Nigel has published his second of two articles on how he sets up his IOM rig.
You can read it by clicking here
Nigel has published his second of two articles on how he sets up his IOM rig.
You can read it by clicking here

Our member, Nigel Barrow, writes an excellent blog about his exploits in radio sailing. I expect you all read it.
Nigel has published a great reminder that, like big boat sailing, telltales are extremely important in boat set up and tuning. This is Nigel’s excellent blog post :-
https://www.nigelbarrow.co.uk/post/thought-for-the-day-telltales-are-your-friend
Most of us already have a pair of telltales on our various jibs. What Nigel has me thinking about now is using four sets of tell tales (see photo and article).
You know how it is, the slightest bit of rain causes tell tales to stick to the sail and be useless. Nigel recommends a fly fishing spray I’d not heard of before called “fly float”. The idea is to stop your tell tales sticking down when damp. I wish I had known about fly float in my 25 year career in Flying Fifteens!
I’ve checked out fly float and it costs about £5. However, Royal Mail will not ship aerosols so you end up paying £6.50 postage extra to a courier. I need to find a local fishing tackle shop and see if I can get some there. I may be able to scrounge some off fishing friends and try out Nigel’s idea.
I can see now that the national sales figure for telltales is about to soar!….
When you start radio sailing, quite quickly you notice the amount of attention that competitors pay to trimming and tuning their rigs.
Does it make a difference? Well, in our recent IOM meeting which was using six-leg courses, the leaders were finishing in around 12 minutes a whole leg in front of the competitors at the back. So setting God-like tactics, skill and good-looks to one side for the moment, superficially they are going about 15% faster. Amazing.
Confounding matters, the top competitors seem to do rig set-up by eye – no measuring rules or tape measures or anything. Sometimes you’ll see two or three fingers being thrust in a gap in the rigs. Baffling….. So where do you start??
I started radio sailing a little last year with a borrowed Britpop with BG sails. It’s a very popular combination. There is a public download on tuning and trimming from BG Sails.
Click to access bg_sails_rig_tuning_iom.pdf
Take a look at this tuning guide. It’s a cracking good read. In fact, take a look at the whole “Tips” section of the BG website.
Tomorrow, I’ll publish part 2 of this item – a pocket trimming tool ….