rigging a preventer

When you’re sailing downwind you obviously want to rig a preventer.

Of course there are many ways to rig it but if you sail a bigger boat it’s not that easy to connect the preventer to the boom. It’s just too far out.

One way to solve that is to split your preventer line in two. The first part runs from the mainsheet block on the boom where it is fixed to the gooseneck + 2 or so meters, where you can tie it up. The second part runs from the cockpit or from wherever you want to control the preventer, to a block attached to stronghold near the pulpit and back to the foredeck somewhere. On the end you fix a snapshackle.

Now, when you’re running, you can untie the first part from the gooseneck, take it to the foredeck where you can easily connect it to the second part by the snapshackle. No hanging overboard trying to connect the preventer to the moving boom. Or, even worse, trying to disconnect it when you need to gibe.

If we go for a longer passage, we just leave the first part rigged all the time. Actually we’ve rigged the second part in a permanent way but that depends of course on the deck layout.