“We can’t make cloth,” says sailmaker Dayle Tognoni Ward of Traditional Rigging. “That’s where we hold the line.” Exactly duplicating 17th-century cloth would be prohibitively expensive.

Wrangling cloth up to 13 layers deep, she hammers an awl with a mallet to make a constellation of holes. These will be used to attach a rope around the edge of the sail, like a kind of fringe.

North Cloth Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. was the latest entity to come under the North Sails Sri Lanka Group, when the factory was ceremoniously inaugurated by Rishard Badiudeen, Minister of Industry and ...