Alado Nautica USA is a stocking distributor and advertises that, from date of order, one will receive their furler within four days via FedEx.Īlado uses an internal halyard for raising and lowering the sail. Since 2001 the US distributor has been Alado Nautica USA. Their gear is made in Brazil and marketed exclusively through the Internet. The following companies are listed in alphabetical order.Īlado Nautica has been making headsail furlers since 1990. There’s a bewildering number of brands and variations, so we limited our scan to those headsail furlers that use a foil that goes over the headstay, are mechanically driven, and allow some reefing of the jib. Instead, our goal was to try and boil down to a manageable format all the headsail furling products available. We’re not sure that would be possible, even given enough personnel and boats, especially because it’s long-term dependability and customer service that count more than most other factors. We haven’t done hands-on tests of the latest versions of all these furlers.

We collected the market scan information from the company websites and in some situations, phone calls with the company. To this list we added a couple of other manufacturers that may be too new to the US market to have shown up in the survey. When compiling this scan, we started with the manufacturers listed in our survey results. Before we get to the results, here’s a brief market scan to explain what’s available out there now. Some months ago, we asked for your help in evaluating headsail furlers. Even if you don’t change your stripes, you’re likely to find that furlers are more trustworthy than they used to be. There are still plenty of purists around who insist that hanked-on sails are the way to go, mainly for safety reasons, but even if you fall into this category, you might as well read the survey results from fellow owners. Many of the original reasons for furler problems are understood and managed by the manufacturers. However, if the sail was partly furled and jammed, this created panics, in that one could not roll up the sail nor unroll it to drop it on deck. If the sail was fully unrolled when the mechanism jammed, then the jib could be dropped on deck like a hanked-on sail, though with the lowered sail not held captive on the headstay. In the bad old days when headsail furler technology was new, it was common to see someone up on the foredeck trying to wrestle in a jib that refused to properly furl, especially in a blow. The reasons for their widespread use boil down to two advantages: the convenience of “raising and lowering” sails easily from the cockpit, and changing the headsail size by rolling or unrolling the sail.

Headsail furlers, once a novelty scorned by “real” sailors, are everywhere nowadays.

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