Well, the house is done, or at least everything that needs to be done before this fall. In fact when I look outside today, I should find little grass seedlings popping out of the topsoil on the last piece of lawn that we seeded. I even cut the grass last night for the first time, at least on the parts where the grass was tall enough. So that means all my focus can now be put to the boat. The problem is that I am having a hard time shifting gears from house to boat.
We did go to the boat for a few hours yesterday though. Finished up the rigging, tightened it up, and bent on the sails. The new sails look nice. The staysail looks a little large, but I'll check that out a little later.
This is an older pic from when we stood up the mast, but never got on the blog. Serena insisted on taking this one so that I wouldn't forget. I spent about an hour pounding on the pin for the backstay before I finally got it to let go. Then I had to take a drill to it to ream out the hole. It was like someone had glued it in, but I think it was just years of crud buildup. The pin was completely mangled and accidentally fell in the drink on purpose.
So yesterday I started out by attaching the rogue backstay. I had to cut the extension to the right size, after all, I only needed an inch. Then installed it. Problem was that the backstay was bent around the pushpit bar. I can tell by the scratches on the bar that it has been like that for a while, but with the extension, it was that much worse. So I had to cut out the bar. I will have to get a new piece, and some fittings, then put it back in. There is no strength in the pushpit without this bar. As far as I can tell, the pushpit has been bent a few times, and is not longer where it should be. Oh well, into ones life a little rain must fall.
Then I managed to get the rig tightened up using my handy dandy tension gauge. I set the backstay to 750 lbs and the shrouds to 500 lbs. I'll try that out sailing and then adjust as required. It should put about 850 or so on the roller furler foil, but I'm not interested in do the math.
Our new mainsail. So excited.
We got the boom attached. But we were missing the shackle that attaches the mainsail to the mast. I think I left it on the old sail, which I sold to another Bayfield owner in our club. I'll have to get that back, or find a replacement. The boom isn't rigged though. We added an extension to it, but it hasn't been properly attached or setup yet. Thursdays job maybe! I think I will have to grease the slides a little, as the sail didn't want to come down on its own. New slides I guess. It went up really smooth though.
Then we put the furling yankee on. Silly me, when I put the sail on, i didn't check how much rope was on the furling drum, and some had come unraveled during storage, so I had to manually feed about 8 turns into the drum so that it had enough length to furl the damn sail. Pain in my, @$$. But we got her up, furler works good.
Then the staysail. This sail seems bigger than I remember, but it measures the same. It hoisted nice, but with the new stiff/heavy fabric, there was no way it was going to fit in the bag, so I will need to make a new bag here, very soon. Maybe this weekend. I also realized that the old staysail had a wire extension from the tack to the deck, to lift it just a foot, and keep it off of the deck. So I need to get one of those made up. Also, the usual way of attaching the sheets won't work, because we need to be able to move them to the reef points. The only thing that bothers me about that is the steel shackle that will be flying around the deck looking for my head. I'll figure something out, I've dealt with the flying shackles before.
So, all that is left is to finish rigging the boom. Install all of the reef ties for the main and staysail. Make a bag for the staysail, add the wire extension for the staysail, and set up the mainsail reefing lines. I will also need to put an anchor on the boat to be legal, and then we can sail. I'll worry about the lazyjacks at a later date. My goal at the moment is to make the boat sailable, then I can move on to liveable.
And here is the before and after pictures of the life ring. I went with the expensive floating rope instead of the crappy poly. It helps having a rope manufacture right here in town. I was tempted to put SS Minnow on the life ring, but not only is that not the name of the boat, but I thought I might be tempting fate a little too much.
Oh well, onward and upward. Today is in the shop working on boat projects, and taking it easy.
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