The other day when we went out for another test sail in 25-30 knots we had a little difficulty rolling out the mainsail from inside the mast. This was never an issue on Jay Jay where I could roll out the sail by hand. On Tumi I needed to use the winch which wasn't right. The furling system needs to run smoothly. I had noticed that there was quite a rake in the mast (it bends towards the stern at the top of the mast) which I suspected was causing the problem. You can't have a straight pole rotating smoothly in a bent casing, and I reckoned this was causing the problem.
The riggers were out yesterday to look at it, and after some discussion with them they re-tuned and re-tensioned the rigging so that we have a straighter mast now and it seems to allow the furling mechanism to run freely. We will test it out for ourselves in the next couple of days. It seems to me that Jeanneau don't expect too many in-mast furling systems to be sold, and their rig was primarily designed for slab reefing where the sail is dropped onto the boom and secured to reduce the sail area. They need to have this information fed back to them as they might want to take it into consideration for the future. We will be talking to Richard, our Jeanneau dealer about it so he can let them know.