making a Sunfish sail logo

last summer, I bought the new practice racing sail from APS – similar in construction but much cheaper (~$150) than the officially-sanctioned Sunfish class-legal sail (~$460).  since I’m just a recreational sailor at this point, this is a fine option for me, but if I wanted to participate in Sunfish Class races – I’d have to buy the class-legal sail.  due to a back-order with APS, I didn’t get the sail last year until the summer was basically over, so I didn’t even get to use it, and it has just sat in the nice drawstring bag it came in from APS, stored down in my basement closet for the winter.

since the Sunfish logo is copyrighted, the practice sail from APS (or other places) shouldn’t come with the logo, and mine rightly didn’t – just a plain white sail with a window and an APS sticker.  but, I wanted to have the Sunfish logo, so I decided to make my own.

I bought a piece of adhesive-backed sail insignia cloth from Sailrite – it turns out the minimum size I ordered could probably make enough logos for (4) sails, with logos cut out for both sides of the sail.

I used a template of the Sunfish logo (I found it at the Yahoo Sunfish Sailor Group), traced it onto the insignia cloth, and cut out the first logo.  I then used that logo to trace the mirror image so that the (2) logos would be as similar as possible on each side of the new sail.

note: you’ll see (2) great books I was using to keep the insignia cloth flat – the upper right is the Sunfish Bible (a must have for Sunfish sailors), and the lower right is Start Sailing Right, a great intro book put out by US Sailing and the American Red Cross, written by Sunfish veteran Derrick Fries.

I was also planning to install my sail numbers on the new sail.  I joined the Sunfish Class, and when you join, they assign you a set of unique sail numbers, and the Class even provides (2) sets of numbers for you – one set for each side of the sail.

I laid the sail out flat on my living room floor to get the position of the logo and my Sunfish Class sail numbers correct.  after getting the positions figured out (the orientation of the Sunfish logo was the trickiest part), I moved the sail to the dining room table – a flat, hard surface so that I could then peel off the backing papers, and apply the insignia cloth and sail numbers to each side of the sail.

it was a little difficult to get the logo to sit flat and without any bubbles or wrinkles in it, but the adhesive backing lets you pull the logo back up a bit and re-position it if you need to (I would imagine it will set up more permanently now that I’m finished, though).

all told, it was a pretty simple process – it took me a bit of time to do it, but I was pretty picky and wanted it to look as good as I could get it.

Sailrite also has a pretty good video explaining how to cut out and install the logos to a sail.