I have seen different ways of rigging a whisker pole. I use four lines. The pole is attached to the mast at a the same height as the clew of the sail. The end of the pole is held parallel to the deck using a spinnaker halyard (red). The jib sheet passes through the claw of the pole (green). Two preventers are attached to the pole. The aft preventer (black) runs through a block on the deck to the staysail wench and it all owes me to select the TWA to present the sail to the wind. The spinnaker tack line which is attached to the end of the pole (yellow) passes through a block on the bow sprit and then back to the lazy jib wench. This preventer keeps the poke from running into the lower shroud (steel cable in photo). This system is useful in light winds when the foresail would “bump” (sometimes violently) as the boat is rocked by the waves. This happens because the foresail is temporarily in the shadow of the mainsail. The pole is also sometimes used for wing-on-wing sailing downwind (running). However, I find unless the seas are calm, my boat tends to roll severely when sailing wing-on-wing. It takes me about 20m to set up the pole single-handed, because I need to make several trips back and forth to set up lines. As a consequence, I do not use a pole unless I believe it is going to be up a long time. In this case it was been up 24h and will probably be up 12 more.
Sent from my iPhone