Sail Washing
To keep your sails in tip-top shape and avoid the spread of mildew and other air-born fungicides you should have your sails washed and checked over annually. Sails that are washed and maintained on an annual basis stay in better shape and last longer than those that are not.
Sail Maintenence
There are many levels of annual washing/maintenance that you may choose to employ with your sailmaker. At Sailmaking Support Systems we offer 3 levels of non-agitated washing service. We utilize a large tub for a soaking style wash as opposed to an agitated/machine style wash. The advantage to this is that we are able to treat the sails more gingerly and not cause as much breakdown as with an agitated wash. If you are going to take the trouble to flake and/or roll your sails, it doesn’t make much sense to then “stuff” them into a machine for the washing that is still necessary.
We offer four levels of sail washing: Standard Wash, Racing Rinse, Intensive Wash, and Surface Cleaning.
Our Sail Washes
Standard Wash Our Standard wash consists of soaking the sails overnight, in a diluted solution of water, soap, and bleach. The solutions are all in sufficient levels to clean and treat the sails, but not so much to harm any sail fabrics. After the overnight soak, the sails are "drip dried" for the day, and then hung for the night to dry.
Racing Rinse This is our wash level reserved primarily for racing laminates and nylon sails. We utilize a weaker solution and dip the sails in the wash bin for about an hour, after which they are dried in the normal way.
Intensive Wash With the intensive wash we are able to remove a very large percentage of mildew, even if the sails have not been washed for a couple of seasons. We use a more concentrated solution and, depending on the severity of the surface grime and topical mildew, may leave the sails in the wash bin for an extended period of time. Sometimes we leave the sails in for an additional 24 hours. Our intensive cleaning process can take some severely mildewed sails and make them look good as almost new, with no harm to woven or laminated sail fabrics.
Surface Cleaning For some sails, especially laminates with extreme surface mildew and dirt, we offer a concentrated spray/wet vac topical cleaning method. The concentration though stronger than our intensive wash, proves totally safe as the sails are never really submerged. The solution is sprayed on and then vacuumed up. Once the vacuuming is complete the sails are hang dried in the normal manner.
