Sail Inventory & Condition Register PDFWardrobe, Usage Hours & Shape Record

A sail does not die of depth. It dies of the draft creeping aft, and that starts years before anyone says the sail looks tired.

Ask most owners how many hours are on their mainsail and you get a shrug and an estimate. The estimate is almost always low. Ask them what their genoa cost per hour of use, or which sail to budget for next, and there is no answer at all, not because the question is hard, but because nobody wrote down the two numbers it needs.

This record holds the wardrobe: what each sail is, what it cost, where it actually lives, how many hours it has been set, and the two ratios that show it losing the shape it was cut with.

Model S2 is a usage rate: hours between two season closes, divided by the seasons. It sounds trivial and almost nobody has it. Model S3 takes that rate and the life your loft quoted and tells you how many seasons are left, which turns a new mainsail from a Friday-in-June emergency into a line in next winter's budget.

Model S5 is the sleeper: how far aft the point of maximum depth has moved, as a share of the chord. A stretched sail closes its leech and stops the boat pointing long before it looks worn out, and this is the measurement that catches it.

In the Fillable edition every line has a field. Type the cumulative hours once a season and the chord, depth and draft from your photograph; in Adobe Acrobat Reader, free on computer, iPhone and Android, the life used, the rate per season, the seasons left, the year to budget for, the depth and draft ratios and the cost per hour of every sail calculate themselves. The Pencil & Print edition is ruled for handwriting in GoodNotes or Notability, or on paper with the sail spread out on the pontoon. Both come in A4 and US Letter and work offline.

No page here tells you when a sail is finished, whether a recut is worth it, or whether a repair is economic. Those judgements are made with the sail flat on a loft floor by somebody who has seen a thousand of them. Part IV is split for exactly that reason: twenty lines for what you can see, feel and photograph, and a separate fourteen recording what a loft assessed, what they found and what they recommended, with their name against it.

The inventory has a field for where each sail is stowed, in words a stranger could follow. “Forepeak, port side, third bag from the bulkhead” beats “forepeak” by an hour on the morning you need the storm jib, in the dark, with somebody else's crew aboard.

The club and offshore racer. Shape is your whole reason for buying this. Draft position measured season on season shows which sail has moved furthest from its own first measurement, before the first start rather than after the third race, and the hours column shows whether it was the sail or the year. What that means for the sail is your sailmaker's call. Measure the same way every time and record the method once, because a change of method looks exactly like a change of shape.

The cruising owner with a dacron wardrobe and a furler. Your sails do not go off, they wear out, and the two things need different records. Hours and cost per hour are your numbers. A genoa that has done ten seasons on a furler has spent most of its life partly rolled in sunlight, which is a different kind of life from ten seasons of being hoisted and bagged, and the usage column is what makes that visible.

The owner heading offshore. The stowage column stops being housekeeping and becomes safety. You will want the storm jib at night, heeled, with someone who has never been aboard before doing the finding. Write the location as a stranger would need to read it.

The shared, syndicate or chartered boat. Hours accumulate under four different hands and nobody logs them, so the wardrobe is always older than anyone thinks. One cumulative hours spread, closed at the end of each season by whoever was last aboard, is the only version of this that survives multiple owners.

The owner about to sell. A wardrobe with no history is valued as an old one, and a buyer is right to do that. Hours, year and loft assessments in one place move the conversation from what the sails look like to what they have actually done.

The Standing Rigging Record covers what holds the mast up. This one covers what drives the boat. They share a reference-page method and a season rhythm, and together they are the complete paper history of everything above deck, which is the half of a boat a surveyor can least easily reconstruct from an afternoon's inspection.

This document records, structures and compares figures that you supply. It publishes no service life, no wind range, no draft depth, no replacement interval and no threshold at which a sail should be retired, and it reaches no conclusion about any sail.

It is not a sail assessment, not a trimming guide and not sailmaking advice. Those judgements belong to a qualified sailmaker working with the sail in front of them.

Instant download. Your links appear on screen the moment payment clears, and a copy arrives by email, usually within a few minutes. They do not expire.

2026 Edition, Revision 2.1, AML-RIG-2026-02. Apex Marine Labs designs the organisational process behind good seamanship. Our documents record and organise; they do not replace a certified marine survey, a sail assessment, or a qualified sailmaker.