Ongoing maintenance

Beyond replacing our battery bank and the normal repairs, we've been busy with the normal assortment of boat jobs. We work on projects either a little each day or several full days a week depending on our social schedule, the urgency of the repair, and our travel schedule. We don't write as much about maintenance anymore as we did when we were prepping. As examples of what we're not blogging about, here are a few items we've tackled recently:

Mainsail: We don't know exactly how old our mainsail is. When we bought the boat in 2007 it already had seen some good use. We've put a lot of miles on our boat and the sail has been doing generally well. Good job Neil Pryde. Our Dutchman system, however, causes our sails to flake in exactly the same place, folding in the same creases, on every drop. This makes reefing a delight. However, the mainsail cover, fluttering in the wind, is fluttering against the Dacron in exactly the same spot and has gradually started to chafe at the sail.

We took the main to the beach in Moorea and applied liberal amounts of polyester sail tape to the chafe points but this is going to be a regular maintenance item as we lay down large amounts of miles this year. A new mainsail is likely in our not too distant future and the big dilemma will be whether we go with the Dutchman system again.

Boom hardware: We also recently replaced the sheaves at the end of the boom which were cracked and breaking at the edges. Strangely enough the ones at the masthead look OK.

Dodger: The stitching on our dodger has rotted away. We borrowed a normal sewing machine in Tahiti last year and used PTFE (UV proof) thread (Goretex's Tenara) to resew every area of the dodger that a non industrial machine could handle. Now we are hand stitching the areas that we couldn't do as they fall apart. I spent most of a day recently resewing strataglass windows into the dodger that had rotten stitching.

Foresails: Speaking of rotten stitching, we have redone the entire sunbrella stitching on both of our headsails AND completed small section repairs to the already redone sections in the 7 years we have owned the boat. Crazy, huh?

Varnish: While we don't have brightwork we care to maintain on the outside of the boat we have been putting in the hours touching up sections of the interior. Epifanes Rubbed Effect is what we had used previously and love the matte "hand waxed" look it gives the interior. This is an ongoing project that has recently been interrupted because we are out of varnish.