Cuts & construction
Cringle
A reinforced eye in a sail for a line, hook or shackle.
A cringle is a reinforced eye in the sail. It may be a metal ring, a pressed grommet, or a webbing ring built into a patch. The point is the same: give a line, hook or shackle a strong place to load the cloth.
The corner eyes at the head, tack and clew are cringles, but the word is most often heard around reefs and controls. A reef tack cringle hooks down at the gooseneck; a reef clew cringle is pulled aft and down along the boom. A cunningham also uses a small cringle above the tack.
Because a cringle concentrates load into one point, the patch around it matters as much as the ring itself. A neat metal eye in weak cloth is not a strong fitting.