The Ballad Exchange

Did you add more flanges to the stock in the end Bob? Did you reuse the current stock or replace it entirely? What did you do to prevent the rudder jamming against the skeg (mine suffers from this too)? :D Looks like a cracking job, one I must tackle as my rudder is full of water (spends a good hou...

Fionn (1972 -- hull 18?) came to us a little scruffy. Typical neglect of some basics, like chainplates (leaky; original; carriage bolts pulling thru furniture), thru-hulls (brass/bronze gate valves), and hardware bedding. Nearly all hardware lacks suitable backing plates or solid core beneath; most...

Thanks for posting that, Mark. I'd run across it during research on the Ballad. The bulkheads-bolted-to-tabbing construction method was hardly unique to Albin, nor were most other boats of the time period built with fully tabbed bulkheads. Even today, that level of construction detail favors higher-...

Outstanding help! Thank you for those photos. It makes sense that such a big sail would need full-on chainplates for the turning blocks, which must see upwards of 1500kg force on a reach. Our 1972 Ballad has no such plates. (Presumably the spinnaker block was on the toerail track?) We will probably ...

Yowza, that's a big sail. Thanks, Joerg. I have little spinnaker experience (they were never used where I learned to sail as a child, considered radical and dangerous), and our recent spinnaker trials have been on boats with little or no ballast. Small fractional spinnakers -- 150 and 250 sqft. http...

Thanks so much, Frans. Hope you had a good week of sailing. Some photos of you enjoying yourselves would help those us us who are still getting snowed on.... :D Ours is an old Ballad -- 1972, no bronze nameplate, but an ancient Genoa carries the number 18 (?). It must have shipped from the factory i...

As I described earlier, I have double spinnaker sheets. The first pair of sheets is lead to blocks at the back of the boat, the second pair I have lead trough a extra pair of block on my genoa track. When spinnakering I use forward sheet as the luff sheet and the backward sheet as lee sheet. Howeve...

Frans: thanks for the information, and for the useful website! Could I ask a few more questions? What conditions do you fly the spinnaker, or not fly it? Do you store the pole on the mast, or on the deck when not in use? Is the Ballad prone to the 'IOR roll' that many boats of this age exhibit under...

Used spinnakers are good for learning with; we are still getting them tangled on the spreaders, hoisting them wrong, etc. Hate to rip a new $2000 chute! We bought a very used spinnaker for practise on our smaller boat -- a smelly, much-repaired sail with a royalty stamp "1969 Intl Dragon NA Cha...

Hi Mark. I'm by no means a spinnaker expert, having never used the Ballad's. And where we sail our smaller boats, on high mountain lakes, spinnakers are suicidal. So take this with a grain of salt. :D Our spinnaker pole ring is on a track that slides from about 1.25m off the deck to a bit over 2m. A...