Parasailor evaluation report from a 385

I would like to capture our experiences from parasailor installation and first trials, hoping to help future owners considering it.   

All wind speed mentions below are in true. 

Me and my partner, we are not super experienced sailors. We are on our way to Madeira & Canaries from The Netherlands, and we own our 385 for 10 months. 

We do not have any experience with spinnakers. We have a code zero on board, but that stops working efficiently after 150 degrees true. 

We wanted to get something for light-medium weather downwind sailing, as we experienced a lot of those in the first two months of our trip. We tried wing-on-wing with a whisker pole, which is good for higher wind speeds, but on the lower side, the sails flap a lot with a little bit of swell. 

Our options were asymmetric spinnaker on furler and parasailor, in this preference order. Furler solution was attractive as it follows the same pattern as code zero that we and the boat is used to, and it is a simpler sail in general. But it requires a pole for deeper angles. 

We happened to find a very good second hand deal with the parasailor, that's why we went for it. Someone bought the sail and sold their boat before taking the sail out of its bag. Otherwise, we were not ready to pay the amount that was quoted for this sail by the dealer (7-8K Eur depending on the accessories you choose).  This is the "second generation" 104 sq mt version. A lot of information on the internet about those, will skip it. 

One thing to mention, even though I ended up buying the sail second hand, the technical support from the dealer in The Netherlands was substantial. I can see that the company cares about after sales a lot. 

One thing I was dreaded by was the lack of secondary winches on our boat, which is essential for this sail. It requires two sheets and two tack lines, which need to be trimmed intensely until the sail finds its balance. We bit the bullet and installed the winches. 

Then the tack lines had to come from the bowsprit, through the blocks, and brought in to the cockpit. This happened through the first cleat (I want to add a block or no-friction ring later, WIP), and later via a block on the mid-ship cleat. I used the eye installed by the factory probably for the genoa tracks, below the spray hood, to bring the tackling to the second winch.  

(Note that I had a bobstay before, otherwise parasailor can bend the bowsprit. )

The sheets are the same as the code zero, but later we might need to add a barber hauler.

We hoisted the sail three times, and hoisting is not as easy as advertised, four control lines and the two snubber lines tend to get tangled around things with a little bit of roll. And the parasailor wing looks a bit precarious when lifting the snuffer (same as spinnaker sock). No incident so far. 

The sail works perfectly for < 170 degrees and wind speed > 6 knots. Above > 170 degrees, we could not stabilize it yet. Below < 6 knots of wind, it tends to collapse sporadically, but it recovers.   

In one of our attempts, we got to experience winds from 6 knots to 18 knots true, around 170 degrees, with stable sea state.  This gave us a fair way of evaluating the sail in a "ceteris paribus" manner. 

The sail progressively increased in stability as the wind went above 10 knots. The lines did not have a lot of tension (could move things without winches almost)

After 14 knots, we started getting nervous, but neither the sail nor the boat was giving signals of overpower. But the lines were under a lot of tension. 

After 17 knots, even though we were flying - average 8.5 knots, max 9.5 - we wanted to take the sail down, by the time we took it down, it was 18.5. The sail was still doing good. 

Throughout this experience, the boat was stable, did not try to make abrupt heading changes. 

18 knots was too much for us to handle the de-deployment of this sail in a relaxed way. The user manual mentions 20 knots as the suggested max, but of course this depends on the boat a lot, as the apparent will drop accordingly (large catamarans for instance).  

Snuffer works fine even in the high wind case, but the forces coming from the snuffer line and the sail bag flying around is a bit too high. At the end, it was safe and we did not damage anything, but the adrenalin levels were high. 

We also flied the sail without the main, so we could not use the main to collapse it (that causes other problems anyways, like being have to maintain the main in deep angles, preventer, noise etc. Not even sure if this is really recommended with this sail)

We do not have enough sample points yet. The sail works fine, but without prior experience with conventional spinnakers, hard to judge whether it makes a big difference compared to those for us. 

Hoisting and snuffing experiences will probably improve as we practice. 

This sail costs a lot of money, and some work to rig it, and one part of us thinks a furler asymmetric might have been a better solution for us. But as always, trade-offs. 

All in all, not sure if we will keep the sail yet, we will be considering selling it later depending on our feelings, potentially to someone from ARC in the Canaries as we will be there at the time.