For those of you who were kind enough to provide your experiences/thoughts on the matter in last fall's thread http://archives.sailboatowners.com/pviewarch.htm?fno=400&sku=2007332141202.75&id=507166&ptl=#2007337080315.30 I did promise to report how things worked out. As I indicated, I wanted to avoid still more cross folds in my well-flaked/trained Doyle full-batten mainsail due to unbending and bagging it for the winter. But, I was concerned about possible adverse effects of sub-freezing temperatures in the boat yard. Since I was concerned about its windage, I did unbend and bag my roller-reefed Genoa. I also unrigged all the single-line reefing lines, lazy jacks, halyards, downhaul, etc. Since I customarily reef-down my mainsail through each of the three reef points (to allow me to easily unreef my way back up, in case I want to go out in heavy weather), the mainsail was well-flaked and held down on the boom by reefing lines. (This time of year the Gulf of Maine has a succesion of lows passing through, and I find my self hoisting only to the 3rd reef and unrolling a jib-handkerchief to sail at hull speed out to the Isles of Shoals.) I left my carefully flaked mainsail bent-on and wrapped it and the unrigged boom in plastic, and then lashed-down a hardware-store blue tarp over it. This was to avoid rain/melt water getting inside the zipper-on-top sailcover and refreezing between the folds. (I left the reefing lines inside the boom attached to and holding the sail to it, with the unrigged portions beyond the gooseneck carefully flaked and sea-gasketed to hang under the boom/tarp, shielded from rain/snow and - most importantly - sunlight.) I can happily report that not only was no harm done to my mainsail, but in the past month of sailing its performance in reefing-down (I have 3 reef points) and dropping between the lazy jacks has been excellent. Inspecting and re-rigging all the running rigging took as long as usual, and since that's a lot longer than re-bending on the sail I didn't really save any time. However, I did save the mainsail's fold memory, which was my goal. It seems to have kept its memory of the folds very well indeed, avoiding my past year's struggle to "retrain" it after the abuse of winter folding and bagging. Careful inspection of the stitching on reinforcement panels and batten pockets while raising it one reef-point at-a-time (on a windless day) shows it looks exactly as it did in the fall. Apparently my wrapping was succcessful in keeping water from entering where it could freeze and possibly damage the threads. I plan to now make this my standard practice, and not unbend the mainsail except for sending to the sailmaker. Fair winds, Al