When leaving Stromness we noticed something wrong with the jib halyard. With the No. 1 jib, the purchase was block-a-block without tightening the rig. Something had happened to the block at the top of the mast. I had a look and it didn’t look right but I couldn’t see what was wrong. We made do for the trip to Tongue.
Today Alison took a good look with the binoculars and saw that the strop had fallen off the little hound it sits on. It must have happened in Portsoy. It looked OK other than that. It was a calm enough day, so at low water, when we would have maximum shelter from the rocks around the anchorage, Alison agreed to go up the mast.
When Alison has to go up the mast, we usually use the jib halyard, as that has the most purchase. But of course we couldn’t use that to fix this problem! In Portsoy, friends had used the peak halyard. But there were two of them and both likely stronger than I.
We don’t have enough rigid mast hoops at the moment to try climbing the mast with the mainsail up. And the shrouds don’t go nearly high enough up the mast to make fitting rat lines useful.
So it was going to be the peak halyard.
I had wondered how far I could raise Alison using the peak hardener, which has a 4:1 purchase. The answer was ‘not far enough to be useful’. I also tried using the jib sheet winch to haul, but that wasn’t effective either.
Using the main fall of peak halyard, and with Alison climbing and me pushing against the cabin with my foot, I managed to get her up most of the way. Then she asked for the boat hook and I sent that up on a spare halyard. That was enough for her to get the strop back into place.
As usual, we used the topsail halyard as a safety line. It’s its only function at the moment as we don’t have a topsail. Maybe one day. I had to walk back and forward between the cockpit and the fore-deck to keep adjusting it to minimise how far Alison would fall if I lost control of the peak halyard. But it felt really important, as I was pulling that line with nothing to lock it off and if I’d fumbled Alison would have fallen. Luckily, I didn’t fumble. Letting Alison down was much less fraught, as I could use the pin-rail as a turning point. I still had to adjust the safety line a few times, but it was stress-free, at least for the person down below.
Once that important job was done we had a few other things to look at.
We fitted the plastic mats we had bought in Inverness. We’ve put them on the foredeck where the paint has been most scratched by the anchor chain. Hopefully, that will protect the deck from the chain.
We would like to fit something to keep the anchor in place better. We had a think about what and where we might do that. But while anchored isn’t the best time, as we don’t have an anchor to play with!
When the starboard backstay broke yesterday, we fitted a temporary using a new piece of buff braid-on-braid. We aren’t sure what we bought that for, perhaps the bobstay tensioner. It wasn’t finished off very well but it does feel nice and doesn’t stretch, so it’s a good fit for the job, except that being braid, it is hard to splice a thimble in the end. But I couldn’t find any suitable stranded rope on-board so it’s going to stay in use for now. I served the end that I’d just put tape on yesterday and removed the old thimble. Instead of an eye at the end, there is just a bowline round the stainless steel shackle. The crush load will be higher that way. I’ll have a think.
We’ve had problems again this year with the gaff saddle getting stuck on the jib halyard when dropping the main. I’ve tightened the parrel line and replaced the string I’d tied from the parrel line to the gaff to act as a guard. It had worked last year but it wasn’t working and it was very tatty. I used a simple whipping with 6 mm rope as the twine to fill-in the gap between the last parrel bead and the saddle. It looks like it should stop the saddle snagging on the wire rope of the jib halyard and it’s much tidier than what we had before.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment