Kinship was equipped with chain plates for a series drogue when we bought her. This made the decision to build one an easy choice. In reading John Kretschmer’s book “Sailing a Serious Ocean” I came to realise that the series drogue could use some promotion. In the book, John encounters a number of storms where a series drogue could have made the situation a whole lot safer by allowing the crew to go below and wait out the storm. From his stories, his approach of forereaching once running becomes untenable seems to be both dangerous and very demanding on the crew and this has resulted to a number of injuries on boats he has captained.
We built our series drogue from a Sailrite Kit, the process was documented in the Safety First and Finishing the Drogue post in 2015.
The US Coast Guard Report on work with Donald Jordan, designer of the series drogue.
Series Drogue – an Australian site with lots of information, including an HTML version of the US Coastguard Report
Oceanbrake UK manufacturer, “Don Jordan’s Series Drogues for World Wide Delivery”
David and Marcie on Nine of Cups have a really good series of posts on their series drogue:
As we find more materials we will add them here. Over the summer we plan to test deployment and recovery of our drogue, we plan to post the results.
“Jordan Series Drogue” is a Trade Mark in the US held by Ace Sailmakers.
