The first thing I did was measure the sail dimensions I wanted. I didn't want to deal with a spinnaker pole and thought I might be able to use in more than just downwind, so I chose an asymmetrical arrangement with the clew slightly higher than the tack point.

The dimensions I used were Luff - 17ft, Leech - 16ft, Foot - 7ft. I use only 17ft for the luff for two reasons - so that I could adjust the height up and down along the 19-10ft line from the mast tip to the bow, and so that the sail would be easy(ier) to manage and stow.

Having found no used sails anywhere with those dimensions, I opted for a Sailrite kit with my wife graciously agreeing to sew it together.

So here is the sail being put together.

This was the first sail we ever made from a kit, and it was a lot easier (albeit time consuming) than I thought it would be. It came out to the equivalent of about 15 hours of two peoples' time.

Sailrite kit (very complete, by the way) - $176. http://www.sailrite.com - very good folks there.

Then I started at the bow. Here is what the attachement looks like.

I drilled through the top edge as close as I dared estimating stresses and all the while hoping that there was solid plastic that close to the top of the bow. There was.

There is now no hole into the inside of the hull. The shackle pin is going through solid plastic - what luck!

Here is a picture of the tack control line in its "stowed" position.

I wanted all of the lines to be "reachable" from the cockpit for both launching and retreiving.

I used a small cleat under the flare of the cockpit so it would be out of the way.

Here is the tack control line in use.

Next was the head. I wrestled over many different solutions to this, and again, opting for simplicity and trading off many other things (including having to remove this block to take the sail off), came up with this. It is mounted on the SIDE of the mast relative to the boom.

This is a standard cheek block......but now comes the tricky part. I used a soldering iron to "burn" the screw holes into the sail sleeve material. This allowed the cloth to melt around the hole and keep it from tearing later. I also put some rubber grommets underneath to try to "pinch" the sail rather than clamp it hard with sharp metal (remember those light loads?).

Then came the hard part. The mast tip was a bit too thin to tap threads into, so I decided to through-bolt the block. What I ended up doing was to TAPE the nut into a long box-end wrench of the appropriate size and hold it down inside the mast tube from the top, weaving around the webbing at the top of the sail, line it up with the appropriate screw/hole, and hope the threads would eventually grab. Don't ask me how long these four screws took to put in!

Then came the cleat to tie the halyard off to. I didn't want to put more holes in the mast, especially at the gooseneck. So I used a large band clamp and cut some rubber backing to "grip" the mast with.

O.K., this is not especially pretty, but it is functional. It is one thing that I'll work on more next year - the foot is chafing a little on the clamp screw when it is furled and the cleat moves around a little too much.

The cleat had to go above the gooseneck so that when the spinnaker was not in use, the halyard would just wind up inside the sail as it was furled (I tie off the halyard and the snapshackle to the cleat when it is not in use).

Finally (there is only one more corner on the sail!) were the sheet controls. I put some small blocks as far outboard as practical on the aft-most elbow.

Again, these I through-bolted with my newly acquired "tape-the-nut-to-the-wrench" technique, only this time I needed to tape the resulting wrench assembly to a large screwdriver just to get it far enough up the tube!!!!

I put a small cleat on either side of the cockpit for each sheet to be tied off to.
I rolled up the main in all of these pictures just to keep it out of the way.

So, then you ask, how does it work?

In a word, FANTASTIC! The summers here in North Carolina can be quite windless, and this extra 90sq ft of sail makes a tremendous difference.

In fact, I have been able to use it up onto a broad reach of nearly 110 degrees before it starts fouling the back of the main! It handles a bit like a drifter this way. I am sure that a bowsprit would have helped get the tack out more than the 4ft to the bow, but this is plenty useful for me (and plenty simple without having to have a bowsprit!)

I keep the sheets run through their respective blocks and the sheet snapshackle clipped at the base of the mast while not in use.

I can launch and retrieve the sail all from the cockpit and I keep in in a "launching bag" snapped just under the forward edge of the cockpit.

I just pull the three snapshackles into the cockpit, clip them on, and hoist away!