Paul Larsen was converted to the appeal of deck chutes on a particular day aboard Sir Peter Harrison’s 35m maxi yacht Sojana. “You’d be racing into the leeward mark with another smaller boat, and you know they’d be thinking, ‘We won’t get our kite down until they drop theirs.’ Suddenly our kite disappears in the blink of an eye, we’re around the mark – but when I look back they’re just in a huge, huge mess back there!”

Larsen can’t quite work out why deck chutes haven’t caught on in a bigger way in racing because they’re relatively easy to install and not difficult to use once you’ve got the basic rules of operation sorted.

“It works really well, certainly compared with the alternative,” he says. “It wasn’t so long ago when standard procedure was to have all the crew up on the foredeck clawing cloth over the lifelines, trying to get the kite in. And if the helmsman turned the bow up too soon and the wind got under that kite, then all the little ants got thrown overboard.”

For some, the answer has been top-down snuffers. “But they come with their own problems of getting fouled up, or not going up or not coming down, and having all that drag up in the air isn’t ideal.”
If this has got you wondering more about whether a deck chute might be for you, here are Paul’s five best tips on how to make this system work on your monohull or multihull.

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Get set up

The deck chute setup is not so different from what you see on a small two-man catamaran like a Formula 18 or a Hobie Cat. It’s got a big, rigid hoop – say about 80cm wide – that you lash near the bow in a way that stands upright.

Leading off the hoop is a big sock with a pull-down cable – a retrieval line – running through the middle of it and aft towards one of your primary winches in the cockpit. The retrieval line goes through a couple of rings on the kite so as the line pulls the kite into the chute, the first chunk of kite hits the back of the sock and the fuse (we’ll come to that) snaps and then it pulls on the next section of kite, and so on until the kite is bagged.

Tweak your fuses

A fuse is just a few hitches of whipping twine that are strong enough to do the job of leading the retrieval line and the kite to the back of the sock, and weak enough to snap during the process of retrieval. Depending on your size of kite and how long the sock is on your deck chute, you might get away with just one fuse or maybe need two.

After each kite drop is complete, with practice you can re-whip the fuses in about three minutes. On Allegra we use the deck chute to retrieve the A2 kite, but for the A3 we use a top-down furler.

A deck chute set up for use on the J Class Svea during The Superyacht Cup Palma. Photo: Sailing Energy/The Superyacht Cup

Burn off apparent wind first

When you’re retrieving a kite on your biggest primary winch and it’s spinning super quick, that’s a lot of rope to come flying down in a short space of time. So the halyard has got to be eased at the right time and speed as you don’t want the kite dropping over the bow and flopping into the water. It’s quite a precise manoeuvre at this stage.

If you’re on a fast boat and you put on too much speed the apparent wind goes forward and the spinnaker blows back onto the boat – rather than floating forward to be sucked into the chute mouth. You’re trying to manage the apparent wind all the time so that the kite is dropping in front of the mouth and is scooped up without too much pull on the sail.

Get two thirds away

The better you get at this choreography and timing of the drop and the turn, the more you’ll want to be aiming for a smooth rounding where you’re steaming into the mark at full pace and as you start to turn, the whole thing is disappearing in the radius of the turn.

That’s the expert version though. Make sure that you have at least two thirds of the sail stashed in the sock before the helmsman turns the boat up towards the breeze, especially if it’s more than a few knots of wind.

As much as possible you want to avoid the kite blowing aft beyond the chute mouth and then having to drag it round the corners of the hoop. The deck chute arrangement can be tough on kites, particularly when the crew is getting used to the timing of the manoeuvre, so expect to be taking your sail to the mender’s a bit more often than usual. It’ll also take you a while to work out where best to position the retrieval patches, so there is a bit of trial and error until you fine-tune your technique.

Don’t get sucked in

One last word of warning, don’t get sucked into the chute. Yes, really! People occasionally get sucked into the chute if they stand too close. There’s spinnaker flying everywhere and if you get a wrap of cloth around you then you can end up being grabbed and pulled in.

It’s probably a bit like being eaten by a python, so best advice is not to get too close to its hungry jaws.

While there are potential pitfalls, the big benefit of deck chutes is how quickly you can be ready for the next hoist. Fuses can be reset in a couple of minutes, and then the kite is good to go again without needing to be repacked or rezipped.

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