Editing Proa (section)

===Sail rigs===
One of the issues Western designers have with the proa is the need to manipulate the sail when shunting. Even Munroe's early sails discarded the curved yards of the traditional crabclaw for the more familiar straight yards of the lateen and lug sails. Munroe's designs likely lacked the tilting mast because he was unaware of it, but many designers since have used a fixed mast, and provided some other way of adjusting the center of effort.  Most sailboats are designed with the center of effort of the sails slightly ahead of the center of area of the underwater plane; this difference is called "lead."  In a proa hull, and in all fore and aft symmetric foils, the center of resistance is not at or even near the center of the boat, it is well forward of the geometric center of area. Thus the center of effort of the sails needs to also be well forward, or at least needs to have a sail which is well forward which can be sheeted in to start the boat moving, allowing the rudders to bite and keep the boat from heading up when the entire sail area is sheeted in.  Jzero, for example, and all of Russell Brown's other designs, use a [[sloop]] rig and hoist a jib on whichever end is the current "bow". Other designs use a schooner rig for the same effect.

One of the more practical rigs for small proas was invented by [[Euell Gibbons]] around 1950 for a small, single handed proa. This rig was a loose footed lateen sail hung from a centered mast. The sail was symmetric across the yard, and to shunt, what was previously the top end of the yard was lowered and became the bottom end, reversing the direction of the sail. Proa enthusiast [[Gary Dierking]] modified this design further, using a curved yard and a boom perpendicular to the yard. This allows a greater control of the sail shape than the traditional Gibbons rig, while retaining the simple shunting method, and is often referred to as the [[Gibbons/Dierking rig]].