Monthly Archives: November 2015

Ho Ho Hoist the Sail!

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Christmas is coming. For most people, December 25 is a good enough day to celebrate gift giving in whatever form. At our house, Christmas has come early. That’s right, Mike and I already have opened our Christmas present to each other because Santa surprised us early this year. He came to our house from his house in Minnesota. He came in his truck with eight tiny horses under the hood and a truck bed full of spinnaker. Here’s how that happened.

Deploying the spinnaker from the forward berth. A dream come true for this man.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the previous owner of the boat, with whom we are friends, had in his possession a beautifully made spinnaker. It had been made for our boat by a mystery previous owner (Our boat has had a number of owners.), and came stowed cozily in its magnificent sail bag. The sail was practically new and when times grew hard, he sold the sail to his brother, who sails a boat of similar size in Bellingham. Or rather, he owns a boat of similar size in Bellingham. I understand there isn’t a lot of actual sailing going on.  So when we bought Galapagos, she had not seen this sail for a few years. Like a family heirloom, it had been stored safely away from the light of day, probably in the marine equivalent of the brother’s attic.

We’ve been talking about wanting a light air sail, but, you  know, $$$$. We sure could have used a nice cruising spinnaker this summer when  light airs were all the rage along the coast of Vancouver Island. Little did we know Santa John was listening.

It’s like a large larval organism. Or perhaps a tape worm.

A couple of weeks ago John (the PO) traveled from his home in Minnesota to the Bellingham area. He repossessed this sail from his brother and brought it down to us, offering us a great deal on this excellent sail that has hardly seen the light of day. This thing looks brand new. It has a beautiful sail bag that fits exactly between the rails at the bow, and a sock that makes it dead easy to deploy. We took the sail with the understanding that we’d look it over, deploy it on the boat and then make a decision about whether we wanted to buy it from him. He left it with us and tootled on along his route. Ho ho ho, Mike and Melissa! MEEERRRYY Christmas!spinnaker fitting

When Mike came home and looked at the construction of the sailbag, he began fingering the sail, a glazed look coming over his face. It was the gaze of lust. And this time, I was not the target. This was sail lust. I knew right then Christmas was upon us. This sail would have to be complete crap to avoid becoming stored in our forward berth. And I knew that this sail was not a piece of crap. Visions of our checking account balances danced in my head. Sometimes, you just have to go with a great deal, especially when it would break someone’s heart to pass it up.

This past weekend we had sun and very light wind. We decided we’d tape those hatches, and then for dessert we’d play with this spinnaker and see what it was like before the sun went down.

So if you read our previous post and looked at the photos, you’ll notice who was doing all the work. That’s right. I was. This is because I cut a straighter line than Mike does. I am the tape installer.  So Mike played the role of ‘warm body’ whereby he cleaned the lenses and the hatch frames, readying them for the taping. Needless to say, he got restless and bored. Cleaning the lenses and frames and policing the deck for garbage from the project just wasn’t enough stimulation for his large mammalian brain, and pretty soon I realized that he was no longer looking over my shoulder. Then, I heard the sound of a halyard being surreptitiously raised.

“What the heck do you think you’re doing?”, I asked, hands on hips, knowingly. Yes, knowingly, as the larval sail was already halfway raised.

Caught red handed, he could only look sheepish (and GUILTY)  as I laid out my thoughts on people who started playing with new toys that are mutual property while other people are on hands and knees wielding a sharp cutting wheel and shiny tape. I was dealing with flashbacks of Christmases past whereby Santa left toys meant to be shared with my siblings. Ugh. Bad Santa!

This was NOT the plan. Tape first. Playing with new sail second so we could both enjoy it. And no, I cannot ‘tape faster’. This has to look decent or we’ll both hate it. Simmer down, my friend, simmer down.

I submit to you that this position is much less fun than raising a new sail.

“Put that sail back in the bag, Boyte. You don’t get to see what it looks like and have all the fun while my knees are killing me. What are you thinking? What unmitigated gall!”  Justly chastised, he put the sail back in the bag. Sometimes this guy just kills me with his cuteness over things like new sails. I have to be strong like Badger, even justifiably indignant. Someone has to have some discipline around here.

Having never owned a spinnaker sock, our previous experience with spinnakers has not been exactly delightful. We cruised with our spinnaker on Moonrise on a number of occasions, but it was always a lot of effort to get the sail up correctly and tacking was probably a pretty good show for anyone sailing close by. Raising the spinnaker was one of the occasions on that boat when I might have been heard sighing in acceptance of my fate, secretly asking in my head, “My God. Why can’t we just sit here and go .5 knots and be happy? Maybe there will be whales to watch.”. This spinnaker is much different!

Beautiful! We can’t wait to fly her on the water.

Up went this sail, and we both were delighted not only with how easy it was, but how beautiful it is as well. Wind was only about 2 knots and the sail was filling easily, tugging Galapagos in her slip. Sadly, late fall offers only short days and the sun was already dipping below the buildings in Tacoma.

We’re using red as our trim color for Galapagos and the sail is red and white, just lovely really. We plan to replace the lifelines with soft lines and I’ve been thinking red to match the lettering on the stern. Yeah, I know. I’m already decorating with this sail. Still, nothing like being a pretty boat out on the water and red is such a holiday color. Happy Christmas to us!

Want to see how easy this is to douse?  (Sorry about the sound. A train came just as we were filming. Our marina is very noisy.)  [vsw id=”giSmx7UQ86M” source=”youtube” width=”425″ height=”344″ autoplay=”no”]

We hope we use this sail more than any of the previous owners did. It’s a bit of a mystery where this sail came from, but we’ve been in touch Derek, another previous owner, and he’s never seen it. We think that leaves only the owners who sailed her to Mexico. We’ve contacted North Sails to see if they can look it up by sail number, but no response yet.

It’s a lovely thing, and we have visions of a beautiful downwind sail with it. How that plays out in reality we shall see. What do you think? Will we use this sail? When a piece of equipment this nice practically drops into your lap for literally a small fraction of what you’d pay to have one made, you don’t turn Santa down.

 

Ready, Set….No.

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Okay, okay, yes, everyone in the Little Cunning Plan household needed to just calm down; get a little reality check, untwist our collective knickers. And we’ve done just that. Wiser minds have prevailed and I hope ours are among them. After our last post where I ranted about how pissed off I was that the hatches leaked, and threatened to use butyl tape to re-bed them in the cold season, our readers raced to our rescue and gave us a good talking to. We love our readers.  And we love how they bring good ideas to the table. Because I can come up with some really bad ideas when I’m mad. 

One of the comments that made us take a deep breath was this reminder by a reader known by the sobriquet of “Saffy the Pook”. Got to love that. He/She put in writing what we had been talking about, only reading it in someone else’s words planted our feet even more firmly on beloved terra firma:

“Like your exhaust, this is not a job that will tolerate shortcuts or amateur mistakes. Also like your exhaust, it can have serious negative repercussions if it fails at sea under trying conditions. As painful as it may be, commit to doing it right whether that means spending the time to do it yourself or spending the money to have a pro do it for you.”  (Saffy the Pook)

Of course, that is 100% accurate. You’ll get no argument from us, Saffy.  And you express this with such a reasonable tone, too.  When I say this kind of thing, it comes out more like, “WE CAN’T GO TO SEA WITH A *&^$^&* LEAKING HATCH! WHAT IF A BIG WAVE COMES? WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO DO THIS OVER? MY HANDS ARE STILL RECOVERING FROM ALL THE **&^ CLEANING WE DID LAST TIME! I STILL HAVEN’T REPLACED ALL THE BRAIN CELLS I LOST DUE TO ACETONE! CAN WE PAY SOMEONE TO DO THIS FOR US? WHY AM I WHINING IN CAPITAL LETTERS ALL THE TIME???”  Your way is probably better. 

Around the same time, alert reader and friend Lee Youngblood (sailor, yacht broker, photographer) sent us an email with this subject line: “DON”T DO IT!”.  Well that got our attention! He cautioned us about rushing into making a repair at this moment in time, reminding us that butyl tape is only for applications where there is compression between pieces (and duh, we actually knew that and it’s why we didn’t use it in the first place, but I forgot about that in my pissed-off stomping fit).  He also reminded us that cold weather was not a good time for bedding material to set up well.  Lots of smacking of ourselves in the head was happening, let me tell you.

Even when I’m in a rant, the better part of my brain is working the problem and trying to find the least offensive solution, but keeping the primary goal in mind is sometimes an issue. In this case, the primary goal was keeping water out of the boat for the rainy season, not redoing the entire job. So I had started researching short term solutions, wishing that I could find something like the butyl tape we used on the ports in the hull. That stuff is working great! But, of course, getting that off would not be easy, and it would look pretty bad, too. Didn’t anyone make a clear rubbery weatherproof tape with good adhesion? A girl can dream. A girl can waste plenty of time doing the Google on stuff like this, also.foil tape

Then we got Lee Youngblood’s email suggesting we try an old cruiser trick of using aluminum tape. Bingo. In fact, we had some of that on the boat already. Another reader suggested using preservation tape, and that sounded like it would be a winner, too. But we already had the aluminum tape.  Mike used it when he was building the refrigerator box. I remember at the time he was working on the fridge he commented that he loved that stuff and could think of many uses for it. He wanted to keep some on the boat, so we had maybe half a roll left. The stuff we used is called Extreme Weather Foil Tape and it’s basically like heavy aluminum foil with a good sticky backing. Don’t ask me why we didn’t think of using that. Viva, Lee!

I hope you weren’t holding your breath waiting to see if we actually did those hatches right this time because you’ll have to wait until warm weather comes back around. That’s a lot of breath holding. Today we went down to the boat and made her water tight (hopefully) with this stuff. It’s really too wide, so first thing we did was cut each piece into two pieces of equal  width. This stuff is really easy to work with but get it right the first time when you apply it. If you have to reposition it, it’s not going to be nice and smooth anymore. We did all three hatches and are very pleased that they look decent. 

After applying the tape, I went over it with my fingers smoothing it out and making sure that the edge was firmly adhering all the way around each lens. It is easy to puncture this stuff with any kind of sharp edge, so you need to use care when smoothing. Other than that, this tape is dead easy to use and the paper backing comes off easily. 

Anyhoo, I think/hope/pray we’ve got this under control for this season. Add it to the long list of tasks to be addressed at the haul out this summer. Ideally, we’d like to be able to take the hatch lids off to work on them. I think being able to take them home and put them on the bench to work on will help us be sure all the silicone is off, if, indeed, that is the problem. The other possibility causing the leaking is that we didn’t use enough product, especially on the forward hatch. We were nervous about using too much, but may have erred on the side of being too cautious. Live and learn. Perhaps that mystery will be solved when we give it another go.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for bringing your experience to the table!

 

 

 

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Lessons in Being Persnickity

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This post is by way of doing the harsh thing that bloggers of life transitions and of sailboat ownership sometimes have to do: Post about failure. File this under ‘brutal honesty’, and also many expletives and stomping of feet; perhaps throwing a few things for good measure. I’ve never tried that, but I understand how it could be cathartic.

Remembering more relaxing times. Keep this feeling as you read on.

We’ve owned three boats. We thought we were not amateurs at this point, even though we’re always learning. Oh, hubris. What a harsh mistress you are. This summer, because the weather was fine, we got a little twitchy and decided to replace our hatch lenses. It sounds so simple, no? You just remove the lenses, clean up the frames, and rebed in the same stuff that was used in the first place.

Why did we want to replace them? Because they were old and crazed and didn’t let in much light. Did they leak? No. They did not. Did they work as they should? Yes. They did. So basically, the only thing wrong with them was cosmetic. We wanted them to be pretty. We wanted to see through them. We wanted to lie in the V-berth and look at stars while at anchor. Such petty problems to have. I guess we were a little persnickety. Joke’s on us! Now who feels old and crazed? Not the hatches.

The old but serviceable lens. Notice how you can’t see the side of my foot through the thing?

Now it’s the rainy season and we have hatches that leak. That’s right, readers, we are hatch refit failures. #Amateurs #Pissedthehelloff. Somehow, after literally spending hours scraping, using harsh chemicals that probably shortened our lives, and sanding with expensive sand paper, leaks have developed in all three hatches. All. Three. See what happens when you try to fix something that ain’t broke?

Recall that we decided to use industrial silicone to rebed those hatch lenses. It was that or butyl tape, and we couldn’t get any solid information that butyl tape would stick to silicone any better than anything else. The information is probably there, but we didn’t find it for whatever reason. People posted their thoughts. Everyone who has ever bedded anything on a boat has an opinion about the best stuff to use. In the end, we made the wrong choice, or maybe we didn’t use enough of it, or maybe there was invisible silicone left on the hatch frames. Silicone is evil, so who knows? The hatches don’t leak everywhere so probably it’s a silicone residue problem.

Except that this was a total win. Thank goodness.

The feelings we have about this are second only to the issue we had with getting a proper exhaust system for Hiram, our engine. But we rose to that challenge and, I assure you, we will not be beaten by this one. Never mind that we’re getting the house ready and the holidays are bearing down before us. Never mind that Mike has been transferred to another job in Boeing and doesn’t have the time to think about this problem. Never mind that I’m increasing the number of coaching clients I see on the boat because I’ve made a commitment to using Galapagos as my office space until I completely retire. (I’m loving this, by the way.) At least the hatch in the salon only drips a tiny bit, and the drips don’t land on my clients’ heads. I’m grateful for small things.

This weekend it’s going to be un-rainy. Lots of people will be outside enjoying the sunnyish weather. We will be outside too: removing the forward hatch lens once more. It’s the one that leaks the worst. We’re going to do that one, particular hatch and then sit back and observe the results. We’re going to clean the hell out of the frame until our fingers are tiny nubs of skin and bone. So far, we think we’re going to use butyl tape. So that’s the situation on the ground here for the moment. Keep your fingers crossed we do it right this time, and if you think of it, spit three times and turn around.

Because this is the goal.

Because this is the goal.