online personality might suggest otherwise, but this is a sailor who’s seen 60-knot winds and 12-metre following seas in the Southern Ocean. When his Westerly needed new sails, the brief went well beyond Dacron.
The Brief
A Westerly. In-Mast Furling.
And a Genoa That Fell Apart.
Edward lives aboard Optimist, a Westerly with in-mast furling, in the southeast of England. The plan was to sail to the Mediterranean for the summer, cruise the med, and potentially continue across the Atlantic. The old Dacron sails that came with the boat had two problems. The in-mast furling main was furling badly — binding and jamming in a way that made every reef or furl a minor ordeal. And the genoa simply fell apart during a sail shortly before he was due to leave.
For most people, that would be a straightforward replacement: new Dacron, same cut, same spec. But Edward isn’t most people. He’s seen what happens to boats and gear when conditions turn serious, and he knew that if Optimist was going offshore — Bay of Biscay, the Atlantic, potentially trade wind sailing for weeks — the sails needed to be more than just new. They needed to be right.
At a Glance
Sailor: Edward Collison
Boat: Westerly (in-mast furling)
Voyage: UK to Mediterranean & beyond
Sails delivered: Triradial main + genoa
Cloth: Dimension-Polyant DCX Cruise laminate
Key challenge: In-mast furling geometry
Special detail: Custom Popeye insignia
The Build
Why Laminate,
Not Dacron.
This is a case where the standard answer — replace old Dacron with new Dacron — was the wrong answer. On a boat with in-mast furling, you can’t use horizontal battens. You can use vertical battens, but they tend to create more problems than they solve inside the mast cavity — catching, binding, and making the furl unpredictable. And if you’re offshore with a furling mainsail, you absolutely cannot be in a situation where you can’t get the main into the mast safely. That’s not an inconvenience. It’s a safety issue.
Without battens, you need the cloth itself to hold the sail’s shape. Dacron, particularly as it ages, doesn’t do that well — the weave stretches, the sail bags out, and you lose both performance and the clean profile that makes furling reliable. So we specified Dimension-Polyant’s DCX Cruise laminate instead. DCX gives the sail significantly more dimensional stability than Dacron, which means the shape holds without battens. The sail sets flatter, more predictably, and — critically for in-mast furling — it maintains a consistent profile as it goes in and out of the mast.
Getting the Geometry Right
We built both sails as triradial cuts, orienting the panel layout to follow the load paths through the sail. But on an in-mast furling main, the geometry has to do double duty — it needs to perform under sail and it needs to furl cleanly. The luff curve, the leech profile, and the way the sail builds and sheds depth as it rolls around the foil all have to be precisely right. Get it wrong and the sail either furls with a lump in the middle or jams partway in.
When Edward first received the sails, his only observation was that the main seemed to sit slightly higher than the old one. But the moment he furled it for the first time, the difference was obvious — the sail went in cleanly, smoothly, without the binding and fighting that had made every reef on the old sails an exercise in frustration. The geometry was doing its job. The sail was built to furl as well as it was built to sail.
The Outcome
A Boat Transformed.
Edward says Optimist is absolutely transformed. The boat sails properly in light air now — which, for a liveaboard, changes everything. When you’re cruising on blown-out sails, you end up motoring everywhere. That’s expensive, it’s noisy, and it defeats the entire point of living on a sailing boat. With sails that actually perform, the engine stays off and the boat does what it was designed to do.
The furling works cleanly, the shape holds across the wind range, and the DCX laminate is giving Edward the dimensional stability that Dacron never could on this rig. Optimist is heading for the Scandinavian fjords this summer, and we’re looking forward to seeing those sails do what they were built for — mile after quiet mile.
One last detail. Edward’s grandfather had recently passed away, and his grandfather had a Popeye tattoo. So we developed a custom Popeye insignia for his sails — a small mark of respect sewn into the cloth, sailing with him wherever Optimist goes next. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t show up on a spec sheet, but it’s the kind of thing we love doing.
Got In-Mast Furling?
Let's Talk About Your Rig.
In-mast furling doesn’t have to mean compromised performance. The right cloth, the right cut, and the right geometry make all the difference. Tell us about your boat and where you’re heading.