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It was great, I finally got to take Sea Puppy out again. The roller furling is awesome.. total time to sails out or furled is under 15 seconds. The radio worked great also.. and the main goes up and down so easy it’s like being on another boat now. Amazing what having a sheeve at the top of the mast will do 🙂
I have stopped using a shackle on the main halyard. I am just using a bowline on it to attach to the headboard of the sail. Thats what we were using to attach to the shackle we were using and it had issues. So its just easier and more convienent to just put it on the main directly.
With the forcast and the big thunder storm clouds in the sky to the west I decided not to take Sea Puppy out today…. It ended up that I could have as the conditions stayed fairly mild but I was wanting to take it easy on her first time out with all the changes that have been made so ended up saying not today..
Well with that Breck down the dock on Runaway invited me to go out with them. It was nice. His boat is a much bigger sailboat.. a Cabo Rico 38 .. weighing in at about 22 thousand lbs.. Its a nice boat to kick back on the foredeck and just enjoy the ride 🙂 Which I did. We didn’t sail.. just motored down the waterway to waities Island then played a bit there with Breck’s jet ski.. lol after Sarah and Hans saved it from sinking… Han’s didn’t know about the drain plugs and when he put it in the water the were open. the only thing keeping the jet ski from sinking was the internal bouncy. We all had to help carry the jet ski up the beach so we could get the drain holes out of the water and let it drain out.
I got up early and started tightening up and tuning the upper and lower shrouds.. There is no adjustment on the roller furling unit. It is a fixed length. I set the uppers and lowers at the same poundage that I had her tuned to with the stock forstay and found that I was pulling the mast into a curve forward at the top of the mast.. This is a very bad thing. I also had massive aft rake compared to the just a very lot of rake sea puppy usually has. I spent most of the morning messing with it with no good results. Miriam showed up late in the afternoon while I was working on it and gave a hand also. Finally I started manufacturing new connecting plates for attaching the roller furling unit to the chain plate at the bow. A good drill for the holes and a roto zip with a metal cutting blade did a good job of creating the new plates.. lol at least they did after I got my measurements right. here is a picture of the installed furler with the new plates we made showing.
Early in the morning I went and cleaned up the roller furling unit and scrubbed the bird shit and pine sap off it from it being stored in pattys back yard for the last year and a half. Soapy water and a kitchen pad was good for the bird poop but it needed a stainless scraper to get the pine sap off. It looked much better for being scrubbed. I also went up and down the length cleaning out the to luff slots on the foil and ran water at pressure through the length of the furler to wash as much grit and dust out as I could. I then attached the furler and neatened up all halyards, lines and shrouds so it would be ready to carry to the boat and mount. I also sprayed the length of the slots with mclube sail kote.
This is a preview of Mast Repairs for Sea Puppy Part 4 Re-stepping the mast . Read the full post (1081 words, 0 images, estimated 4:19 mins reading time)
After going out on Pirate Girl racing with Miriam and Patty, I met Mike back at the marina to install the coax for the Vhf Antenna. I had met Mike the previous weekend sailing on Pirate Girl.. He is an Extra Class Ham Radio Operator that also teaches classes for ham radio in the local areas. I had gotten into a conversation with him about radios and such and mentioned that I was installing at vhf antenna on my mast and he volunteered to give me a hand with soldering the PL259 ends on and pulling the cable.
Sea Puppy still has her mast down so I went out with Patty on Pirate Girl her Beneteau 323. I was a fairly stiff day with winds between 18 to 22 knots and seas running between 4 and 6 feet. We reefed both the main and the jib to about 1/2 to 2/3 normal sail area and pirate girl just flew. It was just Patty, Mirriam and Me on the boat so we were all kept busy with tacking around the course but it was definately easier than WeBeJamming which is about the same size but lacks the self tailing winches and furling main and jib.
I spent a lot of time on friday working on the mast with Miriam helping me. I have to give her credit for being willing to spend a day out in the grueling sun workin on my mast with me.. It would have taken much longer with out her help.
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I put new sheeves in the base of the mast and a new main halyard sheeve in the masthead. The jib halyard, topping lift and spinnaker halyard sheeves looked to be in very good condition so I left them in.
I’ve known that there was something wrong with the main halyard sheeve in the top of the mast for a while.. It has been hard to pull the mainsail up and the halyard has been gradually fraying where it goes over the sheeve.. Well we (Richard, BIlly, Breck and I) pulled the mast down today and found that the sheeve is totally gone. The halyard has been being pulled up over the bare stainless shaft of the bolt that went through the sheeve..
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The sheeve that was there was a used one that Richard had around and installed this past November not long before I bought Sea Puppy from Patty. The moral of the story is not to put old used sheeves that you have to modify in as replacement parts.. I bought replacement sheeves for the mast and boom a few months ago and now that the mast is down will replace all of them.
I went out with Orin and Richard today on Orin’s boat La Bon Vie’ a Beneteau Oceanus 39. What a nice boat.. It is smooth as silk.. He has a roller furling jib and in mast furling on the main which made putting sail on and taking it in very easy.
When we first got out on the ocean there was barely any wind… we just sat there and bobbed for a while. Eventually we thought we saw some wind farther out and put the engine back on to go check it out. Still no wind.. Some of the other sailboats out there started motoring back in about then…. wrong choice. About 30 minutes later the wind started to pick up and we spent the rest of the day sailing at 5 to 7 knots in 11 or 12 knots of wind..
I went out on Pirate Girl today with Patty, Cary, and Mike. I was a beautifull day sailing… We went out a few miles and back and on a beam reach in 11 or 12 knots of wind were able to not let Breck catch us in Runnaway. There is definately something wrong with Pirate Girls knotmeter it showed 4 to 4.5 knots top boat speed when we had to have been averaging about 6.5. Breck in runnaway said they were doing 6 to 7.5 and were unable to catch up to us.
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Some days you should just roll over and not get out of bed. You know it’s one of those day when you piss on the cat.
So we have this new kitten.. it’s turning into a wild thing.. it scampers and runs everywhere.. attacks everything and wants to know what your doing all the time ( as well as participate in what your doing).
As a guy I have sort of got my morning ritual down… and one of the early things in that ritual, even before clothes, is to sleeply go and stand in front of the commode and take a much needed and long piss. ( for those of you offended by piss i thought of saying urinate but it just doesn’t cover the feeling you get when you take that first long piss in the morning. So you will have to live with piss) So back to the moment… my bladder is just crying with relief as I start to piss. All of a sudden I hear a galloping sound.. We have raised wood floors that really let you hear a kitten gallop. It’s impressive. It sounds more like a herd of kittens.
So the kitten hears me pissing and goes into overdrive ..hollering “Hey! Whatcha Doing! funny naked human” while running at light speed to see . She arrives at such speed that she jumps for where the closed lid of the toilet normally is instead of running headlong into the base of the toilet at speed. The only problem is that I’m pissing and the lid isn’t closed. You know how you sometimes see what is comming ahead of time but can’t do anything about it.. it’s sorta like one of those nightmares where you run and run and run and just run too slow. I see the kitten running and just know she is going to jump and I’m trying and trying and trying in that fraction of a second that seems to lasts for hours to stop pissing, but it isn’t happening.. My bladder is now in control and its going “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!” while im going “NO NO NO oh shit!!”. About this time one small very interested kitten hits the lip of the toilet bowl.. still at full speed… and realizes “oh shit the lid isn’t there!!!” for one fraction of second you see her trying to stop all that momentum.. unsucessfully I might add.. !!!!splash!!!! dead in the center of the toilet looking up at me in shock and dismay is a now wet and being pissed on kitten. My bladder finaly listened to me when the sound of piss hitting the water went away. Pissing on a kitten just doesn’t have the same sound. I now know this for a fact.
Nancy brought home a kitten friday “just until she can find a home for it”.. however it now has a name “Lucy” and there are kitten toys mysteriously appearing.. so what do you think the odds of a home appearing are?
She has already moved into my territory…
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It was funny this evening.. my mom and sister are complaining that the kitten wont leave them alone when they are eating. it keeps trying to get to the food.. They have been locking up when they eat.. I sat down with a plate of food after they had eaten and the kitten was back out. It made a beeline for my plate.. I growled at it once and it didn’t bother me again. It just told them you have to know how to talk to it.
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