My rigger misses me, I can tell.
Back in the days when I was racing my old boat hard, I was in a couple of times each week. Usually because I had bent or broken something while pushing boat too hard. Of course the number of times I broke something when sheer stupidity or ignorance was the cause was zero. Right. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
When racing it was it was busted halyards or cracked sheaves or broken blocks and the like. My rigger like to use me as a good toughness subject, sort of like the gorilla in the old American Tourister ads.
So…now to the kinder gentler sailing style: Cruising. What can I break? My blender?
Well duh…now I have POWER winches and way more load on the much larger boat! So I can break things more efficiently and find new things to break that aren’t supposed to. Opportunities for rampant carnage and destruction abound!
This past weekend we went to Block Island…nice weekend, but the wind wasn’t great. Leaving Friday night we were headed out into 20 knots on the nose. When we began to unfurl the crispy new main it looked…wrong.
Being impatient to sail after a week of non sailing life I decided I didn’t need to wait for my wife to help me. Typically setting the main is easy; it involves the pushing of two buttons simultaneously – one to unfurl the main and one to grind the winch the outhaul is on (that’s the line on the back corner of the sail). Unfortunately, because of the Bimini installed over the cockpit you can’t actually see the outhaul at the end of the boom if you also have your finger on the “Unfurl” (or “Uit” as it is labelled in Swedish on our boat) button, so when I set it myself generally tell it’s position by the shape of the sail and fine tune it when the sail is pretty much out.
Unbeknownst to me some of the guys that were working on the main sheet clutches earlier in the week completely eased the boom vang on the main sail. For the non sailors in the crowd, that is a device connected from the boom to the base of the mast (roughly) that is used to pull the boom down flat – it is a very important sail shape control. In my excitement to get sailing in all this breeze I failed to notice this. When the boom is off the sail looks really curved…which is the same when it looks when the outhaul is not fully cranked on.
Net result? I cranked the outhaul all the way out and the sail did not look out. I cranked some more, then my wife pointed out that I had run the outhaul all the way out and had the whole mess under considerable strain.
Now, when the outhaul is loaded up the only way to release the clutch (device that latches down and holds the line) is to give it a teeny little additional grind in to loosen the clutch up, then you can pop the lever and off you go. This time, when the lever popped the sheave in the block guiding the line exploded off of it. My wife took two direct hits, one leaving bloody scratches on her right arm and another leaving half of her left hand bruised. Keep in mind that my wife does surgery several times per week as part of her job; this is potentially Very Not Good.
So we have broken bit #1 – the sheave on the foot block. We hurriedly furl the sail back in making our second major mistake which sets us up for breaking the outhaul itself on the way home. The outhaul is a long and strong rope, designed for supporting major loads.
That was easy enough; we did a quick and shoddy job rolling the sail, as we were concerned about the extent of my wife’s injuries, and securing the boat and assessing the damage. So we we decided to take the main sail out on the way home…it refused to come out. All bunched up in the mast and it wouldn’t move. The way to solve this is to go in and out in small bits with the outhaul and the furler together while changing the tension on the sail.
In and out with the outhaul over the broken hub of the block also will do what to the sail? 10 points if you said “break it in very short order”.
So now, I am getting to see my rigger a bit more frequently. Which is nice in a way since the proprietors are lovely people and a pleasure to visit with. I could do without the bills though.
