Turning a fore-and-aft rig into a yawl
Tord S. Eriksson, Gothernburg, Sweden

This is a two-part article about how my wife Ann-Christine and I made our Klepper XXL into a junkrigged, decked canoe yawl. Later a bit about the sailing of such an odd vessel will follow, and lessons learned so far.

As we live in a flat the only option was a folding kayak, and as I had paddled military Kleppers before, and as I only knew of Kleppers at that time, we bought ourself a brand new Aerius II, with all the goodies we needed, including a Klepper sailing rig, that came with a mast, a main, a jib, a leeboard thwart, and two leeboards, and quite a lot of sundries.

Took a year, or two, before we tried the sail rig, which proved to be less to our liking:

The first time we used it, the claw on the gunter yard unhooked from the mast when we lowered it, and we ended up with a shamble of lines and canvas everywhere. It took quite a while to sort all this out, as it was a bit windy and we were drifting. At last we had everything under control, if not stowed properly.

Had we been forced to lower the sail in an emergency, things would have been tricky indeed, with all that canvas flapping all over the place, the boom and yard banging on our heads and torsos, etcetera. By sharp contrast, the first trial with the junk sail proved it to behave just as we had hoped for: when lowered it simply folded into a nice bundle in the lazy jacks, never fluttering at all – just pointing, even before lowering, like a windvane, downwind when we let go of the sheet. And the mizzen kept us pointing toward the wind as usual, so everything was amazingly simple.

The Klepper leeboards were very short, thus not very effective – some even recommended that you skip them altogether.

Ann-Christine has a balance problem, so an outrigger was added very early on – in fact before the first sailing trip. Often we carry just our simple outrigger, the leeboard and the mizzen. When the weather starts to get nasty this is an excellent way of making a Klepper Aerius II very manouvrable and stable, even in 16 knot winds.

As outriggers don’t grow on trees I realised that I had to make my own. I had an old model flying boat fuselage in the cellar – would that do? The flying boat fuselage, that I made years ago out of expanded polypropylene, would be durable and water-proof, and happened to be close to the right size. My ‘aka,’ the outrigger arm, was made from a piece of rectangular aluminium tube, and the Klepper leeboard thwart was used to hold it to the coaming in a firm grip, with the help of four Klepper J-bolts. For now, that would do.

We used this outrigger almost every time we went paddling, steadily improving it over a period of about three years. Through iterations it was beefed up, the attachment to the aka simplified, and improved, and eventually a watertight wooden box was incorporated that could be ballasted with water, or other kinds of ballast if need be.

A neat thing with having just one outrigger is that you can approach a wharf even better than without one, while having two fixed ones makes things very complicated – wide beaches are recommended, if there is one. Sailing-wise, with one outrigger the boat behaves slightly different depending on the tack, but normally we tried to keep the outrigger flying, so the difference wasn’t that big. You have a more stable craft, and you need not be quite as well organized, as if you sail without one. I soon made an aka-holder, clamped to the mast. This way much of the loads were transferred directly from the mast to the outrigger, and vice versa. Much kinder for the frame, and made the kayak easier to paddle, as the aka now was fitted about a foot farther forward, out of the way of the front paddler.