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The common usage of the word hook (crochet in French) will allow us to easily understand its nautical definition. To suspend a chandelier from the ceiling, you can use a rope and a pulley and, once at the desired position, it is sufficient to tie the rope. The alternative solution is to lift your chandelier and then fix it directly onto a lock. There is then no more tension in the rope.
In the case of a sailboat, a hook is a system that allows a sail (whatever it may be) to be hoisted to the desired position, to be blocked with a lock system and thus avoid keeping tension in the halyard. Without tension, it is then no longer necessary to tie the rope. On a sailboat, hooks are mainly found on foresails (staysail, Code 0, gennaker, …) but also on the mainsail and the reefs. More generally, one can consider that it is possible to hook any rope that is usually under tension.
Now that everyone understands the principle, let us focus on understanding why it is interesting to hook a sail on board a sailboat, whether it is for racing or cruising. An important point to integrate beforehand: unlike our chandelier where the halyard tension is constant, the forces present on a sailboat’s halyard are not the same at the moment of hoisting the sail and during navigation when the wind will rush into it.
Gain weight in the mat : the principle is simple : the more weight you have above the deck, the more weight you will need to add to the keel to maintain the same level of stability. On a 15 m sailboat with 25 meters of mast, you have to compensate 15 kg at the head of the mast by several hundred kilos in the bulb keel ! The less weight there is in the tops, the more stable & faster your sailboat will be. Two concepts as important in racing as in cruising. On a ocean cruising sailboat, you could trade a few kilos in the tops for several hundred liters of beverage (whatever it is) or diesel ! While racing, you use this weight gain by weight gain in the keel to make the boat lighter or faster.
With a lock, the halyard no longer needs to be sized to withstand the significant tensions of the sail when sailing. The halyard has only one function : hoist or lower the sail. Also on our 15-meter sailboat, it is possible to replace your 12 mm dyneema halyard with a simple pure 6 mm braid. If the halyard measured 60 meters, you save 5 kg but also several hundred euros. These figures must be doubled or tripled if you “muffle” your halyard (2-fall hoist to divide the efforts by 2). On some sailboats, the tensions are so great that very large diameter ropes should be used. The lock allows the halyard to be sized only for the weight of the sail. Installing a hook comes at a cost, but you also need to factor in the savings to assess its true cost. The use of a lock makes it possible, for example, to remove the halyard jammer.
Eliminate halyard wear : With a hook, the halyard is no longer in tension and it is therefore the end of the halyards worn or broken by prolonged friction on one or more sheaves or by its jammer. On long cruises, you no longer have to worry about changing the position of the wear points : an obvious gain in serenity and real savings. Anyone who has been through the experience of a broken halyard, the fall and / or loss of a sail and the difficulty of ironing a new halyard will easily understand the value of the hook.
Remove the lengthening of the halyard. You will agree, the fabrics used for our sails are more and more technical (3DL, titanium, laminated racing : save weight (see first advantage) and avoid fabric deformation to obtain stability of the shape of the sail and thus improve performance. If you have invested in a technical sail you should understand that using a halyard that is too elastic will seriously reduce the benefits of your investment! The use of a good quality dyneema halyard is therefore compulsory. Better still, the use of a hook will avoid any deformation of the profile of the sail. This is an advantage highly sought after by sailors but it is far from being negligible on a cruising sailboat and even more so on heavy weather sails which usually work very poorly (complex implementation, not enough tension, halyard elastic,…)
Decrease halyard compression in the mast. It becomes more technical and not being an engineer, my explanation may be simplistic. If we imagine an average tension of 5 tons in the sail, this tension will necessarily apply to the mast but the direction of the forces will not be the same with or without a hook. A classic binding with a halyard compresses the mast more and tires it more. Thus, a mast originally designed for use with hooks will usually be subjected to less effort and it is therefore possible to use a less reinforced section, therefore lighter which brings us once again to our first advantage : weight gain.
A FEW TIPS
Tension from bottom : Since there is now a fixed point at the top, the only way to add tension to the sail is to be from the bottom.
This is an important point to think about when changing to adapt your fittings. If we take the example of a code 0, we usually fix the armor point to the bow then we hoist the sail with the halyard that we block with a jammer (installed on the mast or the piano). With a lock, you first hoist the sail to the lock point before taking the tension back through the weave point.
If you are using a furler, you will need to add a termination allowing the use of a hoist to have sufficient strength. It is usual to position the jammer that will block the tack point rope as close to the bow as possible to avoid the rope elasticity issues that we have sought to eliminate from the equation. Clamps that can be operated from the cockpit (such as our KJ clamps) are perfect to complete the setup.
Let’s say that the main constraint of a hook is that its installation cannot be improvised. The forces applied to the mast are different, the sizing of the ropes must be adapted, the fittings and its position are also different. We advise you to carry out this modification with a professional.
Maintenance & reliability : Locks don’t always get a good press, but that’s a very wrong judgment. Reliability has been there for many years and recent systems are very far from the mainsail locks of your Hobby Cat which regularly blocked. On the other hand, these are systems that require maintenance. Nothing very restrictive, but it is not imaginable to leave a lock “in its own juice” as we would do with a winch. You don’t need to hire a professional. Maintenance mainly consists of checking the state of wear and cleanliness of the parts.
DO I HAVE TO INSTALL ONE OR MORE HOOKS ?
If you are a racer and more particularly offshore racers, hooks are undoubtedly products that will help you improve performance. Chances are you already have them equipped unless your class’s gauge rules prohibit them. On an Imoca participating in the Vendée Globe, all the sails are hooked.
For occasional boaters, the financial and technical constraints are out of balance with the advantages. Nothing prevents having fun of course but it is quite rare to find hooks on a cruising sailboat that practices coastal navigation.
On the other hand, the hooks are particularly recommended on sailboats and almost essential on multihulls whose workloads can be very heavy. For these sailboats, the hooks are above all a guarantee of safety. All frequent travelers have had problems with halyards or reefing bumps that break in the middle of their trip. The hooks definitively solve this problem and significantly extend the life of the sails.
Concerned to provide fittings which bring more performance and/or of comfort and of safety, you will find in our range of numerous locks. Without going into the technical details, here is a tour of our solutions.
– Trolley of GV headstock hooked available on the ranges KMS40, 60, 80 and customs
– Fang of ris lock KHR to install on the boom
– Internal halyard hook at the mast KMH
– External halyard hook KHL
–External halyard hook with swivel KFH: it is a hook and a swivel in the same product dedicated to sails using a furler. It is the model that is the most used today on offshore racing sailboats (Ultim, Imoca, Multi 50, MOD70, Class40, ..)
-A blocker is not a hook, but our KJ blockers with 3 jaws are so effective that they bring some benefits of hooks, such as preventing the slippage of the rope.
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