And on to the rigging ...

OK, that's another job ticked off the list

Just spoke to Dave the Rigger at DRS and arranged for him to have a look at Brigantia and then come out in March to sort out a few things for us

First and most important job being to shorten the forestay and add a bottle screw beneath the furling drum (I seem to recall blogging about this before but briefly it will have the twin advantage of providing some adjustment of the forestay length and, crucially, lifting the furling drum sufficiently clear of the bow roller to allow the anchor to be launched and recovered on the roller instead of having to be manhandled between the genoa and the pulpit rail all the time)

Second job is to shorten up the aft lowers and replace the old style bronze adjusters with modern bottle screws to match the rest of the rig

And last but not least a general rig check and setup

Dunno what it's all going to cost yet but hopefully it shouldn't be silly money ... what AM I saying? It's boating, it's ALL silly money fer crissakes!!!

More sails

Or one more sail to be precise

After much cogitation, I couldn't figure out a simple way around making a stack pack setup work with our reefing arrangements (the reefing lines would conflict with the permanent sail cover) and neither could Crusader

So I've decided to drop that idea and stick with a conventional sail cover. Since Crusader will make me a nice shiny new one to measure for slightly less than an off-the-shelf one size doesn't quite fit anything stock cover, I've added that to the order

And having saved (!) myself £200, I decided in consultation with the Purser to go ahead and order the cruising chute as well. We'll try it without a snuffer for this season and see how we go (that's another £150 "saved" - I can save money easy, me)

The chute was always a fairly crucial element of the cunning plan as it was intended to make up for the loss of sail area incurred by cutting the genoa from a 155% to a 140%.

So now I'm wondering whether I can get away with spending the money I've "saved" on a decent whisker pole? :D

One step forwards ...

Well that's the new sails ordered

But now I'm back to having to make yet MORE decisions!

You see, we desperately need a new mainsail cover 'cos we can hardly cover up the nice new mainsail with a ratty old patched up fading and disintegrating piece of dishcloth (and I'm being quite generous about the existing cover)

But the agony of deciding between a very reasonable £150 for a made to measure cover (compared favourably with an off the shelf job) and the convenience of a stack pack system complete with lazy jacks and zip up cover for £350

It's one of those "I know I'll be wishing I'd bought it if I don't" jobs and I've been seriously contemplating fitting a Barton lazy jack setup anyway* which'd be getting on for £100 of the extra £200

Hmmm

* Lazy jacks would have made my life a whole lot easier when we got clobbered off Lowestoft last summer 'cos we wouldn't have had the mainsail out of control and flogging in the howling wind for ages

I'll get these sails ordered yet ...

Just fired off yet another email to Crusader Sails in what I think will be the final exchange of messages working out the optimum compromise between maximising the sail area and minimising the problems we've been having with overly large sails!

All that remains now is for me to check the final (hopefully!) quote and pay the deposit and they'll no doubt rush to it with scissors and palm and needles to make us our wonderful new sails. Or at least so I fondly hope.

I suppose the reality is that somebody will spend a couple of minutes on the computer tweaking an existing drawing to the correct dimensions. That data will then be fed into a CNC cutting machine to slice the correctly shaped panels from a roll of sailcloth and then the whole shebang will be fed through a fancy modern industrial sewing station and in no time at all out of the other end will pop a sail.

The technology may impress but it doesn't have the romance really does it?

A new article ...

A bit of a work in progress which I will expand as we explore deeper and further afield but a review of the places we've been so far and the places we hope to go can now be found in the article on Cruising the East Coast

Oh and there's a spiffing map too. Drew it myself I did. I'm rather proud of it! Can you tell? :)

How could I be so stupid?

There are days when I really do wonder what I've got between my ears!

I've been bemoaning our lack of upwind performance when reefed and whilst it goes without saying that a 155% genoa with no foam luff which is somewhat tired to boot isn't going to be much use in those circumstances, the total lack of any forward drive at all has been a puzzle

Not any more <sigh>

Sheet leads you fool Bru! It's worse than just not being able to budge the genoa track sliders, when reefed down to the equivalent of a 100% jib, we ought to be using the handy fixed sheet lead bullseye much further forward down the side deck.

I discovered this gem of knowledge whilst working out for replacing the existing crappy tracks and cars with nice shiny new ones. I was sort of aware that we wouldn't be getting the best out of the sail without adjusting the sheet lead but hadn't realised just HOW far forward it needed to go!

Ho hum :)

Blog changes and 2012 Summer Cruise news

Some changes to the blog template which I was getting bored with! Quite like the new visuals, let me know if you don't. Not that I'll do anything about it, I just like to know that I've annoyed people!!

Jesting apart, I've spent most of the day editing the daily posts on the 2012 Summer Cruise sorting out typos, consolidating the text, adding photos and, significantly, adding the daily track log charts

Start, if you're interested, with Day 1 and follow the "Newer Post" link at the bottom of the page to step forwards through each day

I may get around to carrying out a similar exercise on other posts for 2012 in due course

Oh and new longer posts now will start with a summary paragraph or two and then jump link to a seperate page to avoid the turgidly long main page