Rigging the chute amongst other things ...

And the shopping goes on ... I just can't stop myself!

Having sorted out the antifoul from the specialists suppliers and the new sails from Crusader, today it's time to hit the general chandleries and spread some hard earned around my favourite online shopping experiences

The main focus of attention is getting the rig sorting out finished off - the mainsail reefing is still a bit of a shambles, we've the new cruising chute to fly and the kicking strap needs replacing amongst other things.

So let's get busy with the mouse and start clicking on those "BUY ME" icons ...

First order of business is some odds and ends in the way of books and things I've been meaning to get for a while and/or need for the new season.

Reeds PBO Small Craft Almanac 2013 is an annual purchase. Not, in truth, that it gets referred to all that much but it does contain lots of utterly essential information that you can't do without but never actually seem to need! Seriously though, this is the bible if you need to find out the telephone number of a coastguard station or the radio channel for a weather forecast or work out the tide times for somewhere you hadn't planned on going when you can't get a signal on the bat-phone and can't use that oh so useful tide app.

Anyway, I won't be without a copy so in the basket it goes ...

Now, annoyingly, my next purchases isn't available from my preferred chandler so it's off to web site #2 to purchase a copy of Roger Gaspar's Crossing the Thames Estuary. II haven't bothered buying one before as all our trips have been parallel with the shoals and sandbanks but this year we are, of course, planning on heading to the South Coast and this book provides a fairly comprehensive set of pre-planned and timed routes for getting across the tricky bits. Not cheap but worth it ...

Back to site #1 and this is something I've been meaning to sort out ever since we fitted the new DSC VHF and haven't done - a new set of destructions on how to make a mayday call

Been playing around on the printer with limited success and these pre-printed laminated cards are not what you'd call expensive so let's have one in the basket and see if it's what we want

If it isn't, it'll be back to the drawing board I guess

And the next order of business is ... a saloon / cockpit table. I've detailed this cunning plan in earlier posts so all I need say here is that I've ordered the bits! This comprises a 600mm aluminium table leg, a surface mount "base" to go on the bottom of the chart table and two flush mount bases, one for the "saloon" and one for the cockpit. I think the Bosun has some old Desmo (as this stuff used to be called) stuff in his shed but we're not talking big money here and I suspect the old stuff is imperial and hard to match so we'll have new

En passant, as it were, a quick electrical purchase ... to wit one solid state bilge plump "float" switch which I plan to wire up in series with the existing mechanical float switch in the hope that at least one of them will manage to turn off when the bilge is pumped out and thus avoid flattening battery one all the damn time.

Some hope, I know. Oh well ...

And now, boys and girls, it's time to get busy with the rigging ...

First job is to sort out the additions and modifcations needed for the new cruising chute. Bugger all point in having a new toy if we can't play with it! I've already taken the decision that the chute will be hoisted on the spare genoa halyard and therefore flown inside the forestay rather than outside it. This is because we don't have any means of attaching a spinnaker halyard block above the forestay fitting and it would not be simple (or, I suspect, cheap) to adapt the masthead. Of course, this means that gybing the chute is potentially ruled out (although we may may able to gybe it as you would gybe the genoa, there is a significant risk of damaging the lightweight sail on foredeck fittings and gear so it may turn out to be a case of dowsing the sail, gybing and re-hoisting it) but I can live with that on a small cruising yacht.

So having dispensed with the masthead at no extra expense (makes a change), the next item on the agena is to sort out rigging the tack of the chute and that's going to need some new fittings and bring some existing redundant ones into use again.

So first item on the shopping list is two packs of 6mm (22mm dia) parrel beads. Next up is two snap shackles for the tack - one large one which attaches both the parrel line and the tack line to the sail and a smaller one which shackles the parrel line back to the bail on the large shackle. We'll also need some 6mm string both for the parrel beads and the tack line. Got it? Good 'cos it took me a while to work it out!

Finally, at this end of the job, we need a single swivel block, stand-up spring and deck eye or U-Bolt. Actually, given the potential loads let's go for the u-bolt.

Now, the tack line needs to go back down to the cheek block and cleat already in-situ on the opposite side of the cockpit from the genoa furling line. So we need a couple of stanchion blocks and a couple of stanchion fairleads.

So far so good. Next we need to deal with the sheets. Actually, we need some sheets! (While we're on that subject, we need some new genoa sheets as well).

The guide on the Jimmy Green website suggests 6mm to 8mm line for spinnaker sheets on a 20 footer, rising to 10mm on a 26 footer. As we're talking about a fairly lightweight sail that isn't going to come out of the bag in breezy conditions, 8mm would seem to be the bunny. But 8mm is too small for the genoa sheets which by the same guide need to be at least 10mm and preferably 12mm

As for length, between 2 x boat length and 2.5 x seems to be the recommendation with most experts suggesting shorter rather than longer. Of course, that is based on the lazy sheet having to go around the front of the forestay which we're not doing but only for now so we'll go with 2x rounded up a bit i.e. 14m. The existing genoa sheets are exactly 8m and we'll stick with that.

As for attaching the chutes to the sheet .. sorry I mean the sheets to the chute, I think I'll work that out later! Some people advocate snap shackles, others bowlines and yet others a knotted loop in a continuous sheet and a soft shackle (that appeals I must say) and I think we need to experiment

And there's still one more (or to be precise two more) bits of kit needed - we need turning blocks on the stern to bring the chute sheets back to the winches. So chuck in two single swivel blocks (size 2 if you're interested which I suspect by now you're not) and some means of nailing them to the stern quarter. Let's have two more of those nice sturdy 6mm U-bolts

Excellent, that's the cruising chute rigging sorted out. It's only costing me £176.07 <sheesh>. Bloody sail itself wasn't that much more than that!

Right, how much is left in the piggy bank ... oh! Thank the Gods for the credit card then.

The next gripping installment of The Adventures of the Wild Online Shopper will be installed tomorrow ...