You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days?
While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in about 3 months. Spindle spinning is very portable and something a woman would do during pretty much every spare moment when her hands were not busy doing something else. Making sails would have been a drop in the bucket when it came to yarn consumption since she also had to make all the clothes and cloth for other uses like sacking, ticking, blankets, etc.
“The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier.”
I think you can call that plucking. People use tools to pluck grapes, too.
And 100 a day without a powered tool? Is that realistic?
Plucking is the ancient form of sheering. You literally pull the hair off the sheep by hand. You aren't yanking it out by the roots, the shaft generally broke rather than the root put out of the skin, but I doubt the sheep enjoyed the process. In short: gathering wool from sheep was very different before ready acess to steel shears.
"Before the invention of shears, the sheep were plucked or “rooed”, a Scandinavian word for plucking, and this tradition was still carried out on the Shetland Island until about forty years ago."
If you have ever encountered a sheep's fleece you would realize that it's not possible to pluck. It's a solid mat. It's not hair. Even paleolithic people had sharp knives and scrapers capable of shearing a fleece, so it's not stretch to imagine iron age people having equipment at least as good as their ancestors from 25000 years prior.
100 sheep per day ... with a flat blade since you don't have sheers yet ... while doing all the other chores required to maintain yourself ... accounting for the time it takes for the sheep to grow a coat long enough to sheer in the first place?
You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days?
While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in about 3 months. Spindle spinning is very portable and something a woman would do during pretty much every spare moment when her hands were not busy doing something else. Making sails would have been a drop in the bucket when it came to yarn consumption since she also had to make all the clothes and cloth for other uses like sacking, ticking, blankets, etc.