Alacrity 19 – The sail plan begins to take shape
I finished whittling the mast and got a few coats of stain on it. You can see in the picture that I still have to trim about two feet off the top. I wish I could leave it there for leverage when raising the gaff but sadly, if I leave it there, the boat won’t fit under the bridges where I sail. So I’ll whack it off with a saw one of these days. In these pics you can see that I just hung eveything on there. It takes a few hours to tune one of these things when you start from scratch like I did.
Once I get it all strung up properly, I’ll take some better pics and post them, but this is okay for just seeing what it will look like. The main sail, boom and gaff are the same rig that I built for the Compac 16, but here you can see I mounted this mast on the original tabernacle, and I’m running a head sail. 
The one that’s on it in the pic is the working jib from the Compac. The Genoa from the Compac fits nicer though so I’ll probably wind up using that combination most of the time. I can reef the main and put this sail on for high winds.
I went to the hardware store and had standing rigging made out of 3/16 galvanized cable. They did a very nice job putting inserts in the loops and didn’t leave any sharp pigtails out on the ends. There are four shrouds and one fore stay. I’m not going to install any back stays.
Well….
How does it sail?!
It sails great. It sails better with the smaller jib. Seems to handle the angles better that way.