The bosun and I set off down to Fambridge mid-morning on Friday armed with ladders, tape measures and sail measurement forms. It was fairly windy but at least the rain held off whilst we set about the job of measuring up for the new sails ...
Of course, if we paid a premium price the sail loft would come out and do this for us but we want the maximum discount so it's a DIY job.
One area of close examination was the existing arrangement at the base of the forestay and I was pleased to find that my cunning plan of hoiking the reefing drum up the stay by the length of a bottle screw is both technically feasible and will achieve what I want to achieve, to wit being able to launch and recover the anchor off the bow roller.
In fact, so easy will it be to launch and recover the anchor over the bow roller I can do it one handed! Jane should have no problems either and it'll be a vast improvement over having to heave the anchor onto and off the deck through the tight gap between the forestay and the pulpit rail every single time we want to use it.
With the measurements taken, I set about removing the blanking cap from the log impeller tube, a task I forgot to carry out before leaving the boat for the winter. The plan had been to leave the cap off so that the well under the cockpit floor would drain through the skin fitting given that with no batteries on board the bilge pump would be out of action.
Needless to say, with all the rain we've been having, the well was all but full to the brim with smelly foul water. Oh well, it's a dirty job but somebody has to do it so I rolled up my sleeves, and, grimacing more than a bit with the cold and general horrible-ness of it, tried to unscrew the cap. Would it shift? Would it hell!
Nothing for it but to pump the well dry with the manual pump and investigate. Sod of a job but it got there after a good ten minutes of pumping. Still no joy shifting the damn cap though, it's going to need a set of grips on it to shift it. So for now, we'll just have to hope that the well doesn't overflow into the cabin (it shouldn't anyway) before the next time we get down to the boat - that's not planned to be until mid-March but if this wet weather carries on it might have to be sooner.
Whilst I cleaned up and sorted out, Glen offloaded the remaining galley stores into a crate to go in the car. I'd been in two minds about whether to fetch it all off and I'd made them up to do so! All that remained to do was to shut the boat back up again and make her snug for another few weeks slumbering in the yard.
We'd contemplated stopping down for the night but it was blowing half a gale, wet and windy to say the least, and we'd have had to sort the boat out for an overnight and then re-winterise her again. Given that it was barely half past two in the afternoon it just didn't seem worth it so we repaired to the pub for a late lunch and a pint (of shandy in my case, or two in the bosuns'!) before heading home.
After much head scratching and cogitation over the measurements, I've worked out what I think it should all be and fired the information off to the sail loft to finalise the sizes and the price. The main and genoa we're having for definite, not sure yet whether we can go the whole hog and order a cruising chute as well but I'm hoping to do so!
No comments:
Post a Comment