How Leading Yacht Manufacturers are Simplifying Rig Setup for Owners
by Cyclops Marine 29 Jan 2025 13:23 UTC
Kinetic Catamarans - Happy Together © Kinetic Catamarans
Leaving the dock with the incorrect rig settings guarantees suboptimal performance and comfort, but it can also lead to serious safety hazards and unnecessary damage to equipment. Whether you're an experienced sailor or just starting out, if you fail your set up, you're set up to fail.
Think of your rig settings like the tyre pressures of a car. When you buy a new car, the tyres are perfectly pressurised. As the car ages, you have a known pressure level to return to on your dashboard—ensuring that you maintain safety between services.
Riggers and boatyards have used wireless load sensors during rig stepping and tuning for some time—setting up to exact load numbers on screen before handing the yacht over to its owner, along with a tuning guide of recommended dock settings. But, until recently, with no way to determine where they are in relation to these recommendations, owners have had little to no chance of maintaining them.
Now, the world's top yacht manufacturers are empowering owners with precision dock settings. Simple, low-cost digital upgrades displayed on boat instruments and via a smartphone app allow them to verify their settings against recommendations with precision.
Rudimentary Checks
Historically, sailors have adjusted their rigs using basic methods which centre on experience and visual estimation, feel, or even the sound produced by plucking a wire. Some follow broad guidelines such as "tighten the shrouds until they're snug and then back off slightly." Basic tools like mechanical tension gauges are also common, but accuracy varies wildly.
All these methods leave huge potential for error, and even seasoned sailors can miss the mark.
Digital Dock Setting
The solution has come from the world of high-performance yacht racing, such as the Vendée Globe and America's Cup, where live data from load sensors (accurate to within 1%) allows skippers to hit and repeat fast settings and safeguard their rigs in extreme conditions. This leading-edge technology has now become a staple for cruisers, offering benefits well beyond performance.
Partnering with yacht manufacturers around the world is leading innovator Cyclops Marine. Cyclops' wireless load sensors make it easy to check rig settings at the dock, and continuously while sailing. Along with raw numbers, a simple green-amber-red dial gives an instant sanity check, ensuring you're within safe limits. It's a simple check that can drastically reduce stress—delivering safe, smooth sailing, and saving buckets of precious sailing time spent tinkering with settings.
Fatigue Monitoring
New sensors now come with built-in fatigue monitoring, storing data on your rig health & lifespan based on comprehensive load data, collected over time. Live loads are hugely beneficial, but fatigue is an invisible risk that makes failure more likely. This feature offers peace of mind, letting you know when maintenance is required before fatigue becomes failure. All data is logged, giving owners a complete fatigue history they can share with riggers, insurers, or prospective buyers when they come to sell their yacht.
Learn more about fatigue monitoring here.
On The Move
The technology doesn't stop working when you leave the dock, also offering you live, dynamic load data while sailing. If the system serves as a tyre pressure monitor at the dock, on the move it becomes your live rev counter - allowing you to avoid overpowering the rig and guiding you to make adjustments to maintain safety.
Learn how to reef by numbers here.
See It in Action
Parlay Revival is a hurricane-damaged 2012 Lagoon 450 Catamaran. Colin and his friends spent 4 months getting her seaworthy, before setting sail across the Caribbean. They have gained a huge following online as viewers tune in to follow their journey as they continue to fix her as they go, and eventually circumnavigate the globe! Here, they get their hands on the ultimate protection for their rig - a set of 1" smarttune wireless load sensors for their shrouds.
Many yacht designers and boat builders offer Cyclops Load Sensors pre-installed, or they can be retrofitted to your existing yacht.
Contact the experts at Cyclops for more information, or learn more here.