New Sails: Part 2

--Blogpost written by Bob

While we are still very busy sorting, packing, and moving things out of our house, we have relished the diversion of selecting the colors for the panels of our new cruising spinnaker.  Our cruising spinnaker will have an asymmetrical overall shape and will be made of adjoining panels of lightweight sailcloth.  Each panel can be a different color sailcloth.

This is the blank canvas on which we create our new spinnaker design.

There were 13 colors that we had to choose from for the cruising
spinnaker--we can use all of them or just a few of them.

In attempting to categorize our options for color arrangements, I made the following chart of six possible color arrangements, for simplicity using only 3 primary colors.  Of course, there are probably hybrid variations of the six primary arrangements.

By coloring panles in different ways, it is possible to create six different styles.

Maggie and I both like "colorful" things--so, a single solid white spinnaker is definitely a "no go" with us.  I think the only single solid color we could both agree on would be red and there are lots of red spinnakers.  Simple two and three color options with horizontal divisions in the sail are simply not interesting enough for our visual palettes.  We decided to use the last option, stripes top and bottom.

We were inspired by this image of someone else's cruising spinnaker.

Our next decision involved narrowing down the colors--we narrowed the list down to four that we liked and then we made pairs of colors (since we want to end up with only two colors).  The pair of colors we chose was ocean blue (a dark blue-green) and hot pink--it is a strong masculine color with a strong feminine color, a kind of yin and yang color combination.  (Yin and yang, in Chinese philosophy, describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complimentary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.)

While it is difficult to match the sailcloth swatch colors exactly on a
computer screen, this is a fairly close representation of our new cruising spinnaker. 

The only color selection remaining is to decide on the color of the sun cover for the self-furling genoa and the mainsail.  We're leaning toward an off white color.  Our dodger and bimini are navy blue.

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