HOW SMALL IS TOOO SMALL ??

[jessejaay]

G;day guys, i made a sail for my sport and im afraid its to small, so how small is to small ?
cheers for the help

[Smish]

It all depends on what you want your sail to do… Downwind with a decent breeze, if you have some sort of rudder, any sail will get you moving. To work out how fast, you can use these tools to give you a ballpark figure:

Wind load calculator:
http://www.sailingusa.info/cal_wind_load.htm

Hull resistance:
http://www.fionamsinclair.co.uk/yachts/spreads/fred.htm

Sailing “into the wind” or “upwind” is a different matter… To get any sort of performance you need quite a large sail because lift needs to exceed drag. Imagine your kayak is like an airplane, if the wing is too small you’re not going to fly! Unfortunately, when you up-size the sail it dramatically increases the forces on the rig, so if it’s not built strong enough it will break! Also you’ll need to line up your centre of effort with the centre of lateral resistance and then there’s the lee boards… they need to be at minimum 4 percent of the sail area to resist lateral drift. Finally everything needs to be stable otherwise you’ll be doing more swimming than sailing!

The sailingusa site has lots of good info.

Cheers,

Andrew