Boatwork at anchor

The first day the winds were too strong for kayaking in the Polkinghorne’s so we did some boat maintenance.

 

First, we took down the huge 130% (150%?) Genoa on which we had blown the sunbrella stitching on the sail over. The sunbrella stitching was the only thing holding in the leech line (bad design IMHO, the leech line could have been stitched with stitching underneath the sunbrella and thus protected from UV). We replaced the genoa with our working jib. It has a much, much nicer shape when reefed because of its smaller size and we are definitely in reefing strength winds lately.

 

Before we put up the jib I wanted to do a few small improvements that came up in Carol Hasse’s sail repair course when we examined this sail as a class. Primarily, I wanted to put leather chafe gear on the head and the tack which would protect simultaneously from chafing on the metal furling and halyard attachment points hand also protect these two pieces of webbing from UV. Done. I also hand sewed a few places where the sunbrella stitching had rotted off (on this sail as well - *sigh* UV thread anyone?). While doing so I saw that the areas that had ripped were between areas that had already been repaired. At least the previous repairs were in great shape. I probably restitched 10% of the length of the sail, anywhere there was stitching coming loose. Hopefully the sunbrella will stay put for a while.

 

 

Carol was a boat working machine and finished the SSB backstay antenna by terminating the wire inside the hull to the tuner with a ring attachment and he also ran the foil from the tuner amidships.

 

Then he removed our broken hinge from the aft starboard lazarette and attempted to remove the seized pin. However, during this attempt the hinge made a successful escape from the Estrellita foredeck prison and is now free to roam the bottom of the E bay at the Polkinghornes. Any Pretorien owners have an extra upper hinge for that lazarette? I’ll post on the owners’ forum later.

 

The hinge still imprisoned:

 

Finally, he wired the AIS for power and the antenna splitter for it. So we now have AIS reception (non-boaters, this is so we can see large ships and know which direction and speed they are heading so we avoid being crunched). Here you can see our navigation program (NavSim’s SailCruiser), we are the pink dot with the yellow track (we are tacking upwind to Blunden Harbor) and I’ve clicked on a boat so you can see what information that it is broadcasting that we can now see. The little brown circles with M’s are markers we made when we dropped anchor so we could see where we were compared to where our anchor touched ground. The yellow arrow just below the box is the current at the time I took the screen shot.

 

 

All of that he did while I was still stitching a single sail. AND, after that we connected via SSB to email and downloaded some practice weather files, checked in with the Great Northern Boater Net, and listened to the Pacific Seafarers net.

 

At Lewis Cove I cranked Carol half way up the mast and he installed our starboard spreader halyard. Non-boaters, this rope allows us to fly flags on the starboard side of the boat. We fly our Canadian flag from the back but we have smaller flags that get flown on the starboard side like courtesy flags for countries we are visiting (small US flag right now) and also any club flags (aka burgees) for clubs we belong to. We also have some fun flags like a pirate and martini flag (THANKS SARAH & CRAIG) and a huge Wauquiez flag we picked up at a rendezvous.

 

This was supposed to be our relaxing few days of becoming more cruiserly, remember?

 

We’ll get the hang of this retired thing eventually. – Livia

50 47.68 N; 126 55.38 W