Interview with a Sailmaker

Neil Pryde co-owner, Bob Pattison, with some straight talk on sails, small boats, and the progress being made... PLUS: Ask him questions!

I first encountered Bob Pattison during our search for a company to produce the stock 100 square foot balanced lug sail for our SCAMP design. Where some potential sailmakers weren’t interested in sails this small, and others seemed unfamiliar with the balanced lug, Bob not only seemed enthusiastic about the project, he also had answers. Since Bob was a company owner I’d assumed he wouldn’t actually be designing our sail himself. Early in the process I asked: “Who will you have working on our actual SCAMP sail?”

“You’re getting the very best…” he wrote, “Me!”

So began our long working relationship. Over the years that followed we worked with Bob and Neil Pryde to design sails for Skate, the Portage Pram, Scout and others. In every case we were impressed by Bob’s expertise and—when necessary—his willingness to consider unusual solutions for our deceptively complicated requirements. He has also been happy to climb aboard for a windy day of testing.

Like many sailors my head used to spin when I’d read about sails, the exotic materials, and the supposed performance differences. What things are really important, and which are just “advancements” for the sake of selling new sails, I wondered.

I’ve learned a lot from my conversations with Bob so decided to ask him if he’d consent to an interview, and he agreed. I think all small-boat sailors will find his responses both educational and entertaining. —Josh Colvin

Tell us briefly about your history with sailing and sailmaking:

My sailing life started on Lake Mead outside of Las Vegas in the early 60s, sailing and racing windward Sabots that had a daggerboard versus the leeboard of the Naples Sabot. This was around age 7. Our family purchased a Coronado 25 from Frank Butler (before his success at Catalina) and in those days you could buy production boats in kits...ours came with the rig and sails and our Dad finished out the interior and our Mom made the cushions and curtains. The kids just got in the way. My Dad had grown up sailing on San Francisco Bay and was a good sailor and racer and taught us everything from knots and anchoring, to sail handling and how to “see” the wind. Sailing on Lake Mead taught me a lot about the intricacies of light air sailing, the excitement of too much wind too quickly, and the joy of freshwater sailing. 

I started my sailmaking career in 1975-76, learning the art on the sail-loft floor, and for a variety of sailmakers in and around Southern California. This included working for the Westsail Corporation making “round the world” cruising sails for these heavy displacement cruising boats and later heading up a production loft for Prindle Catamarans as well as working for a small independent racing sail loft owned by my brother. This “hands on” experience proved to be invaluable as the industry and I moved into the PC revolution in 1980.

The eighties brought great change to the sailmaking industry and I was at the forefront of the CAD/CAM revolution, beta-testing the very first commercially available sailmaking software and by 1985, using the first commercially available computer-driven plotting/cutting machines. 

In the late 80s I worked making sails and boats in Mexico, about an hour west of Mexico City. There is an active sailing scene there and because of oppressive import taxes and duties at that time, a business group was formed to build boats and sails for the domestic market. I worked on the Andrews 26, an MORC boat that the company was contracted to build and I worked on the keel and rudder molds, deck layout and the like.

I went to work for the Neil Pryde Yachtsail Division in 1990, living and working in Hong Kong for a spell. In 1997 my business partner, Tim Yourieff, and I purchased the Yachtsail division from Neil Pryde Ltd and started a new and wholly owned and sailmaking-driven company that is licensed to manufacture and distribute the Neil Pryde product worldwide.

Where have you seen sailmaking demonstrate the most progress in terms of technology or performance? Are the shapes and construction of modern sails definitively better than 25 years ago? Are the materials significantly improved? 

This would have to be the adoption of CAD/CAM, which started in 1980 and coincided with the advent of the first “modern” laminate materials. The computer allowed us to take advantage of the inherent strengths of laminates...and by 1984 the whole of the industry was being transformed.

And everything since then has be evolutionary...or upgrades if you will. The sailmaking software has improved and includes analysis features that at best were seat-of-the-pants prior, and the “fabric” technology keeps moving forward as well…both in conventional “roll” goods and new “on the fly” construction as in all the various membrane products on the market.

Improved? Hmm. I can tell you I think sailmaking must be one of the very few industries that has seen vast improvements in production and materials and the retail costs continue to get higher...so in some sense yes, in others no. This is a problem for the sport in general because as costs spiral, builders only want to build bigger and bigger boats with more expensive sails, and this leaves a big gap at the bottom end...which is where we hope to draw new people to the sport.

Sail shapes are more refined today in part because of software and sail design, but really I think form follows function...which is to say that the genoa or jib we might build for a contemporary race boat is not the shape we would use for a Triton 28 genoa.

This is because the boats are faster and get to speed faster, and the rig profiles are much narrower. So sails sheet closer to centerline, entry angles are dramatically different—as are exit angles. My guess is that sailmaking would have adapted to this in 1969 as well as they have in 2023... we would have been following boats and making the fastest sails for a given rig and boat. This has not changed. Clearly we might not have been able to make the same type of sail in dacron in 1969 even if we wanted to, but my point is, we don’t come up with a new sail fabric and have a boat built around it—it’s universally the opposite.

And then I’d remind folks that there is little that hasn’t been done. Case in point would be “screachers’”...essentially a high-clewed overlapping multihull reaching genoa that is free flown and can be furled. Conceptually these are what any sailor who sailed offshore 1979 would have called a “jib top,” albeit a free flying one…or the latest triple headsail reaching rigs on boats—I would remind anyone to look at the clipper ships designed to reach really, really fast and with a quiver of headsails.

Lastly I’d also say that the shapes that work on sails is a fairly small range...too flat or too full and they just don’t work. It is pretty easy to get inside the range that works but a lot of work to refine it. Although this is changing; most sailors have a displacement boat of sorts—be it a big cat or a Scamp—and as such they have maximum hull speeds and it’s important to realize that the best, most expensive sail in the world will not make you exceed hull speed (surfing excepted) and when you are off the wind at all (70% of cruising) just about any sail will get you to hull speed! The latest and greatest sail will help you sail a bit closer to the wind, allow you to reef later (not stretching out of shape as wind increases), be lighter and stronger. All of which is great when racing. Which most sailors don’t do.

Testing the prototype SKATE sails designed by Bob Pattison and Neil Pryde

It would seem like the offshoring of some sailmaking has actually made pricing better than it would have been 25 years ago. Is that true?

Funny and in a bit of contradiction to what I said above, this is true at least in terms of inflation. There are outliers of course to this: atop the list is grand-prix sailing, where money has never really been an issue. In this environment people or organizations will spend whatever it takes to get what they think will be an advantage. This of course skews the median cost of “sails” but if we take those out of the equation and look at smaller boats where woven dacron is the fabric of choice, I would say this is true, as I think sails today are both better and have higher value for cost.

As you probably know, Neil Pryde started his company in 1970 in Hong Kong as that was where he was working and sailing at the time. Offshore manufacturing is never as simple as “lower labor” costs, as offshore production has its own host of issues (case in point being in shipping goods to Asia via sea freight. During the pandemic the cost of a container went from $1950.00 to $19,000). Neil was always focused on the cost of material because this is where the true cost of sail is and in part why he was maybe the first to commercially cut sails with computer driven cutters (using apparel industry equipment at the time). He was able to achieve a level of repeatable accuracy not seen in the industry, but more important he reaped the benefits of material savings as it is a lot more efficient to cut say 100 of the same parts or panels than it is do do a one off sail. And at the time they were building 300 boardsails a day (!) so the savings add up quickly and the ability to sell more competitively increased. I would also add that one of Neil’s lasting contributions to the industry is the notion of centralized manufacturing, and though the company was derided about this by competitors all through the 70s, 80s and into the 90s even, his foresight was borne out as today every large sailmaking entity builds in centralized locations around the world. And the efficiencies of this is another downward pressure point on pricing.

So fast forward to today, and weaving and finishing have improved tremendously and in some cases raw material costs have come down. Most obviously would be UPE (high modulus polyethylene) yarns which, because of growing demand and supply, have really come down in price, allowing sailcloth manufacturers to use this yarn in more applications without much of a price penalty. And then we have improvements in sailmaking technology, which I’ll loosely refer to as “membrane” sails. This broad range of sails are generally produced in-house by sailmakers who source the raw yarns, films, and adhesives directly from suppliers, which in effect makes them sailcloth manufacturers. This removes one link or middle person in the chain of production, and in doing so removes their profit margin. This of course helps the final retail pricing structure in favor of the consumer.

But at the same time we have seen price escalations. For instance, the now gaining-in-popularity movement to use recycled yarns and other components in sailcloth isn’t free...in fact recycled yarns are currently about 40% more expensive than conventional yarns. But as this cost is a the bottom of the production tier it does not mean sails get 40% more expensive at the retail end. This cost increase has been somewhat nullified by the factors I mentioned above. It is all very dynamic, but in the end and I suppose as free market folks would say, “the customer has benefited.”

The original space program gave us “Tang”...I’m sure there are folks who love it, but if that’s really how the space program impacted the average person then I’m not sold.

Of class racers, offshore racers, and casual cruisers, which group most drives the developments in sailmaking? 

This really just depends on where one is sitting. There of course is tremendous R&D at the top: Fabrics, rigs, hulls, sailplans. That’s a given. But the bigger question might be—does it matter, right? The original space program gave us “Tang”...I’m sure there are folks who love it (is it still out there?) but if that’s really how the space program impacted the average person then I’m not sold. Sure, I get the science side of this and the quest for knowledge, but even NASA has a hard time saying there is anything else in it for us (and they've written papers on it).  

By way of illustration the question is this: How many of us sailors are going to own, sail, race or cruise an 80-foot foiling trimaran? 

If we peel back a bit and look at development on a more macro level then we see all kinds of interesting things going on at many levels...so an example might be the Scout dinghy from Duckworks. The sailplan is quite a bit different from what you see on conventional dinghies...criteria such as boomless and square top head for sail efficiency in a small planform, both of which are not breakthroughs, but couple it with a creative and new reefing system and now you have something that is developmental and creative.

Or on bigger boats you see what I call the re-introduction of the “JibTop” to contemporary sailplans, which is called various things (“cruising code zero” comes to mind) but at the end of the day it is a high-clewed, light air and reaching sail that happens to be free flying (21^st century) and with a UV cover. This sail has found a big home with all kinds of contemporary boats that are set up with small non or barely overlapping headsails. So although new and developmental in the big sense, it’s really just a 1970’s vintage JibTop repurposed in modern times. And to that point, I would say if you ever have a chance to visit the Herreshoff Museum in Bristol, R.I., do so.  Here was someone truly well ahead of his time. You’ll find many things—catamarans and full-batten mainsails to name two—that will give you a more historical sense of development in sailing.

SCAMP’s 100 square foot balanced lugsail from Neil Pryde

Speaking of alternative rigs, where do you personally weigh-in on the age-old argument about the superiority of the modern Bermudan rig? We know you guys are right on the cutting edge when it comes to sailing performance—are you seeing any developments in the racing world that favor a less common rig?

I guess it’s hard to argue against it at this stage and in large part because of the improvements we’ve seen to hulls, rigs, sailcloth, designs. We’ve had fatheads, more elliptical sail planforms, narrower sheeting angles, full battens, jibs with battens/roach and fabric/designs that are able to really lock shapes in place. All this while boats are faster and loads are higher. And the Bermudian/Marconi rig still dominates. A good friend of mine, Randy Smyth operates well outside the box and with him I’ve been involved in soft/hard sail combinations which seem so exotic, but are still really the Marconi rig at the end of the day. Super cool though.

To further make the case—in the last 15 years we’ve entered the era of the modern cutter rig and now even multi-headsail rigs (think of big boats reaching around the world...just like clipper ships of bygone days!) The modern cutter is a twin-head rig with the primary jib being self-tacking or a slightly overlapped jib, coupled with a free flying jib top, reacher, cruising code zero, screacher. Or maybe on a foggy day you could call it a Yankee! But unlike the cutters of the 70s (Westsail 32s, Baba’s and the like) the modern cutter is about speed and comfort and less about double ends and displacement. Light, open, airy, bigger rigs and modern hulls. But once again the sailplan is Marconi, just very updated.

The answer to a Marconi replacement is a “no” at this stage and in part because of the physical limitations of the human body. We have to sail with sails we can handle, either several smaller ones we can physically manage, or we use electrics and hydraulics that allow us to control them. But it’s the ability to shift gears with sail changes, and to reef and furl that are of primary importance to cruisers for safety and comfort. This means single sail systems, hard sails, combination hard/soft sails, inflatable sails...all are not (yet anyway) of a nature that allows them to easily be changed for the above reasons and this just makes them impractical for a couple of people sailing together over short or long distances.

What other small-boat classes do you work with regularly or find especially interesting?

I have a long love of One Design sailing and sailmaking...going back to California and the 505 class and I-14’s, but these days the effort and investment into a particular class is daunting and if you get established in a class your reign may be short-lived as things change year to year, championship to championship. Having said that though, I confess I love the challenge and dedication it takes on the sailmaking end to get O.D. right...construction, design, shapes...it’s detail work that requires testing, thought and implementation. What’s not to like?

I’m working on a set of class sails for a Viper 640 right now—the goal is to get the sails to 95%, test and refine and then bring a really competitive set to market locally. I have done a lot of J-109 sails for the local fleet which is very active...though these bigger sails aren’t quite like the dinghy sails I mentioned elsewhere, they still require the same process...so it’s very rewarding.

We love what you did for us on the Scout and Skate sails with the full battens. Should more of our readers be looking to convert to full-battened sails? What are the tradeoffs?

I don’t really see any negatives with full batten mainsails. The two things that break down sailcloth of all types are UV, and use, and by that I mean everyday tacking, hoisting, going head to wind...all this starts to chip away at the performance of sail. The shape degrades. In a dacron main you see this in the draft moving aft as the breeze builds, which leads to less performance. As sailors we adjust by putting more cunningham on, twisting the leech a bit, flattening the sail if we can...but we are fighting a slow losing battle.

What full battens do is act like shock absorbers...they “dampen” the motion of the sail. Instead of a hard flog at the end of short battens, the sail with full battens doesn’t really flog...the motion of the sail is more wave like. So, less physical beating equals a fabric that is closer to original longer…which means the shape is not adversely affected as soon. This is the most important feature of full battens. Another attribute is ease of handling...as you reef, hoist or douse, the full batten main isn’t so wild, so it makes these maneuvers easier. 

I build “combination” pockets for folks who are on the fence about the benefit of full battens. This is simply a pocket that can be full or partial battened, so you can do either. Virtually everyone ends up with the full after trying it.

The common argument against full battens (primary the lower 2) is that you can’t “read” the luff of the mainsail for trimming. To that I say—if you are looking at the luff of the main to trim on a sloop, you are looking at the wrong part of the sail to trim! The single and almost the only important trim of the main is the leech when sailing upwind. There are times when reaching you might need some other tell tails on the sail, but I’m suspect of that as well. We don’t fit luff tell tails on mainsails for that reason. Now if you’re on a boat with only a mainsail, ok, different story...So for instance, on the Scamp or Laser or any other number of small boats, yes you want some luff tell tails as you don’t have a jib directing flow at the front of the main.

The other “issue” might be weight. I think this might only apply to small racing boats where ounces are at a premium. Most of us don’t sail that way and in fact any cruiser could change the weight of the boat many thousand times more by having full tanks of fuel and water than any battens are going to weigh. Moot point reallly.

Testing an early version of the boomless, full-battened SCOUT sail.

Does it make sense for a small-boat sailor (say someone with a 19-foot homebuilt boat) to contact you guys about a custom set of sails, or do you prefer to work on larger projects or class designs? If you aren’t the right fit and a sailor doesn’t have a local sailmaker, any suggestions on who they should call? 

We do these types of projects...just did a cream gaff main and jib here for a local woodworker who’d built a 16-foot dinghy. It’s really a look-and-see kind of thing...if I can’t make money or have to charge someone too much, then I’m honest about it and say, “Look, we can’t make this work for either of us.” Can’t go wrong with the truth. The problem is locally there are fewer and fewer sailmakers and at a shop rate of $100.00 it’s tough to make small sails competitively. This is why we partnered with Duckworks to create a line of off-the-shelf gaff sails at 4 different sizes, with the idea that a DIY person could look at these and say, “Hey this 65 square-foot main is just about right for my boat, so I just need to build the rig around this sail.” I think this has been fairly successful, but this is one place where a more “generic” sail is applicable. The big problem with DIY boats is that no two exactly alike. The market is too broad, and the numbers to small, for someone to make that kind of investment—so you’re back to custom work.

Ideally a person could find a sailmaker with the right skill sets nearby. This is hard as sailmakers have disappeared and boat owners and builders can be a long way from places that have enough sailing to support a sailmaker. I built I550 sails for a fellow in Montana, which required patience, drawings, pictures and support to see the sails through and built correctly. I love this about the world now: Guy in the middle of Montana contacts me on the East Coast, I work with him to develop the sailplan and sails, we build them in Asia with fabrics from the USA, they return some weeks later via UPS and he takes the boat to the coast and sails. It seems so crazy sometimes!

What’s something you see less-experienced sailors do or not do in terms of how they set their sails that is costing them efficiency or performance?

I can say in all honesty that my job has become more about the education of sailors than ever before. The last 25 years has been this way and the pandemic added more fuel to it as a lot of folks came to sailing with lots of hopes, ideas and expectations of the sport with the pandemic looming overhead.

We live in an era where people come to the sport later in life and didn’t have a lifetime of sailing smaller and then bigger and bigger boats and in the process gaining a lot of skills. So for new sailors it is a big steep curve and one that can’t be jumped in a year of sailing. That’s the reality, and as a professional it’s part of my life to help people navigate this. I often tell new sailors that though I have been doing this since I was seven years old, there is never a day I go sailing that doesn’t afford me the chance to learn something new. This is one of the great things about sailing—the challenge. It keeps us engaged and having fun.

There is a lot of bad sailing out there. To be blunt. With regard to sail trim I like to tell customers, “if it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t.” I also encourage new sailors to read...there are many books on the basics of sail trim and I suggest they create a cheat sheet that might look like this: 

Going upwind: Boom to center-line, leech tension on main enough to get top two leech tell tails flying and not stalled. Snug on the vang at this point, so if I bear away, the trim will be ok…15 knots true wind: put in the first reef. Furl jib two turns….

It all sounds obvious, and for experienced sailors we don’t even think about much of this, but for new sailors there is new language, new sensations, other boats, changing conditions—there is a lot going on when you are on the water. Having a list makes these things easier until they are rote.

Reefing marks on genoas is a perfect example. The whole idea of these is to give you a reference point when reefing. So if it’s blowing 15 say, you know you will reef to the first mark on the genoa. Before you do this you move the jib lead position to the “first” mark on the deck and when you reef, your genoa will be trimmed correctly. You take a morning and you go through the process of setting these marks up in advance and you’ll never have to think again about getting the correct genoa trim when reefed. Simple.

When I give talks about sailing and sailing trim I try and remove the technical side of it. New sailors need to be able to relate this stuff to something more common in their lives, right? If you can use a “real life” example of something to describe why it’s important to flatten out or reef your sail in heavier air, the likelihood of people understanding the concept is much higher. It’s a bit of trickery on my part, but humans need to be able to connect the dots to retain the information and put it to practical use. And those dots might not be about sailing necessarily. At the end of the day, this side of my business has become very rewarding. 

This year a group of sailors and I started a community sailing program with the aim of making sailing affordable and available to anyone in our area. Teaching, mentoring and getting people on the water. This has been incredibly fun (and a heck of a lot of work).

To that end, my last suggestion would be if you are new to sailing—get out on a small boat or dinghy. The lessons you learn about sail trim, balance, and speed on a small boat will come quickly and they will be with you the rest of your sailing life, regardless the size of your future boats.

You’ve sailed all over the place—where is your favorite spot?

Hmm. I’m not sure I have one… as per above, one of the great things about the sport is that it’s different. All the time. So sailing someplace else just underscores this. You might like cruising in Maine…4,000 miles of shoreline, islands. You might not like the fog and cold water…

So for me sailing locations are like sailing: it’s all a bit of a compromise. The upwind boat of your dreams doesn’t work so well as an island hopper in the Caribbean, for instance. 

As a US Sailing judge told me once, “racing is never about being in the moment. You have to look ahead, aft, and at your competition. You have to look ahead and think what’s going to happen in 5 minutes or ten minutes that will affect this race.”
It’s a good axiom for sailing I think. As beautiful as the moments are, like a crazy sunset, tomorrow brings a new passage or a new anchorage or new friends. The conditions will change, the location will change and your sailing mates will change. So as slow and sometimes idyllic as sailing can be, we are always in motion and always looking forward. And tomorrow could well be your new favorite!

Tell us more about the community sailing program.

As I mentioned, it’s pretty simple. Our mission statement is: To make learning to sail and recreational boating affordable and accessible to everyone. 

Pretty big in scope, so to do this we make it affordable to those who can and then our goal is to provide free community sailing instruction to those who might not have the ability or opportunity. 

We started the year with 26 boats donated and over 60 members. Our goal is to make it a financially workable model...pays for itself...so as to relieve us of the need to fund raise. I expect we’ll be over 100 members next year.

Many in the marine industry who I know and work with have been more than kind in either cash or equipment donations, so I am very grateful they understand it’s programs like this that bring new sailors to the sport. They stepped up year-one for us. I’ve yet to meet a supplier, builder or even sailors who don’t recognize the importance of small sailing programs and who won’t generously donate time, money and goods. This is one great side of our sport that often goes unnoticed or unmentioned. •SCA•.

Bob has kindly offered to check-in on the comments section for the next week or so, so if you have any sail-related questions, feel free to leave them below. —Eds

Visit: neilprydesails.com