The boat sails very well.
All the most important things are in working order. I only used the mainsail, since it was the
first day on the new lake with the new boat and winds were steady at 15mph and
gusting to 30mph. I did a test run early
in the morning, then was able to take Brycen for an uneventful sail in the
afternoon. The "bright work"
needs work...basically the teak backrests, and tiller need mending and
refinishing, and a couple of cracks in the fiberglass in non-structural
areas. Of course once you have a certain
boat. You immediately realize what you don't have as well......first thing that
comes to mind is a boom stay. When I
first rigged the boom I was using the halyard as a aft boom stay because other
boats had one...of course then I couldn't figure out how to raise my
mainsail....well, being a "dingy", I don't have an aft boom stay, I
in fact have a halyard. That took a
while to make sense out of. The
unfortunate part is of course for anyone in the cockpit while the mainsail is
down, is basically covered up by a sail....
The little clips that fit into the mast track are
annoying. Raising the sail requires that I go forward and feed the clips into
the track carefully, while the 20mph winds push the sail w/battons past the
side stays and I have to lower the sail to straighten in and raise it
again. Also, "dropping the
sail", is more of a "pulling the sail down" since the little
clips are not exactly ball-bearing-like in the track. But once up and cleated, the sail is fine.
Now the mainsheet....it's got pulleys mounted to the deck
and the mainsheet attaches to another pulley system to assist with travel. But in talking to by boatyard neighbor,
clearly the mainsheet rigging includes more than the original option, which did
not account for an outboard angled up out of the water. So using the deck mounted pulleys to attach
the mainsheet as-is, causes the mainsheet to get caught up on the motor
housing. I've seen at least one solution
where you simply move the cleats( or pulleys) forward on the deck to be free of
the outboard.
I realized now ( after talking to the owner of the local
sailboat shop) why I has such a hell of a time pinning the mast stays into
place: the original boat did not use a tabernacle. The mast was slotted through
the deck all the way to the floor of the boat and then seated into a
shackle. When the tabernacle was
installed, a stub of the lower mast is cutoff, and the tabernacle gets mounted
to it. In my case, the tabernacle on top
of the mast stub adds about 2" of overall mast height, and unless you add
length( or turnbuckles) to the stays, they are a wee bit short. Theoretically
this setup doesn't need turnbuckles because at the foot of the mast stub is a
large donut looking round nut on a 1" screw. I know from reading that the idea is use the
donut screw to lower the tabernacle, step and stay the mast, then use the donut
thing to raise the mast up a bit thus tightening all the stays at the same
time. But, when your donut screw thing has seen 20 years of salt water, and
obviously looks like it has never been turned, and you don't have the very
large "donut wrench" to fit onto it, sometimes things are better left
alone. so for the moment, the mast will
stay up and the boat will not travel anywhere. At some point I will replace the
"ladder" type fitting with turnbuckles so that the mast can easily be
stepped and the boat brought to VT, etc.
but for the moment, given what I had to do in order to get the all the
stays pinned, the mast is *not* coming down unless it falls down. Speaking of which, my neighbor checked the
tension on the side stays and felt that they were ok, as-in, not going to rip
the fittings out of the deck because they're too taught. Plus, adding turnbuckles, according to the
boat shop guy, adds 2-4" inches of length, which means wither shortening
the stays, or drilling the upper mast mounts higher up on the mast( his
recommendation, not sure if he figures I'd have him do it, or because
shortening the cable stays is a bit harder than adjusting a dog-run between 2
trees).
So the boat works as-is. The engine is reliable. Brycen had a good first sail. There is some cosmetic work, some mild repair
work, and some more complex rigging changes if I feel like it. Highest priority is adjusting the mainsheet
fittings so it doesn't catch on the motor. I believe there is a way to do this
without moving any deck hardware.
Apart from all that, when underway, I like the way the
boat sails. Having only ever sailed a
sunfish, there are a couple things I've learned about "bigger" boats,
eg. You really need to be moving at a decent speed before tacking, then tack
hard, or the wind will just push the boat sideways into the wind.
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