Sewing our foredeck bag.

When we decided to remove our furler and switch to a hank-on jib we knew that one of the things we would need to do is get a foredeck bag.  The foredeck bag is attached to the headstay and allows you to keep the sail hanked on when not in use.  When you’re finished sailing, simply drop the headsail, place it in the bag, and zip it up.  You can use the jib halyard to raise the bag off of the deck, and there the sail sits waiting until you need it again.

We could have purchased one, but as is typical with canvas work it was much cheaper to order a kit from Sailrite, saving us at least $40 compared to a pre-made bag.  Using their handy-dandy YouTube video along with the written instructions that came with the kit, this actually turned out to be a very easy project.

The kit came with pre-patterned Sunbrella, making it simple to use the hot knife to cut the shapes I needed.  Then I sewed on Dacron patches to keep the bag from chafing where it’s attached to the stay:

A webbing loop for attaching the halyard was sewn onto the round bottom of the bag, and then I sewed the zippers on:

The webbing loop is on the top on the picture on the left, and there is a zipper on both sides in the picture on the right.

After that all I had to do was sew the round bottom onto the bag, sew the long ends together, and voila!  A foredeck bag for our jib:

Not shown in the picture is the bungee cord we use to strap the bag to the side of our bow pulpit when we’re done sailing for the day.  This was actually a very simple sewing project, taking only a few hours to complete.  It was definitely worth the savings.  Of course since then we’ve decided to switch our canvas color to silver so I’ll be making another one, but we’ll be able to use this bag as a sail bag for our smaller jib so it won’t have gone to waste.