A sailing vessel's rig is its arrangement of masts, sails and rigging. Examples include a schooner rig, cutter rig, junk rig, etc. A rig may be broadly categorized as "fore-and-aft", "square", or a combination of both. Within the fore-and-aft category there is a variety of triangular and quadrilateral sail shapes. Spars or battens may be used to help shape a given kind of sail. Each rig may be described with a sail plan—formally, a drawing of a vessel, viewed from the side. Modern examples of single-person sailing craft, such as windsurfers, iceboats, and land-sailing craft, typically have uncomplicated rigs with a single sail on a mast with a boom.
Introduction In the English language, ships were usually described, until the end of the eighteenth century, in terms of their type of hull design. Using the type of rig as the main type identifier for a vessel became common only in the nineteenth century. This is illustrated by the terminology for ships in the large fleet of colliers that traded to London from the coal ports of the Northeast of England (of which HMS Endeavour was a well-known example). Many of these full-rigged ships (square rigged on all of three masts) had the hull type "bark" – another common classification was "cat". In the second half of the eighteenth century, the square sails on the mizzen were often eliminated. The resulting rig acquired the name of the hull type: initially as "bark" and soon as "barque". This explains the Royal Navy's description of Endeavour as a "cat-built bark".
Design Each rig may be described with a sail plan—a drawing of a vessel, viewed from the side, depicting its sails, the spars that carry them and some of the rigging that supports the rig. By extension, "sail plan" describes the arrangement of sails on a vessel. A well-designed sail plan should be balanced, requiring only light forces on the helm to keep the sailing craft on course. The fore-and-aft center of effort on a sail plan is usually slightly behind the center of resistance of the hull, so that the sailing craft will tend to turn into the wind if the helm is unattended. The height of the sail plan's center of effort above the surface is limited by the sailing craft's ability to avoid capsize, which is a function of its hull shape, ballast, or hull spacing (in the case of catamarans and trimarans).
Types of rig Fore-and-aft rig features sails that run fore and aft (along the length of the sailing craft), controlled by lines called "sheets", that changes sides, as the bow passes through the wind from one side of the craft to the other. Fore-and-aft rig variants include: Bermuda rig (also known as a Marconi rig) features a three-sided mainsail. Gaff rig features a four-sided mainsail with the upper edge made fast to a spar called a gaff. Spritsail rig features a four-sided mainsail with the aft upper corner supported by a diagonal spar, called a sprit, whose lower end meets the mast near the foot of the sail. Lateen rig features a three-sided sail set on a long yard, mounted at an angle on the mast and running in a fore-and-aft direction. Crab claw sail (also known as Oceanic sprit or Oceanic lateen) features a three-sided sail with spars on both the foot and the head. It's either mastless, supported by a "prop", or mounted on removable or fixed masts. Tanja sail (also known as canted square/rectangular sail, balance lugsail, or boomed lugsail) features a four-sided sail with spars on both the foot and the head. It's mounted on removable or fixed masts. A square rigged vessel has at least one square rigged mast, a term that denotes a mast where square sails can be set at all levels of the mast. Other masts on the same vessel may be fore-and-aft rigged, giving, for example, a barque. It is common for fully square rigged vessels to include some fore and aft sails, such as staysails and jibs. A vessel which is not square rigged, such as a topsail schooner, may still use square sails, but not in locations that define the ship as a square rigger.Square sails are generally suspended from yards which, when at rest, are at right angles ("square") to the centre-line of the vessel. This differentiates them from fore-and-aft sails, which are aligned along the centre-line when at rest. Operationally, this means that square sails always present the same surface of the sail to the wind when propelling a vessel forward: they have a front and a back. Fore-and-aft sails can have either of their surfaces facing the wind when in use. Hence either vertical edge of a square sail may be the front (when sailing to windward) but fore-and-aft sails always have the same vertical edge at the front.
Types of sail Each form of rig requires its own type of sails. Among them are:
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