Hanks are a great way to make sail changes easy for the short-handed sailor but what if, like more boat owners today, you are curious or thinking about a composite stay? Traditional bronze hanks just won't cut it--but they will certainly chafe it.

So much for my sense of humor..... Most sailors are familiar with the traditional bronze piston hanks seen on jibs, staysail's and storm jibs on many boats.These basic hanks work just fine on wire or rod stays but are not at all recommended for composite stays. Composite stays are a fairly recent development in the high-test racing and large cruising boat arena. The idea is that the composite stays are much lighter for the same strength/stretch resistance than the traditional metal wire and rod stays and so like carbon masts before them, reduce weight aloft. Less weight ultimately means more speed. Composite side-stays and running backstays of course do not have any sails set on them and in most cases neither do the headstay's of race boats because they use a twin groove foil of some type. BUT on some larger and specialty race boats, this latter situation is changing. Some of the latest super maxis (80-100 feet LOA) have reverted to using hank-on headsail's because of sail handling issues associated with doing headsail changes at 15 knots where the sail is over 100 feet on the hoist and maybe 35 feet on the foot, or more. There were issues with the sails getting out of control on the foredeck as they came out of the foil. Handling these sails is not like anything most sailors have experienced. They are almost impossible to get a hand on since they are so thick AND slippery. So what was old is new again. Hanks. But because these same boats are the early adopters of new technology like composite stays, the traditional bronze hanks were not suitable because of chafe issues on the stay.

Composite stays typically come in two or perhaps three types of fiber: carbon, PBO, and sometimes Kevlar. The fibers are arranged in bundles of suitable size, each bundle comprising individual fibers of again suitably sized (called denier)individual fibers. The PBO and Kevlar versions are held captive in a plastic sheath; the terminal ends are mechanical fasteners similar in principle to the commonly known Norseman or Sta-lock terminals used in wire rigging. Carbon rigging is similar except that it is glued; the latest version from Hall winds the end of the individual fibers around the terminal fitting. The cover over the carbon in this case is a hard synthetic fiber applied as a braid over the carbon. In both cases the outer sheaths are intended to provide a measure of protection to the fibers underneath. It is here where the stay meets the hanks that the chafe from the harder bronze material that the hanks are made from will chafe through the outer covers of the stays.

The rigging guys were ahead of the sailmakers in the use of composite stays, initially for staysail stays on larger boats (the weight savings on an inside stay for  a 50 footer are staggering) and for a few years sailmakers fiddled around with Spectra loops and toggles, like this idea (pictured) on the Solent stay of a 40 footer from about 4 years ago:

Webbing straps, similar perhaps in principle to the webbing snaps one might see on a Soling, a Star, and other similar lightweight small one-design boats, were another earlier idea too. The fact that the webbing straps and their cousins were much lighter than the hanks did not hurt either.

The latest iteration in the soft hanks world is a product called Equiplite. Made in Australia, Equiplite makes all manner of fittings using Spectra cordage and specially designed "buttons" around which the Spectra is looped.The loop is held in place with Velcro. It works a LOT better than such a simple description might lead one to believe. I don't have pictures of the hanks but one can get the gist of the idea by reviewing the detail in this picture of Equiplite product being used as halyard shackles.

On the soft hanks product, the part that is seen here holding the halyard to the ring goes around the stay and is captured by a specially designed "donut" in place of the toggle seen in the picture above. The Spectra string is replaced by Spectra webbing supplied by the sailmaker.

These particular products are not cheap, at least relative to traditional bronze hanks. In the past week I did the math for a colleague interested in changing from foil-rigged headsail's to soft hanks. It turns out that for a 50 foot luff, the cost to do the full change over from #6 luff tape to soft hanks was not much change from a boat unit, AKA $1,000, comprising about two thirds labor and one third parts. This estimate was for one 50-foot luff headsail on a 37 footer. The cost to do the same change to regular small bronze hanks was still close to $700 bucks; the price difference between the soft hanks and the bronze ones was about half but much of the work to the sail proper was needed in any case.

While the retrofit to hanks is both expensive and generally unlikely for most boats, a composite stay is certainly within the scope of many 35 foot and above size boats, particularly when  their owners are planning on a longer ocean voyage. A composite stay is to be be considered for the inside storm staysail stay or for the Solent stay, and installing the required soft hanks on these sails in the first place on a new sail is commonly a cheaper proposition that a retrofit.