If the batten deal is what's commonly done on sports boats, I don't see how you could compromise the rig. The normal arrangement is to
place a batten fore/aft the length of the crane, and extending aft some distance. (A few feet, in general) The batten has a cotter ring (middling heavy) which is put through a hole drilled a short way into the batten (At the extreme aft end) You then lead the backstay off the crane, through the cotter ring and down to the normal attach point. (The standard split tail on the J/30, one rather assumes)
With the backstay off, the batten stays straight, pulling the backstay aft and out past the roach of the main. As you load up the backstay, the batten bends, and the backstay loads up normally. Once you've put any degree of tension on the backstay, the backstay is in normal alignment, and the batten's bent, with the full load merely running past the cotter ring.
Having seen this on the Melges-24, and other sport boats, I've been tempted to try it out. Given that you never end up with a discontigous backstay, I fail to see it as a rig compromising issue. The major reason I haven't done it yet is that seems to me that it's going to be much harder to replace a failed batten on a J/30 thana melges-24. (When you break a batten in the rigs, in the worst case, you end up with the broken batten in an annoying place. You can easily cut it free and let the portion with the cotter ring slide down the backstay. Putting a new batten on, in theory, wouldn't be too hard, but I don't know that I want someone up the rig with the backstay off. (Which is needed, at some point, when it's time to re-rig the backstay onto the replacement batten.)
- David
