Ventures came from the factory with a rudimentary roller reefing boom. The boom rotated on the mast, rolling the sail around it. This was very unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
1. It takes at least two people, one to roll the boom, one to tend the halyard, and one to pull the sail fabric aft so it doesn’t all bunch up at the mast. Difficult to do when it’s blowing hard, which is when you need to reef.
2. The more the sail is rolled up, the baggier the exposed sail becomes. This is the opposite of what you want. You want the sail to be flatter. A baggy sail will cause the boat to heel more.
3. A roller reefing boom has to be kept smooth to avoid damaging the sail as it is rolled up. This makes adding a boom vang problematic, not to mention other hardware.
Most Venture owners have long since converted to conventional slab or “jiffy” reefing. This involves replacing the mainsail with one with one or two sets of reef points. (You could have a sailmaker add reef grommets to the original sail but, come on, that’s got to be about 40 years old! )
There are plenty of sources that describe how to set up a basic slab reefing system. On Chiquita I added a cheek block near the aft end of the boom on one side and an eye strap on the other. The clew reefing line started at the eye strap, went up through the reef grommet and back down to the cheek block. These were positioned so that the pull was both down and aft. I could have just brought the tail of this line forward along the boom to a clam cleat but I chose to run it inside the boom to a turning block at the mast, down to the base, and back to the cockpit.
There are also a number of ways to deal with the tack reef grommet. Most owners install a hook or “horn” (or a pair of them for two reefs) at the gooseneck. I chose to use a 4:1 Cunningham tackle with the tail led back to a cam cleat in the cockpit. The top block of the tackle is attached to a Cunningham hook that drops into the Cunningham grommet (for flattening the sail by increasing luff tension) and can be moved to either of the two luff reef grommets as needed when it is time to put in a reef.
FYI, the Yahoo! Group is no longer fully functional. It is still somewhat active via email only. Yahoo no longer hosts files or pictures or archived messages. There are several Facebook Groups to help fill the void:
Venture of Newport Sailboats and Macgregor Venture Classic Sailboats are both helpful.
Henry
