The Main Problem

This has been an extremely difficult post to write and I’ve been putting it off even though we’ve been aware of this problem for some time.  It has been hard not because the awfulness or severity of the problem (but it is severe, awful and expensive), but rather how the sheer stupidity of our handling of it has messed up our schedules and caused us so much trouble.

There is a takeaway to all this – when you have a problem with a major system that you know about, you fix it right away.  Even if it seems wildly inconvenient, even if there are other things pressing and it seems like a minor problem.  Because you never, ever know when a seemingly small problem can turn into a larger, more expensive and time consuming one.  Not that you can minimize the problem per se, but you can buy yourself more time to fix it.

Back up if you will to last November, when Evenstar was making her way from Trinidad to Panama by way of Aruba.  On the Panama to Aruba leg, as the trade winds died and left us near becalmed, we decided to furl up our sails and motor the rest of the way in as there was no wind to speak of any more.  As we went to do this we had some trouble bringing our main sail back in.

This is not terribly unusual.  We have what is known as “In Mast” furling on our main sail, where there is a large spindle running inside the mast that the sail wraps around.  The whole sail is sucked into the mast through a narrow slot in the back side of it as this spindle rotates.  I say this is not unusual because  in-mast furling systems are notoriously cantankerous; since you are sending a huge sail through tiny slot to be rolled up tight in a confined area it is important that you have everything tensioned “just so” so there are no bunches or folds that can get things jammed up.  We’ve obviously done this many, many times and usually it is pretty smooth – but having troubles isn’t unheard of.

If you’ve been keeping up you will recall that when we left Trinidad we had some trouble with the main sail and had to remove it from the boat for repairs.  Removing a sail is a prime chance to introduce a tensioning problem that can muck things up when we try to furl it in.  Generally when we get a Bad Furl, we wait until we arrive at our destination then on the first light wind day we unfurl it and re-furl it up to get the tricky folds out.  In arriving in Panama we couldn’t do this right away since we went into a slip and did not anchor out as we generally do.  To furl it properly you want light wind with the boat facing into the wind and at the dock this rarely occurs.  So we decided to wait to deal with it when we were on a mooring on the other side of the Canal.

This was where the Stupid begins.

In delaying dealing with the problem you let the focus on the problem get lost.  Since we were expecting nothing more than a few misplaced folds and bunched up sail cloth to work out it didn’t seem tpo pressing.  When we arrived at Balboa Yacht Club we were more focused on our visiting friends and then preparing the boat to be left for a couple of weeks when we traveled to the U.S. over the holidays.  With limited light wind days to deal with it the problem fell further to the way side.

It had been our plan all along to remove our sails in Panama to get some work done on them, each sail needed some minor repairs or upgrades.  When we returned to Panama we moved the boat from Balboa and immediately discovered some serious problems with the generator that consumed our time and attention.  It wasn’t until February that we looked once more at the sails and the attention they needed as we had other distractions to deal with as well.

We tried to open the main sail and we could not get it to fully unfurl and it jammed in place and would not furl back into the mast either.  Drastic action was needed, we looked from the deck with binoculars and saw that it was jammed at the top so Will volunteered to take a trip to the top of the rig to check it for us.

Will looks down from the top of the mast

The top of Evenstar’s mast is about seventy feet over the water;  I hear the view is spectacular from up there.  But what Will saw was a main sail all jammed up and bunched into the top of the mast.  It would not move to unfurl.  We sent him back up with a hammer and some tools and he managed to knock it loose so we could fully unfurl the sail and drop it to the deck.

A bit of a tear

When we got the sail down we spotted the problem – the head of the sail was tearing away from the luff rope.  This rope is what slides into a groove in the furler to hold the sail in place.  Seeing the damaged head of the sail we were slightly annoyed since the sail maker in Trinidad told us he fixed the stitching up there.  We weren’t expecting problems with a just-fixed sail.  But we figured this was why the sail and furler was acting up, and as the sail was headed to the sail maker for other repairs so no big deal.

If only we’d thought to ask ourselves WHY the sail would rip like that right after it had been reinforced.  But we missed that one too.

The sails came back a week or so later than expected but not too late.  We set them on the deck to await a calm day.  By this time Will was back in Seattle doing his yacht design internship and it was just Kathy, Danielle and me left to wrestle the sails back on.  The Genoa weighs more than either of them, and the main is only a bit smaller so a near windless day is pretty necessary to get them on short handed.  This took a bit of waiting, and we needed to get to Costa Rica to meet up with Will and my parents so when we found a day we started to put the sails up.

The Genoa went up with surprising ease, Danielle showed us how tough she was by doing the lion’s share of the cranking to haul the 135 pound sail to the head of the mast.  It went quickly and took less time that we expected so we moved right on to the main.

That is when we discovered The Main Problem.

Oh, the sail itself was fine.  But we we tried to move the furler into position to reinstall the sail onto it we discovered the REAL reason for our furling problems – the halyard swivel was near frozen up.

The general idea of a Furling system is to roll a sail up like a window shade for easy storing and deployment.  To do this the center extrusions the sail attaches to must rotate like the bar in a window shade.  The sail also needs to be attached firmly to the boat at the top and bottom.  These attachments must be able to rotate with the sail when it is wrapped.  So the Halyard Swivel is a device that attaches to the halyard that raises the sail has a drum with bearings in it, the sail attaches to the bottom of the drum.  The drum spins with the sail as it rotates, allowing the halyard to stay connected and not wrap itself around the sail with the sail rolls up.

Our halyard swivel wasn’t moving.  It should spin easily by hand with the sail isn’t on and ours wasn’t turning at all.  With the hydraulics one we could make it spin but with much noise and grinding sounds.  Pretty clearly the bearings were jammed up.  After spending time cleaning out the bearings, flushing them and lubricating them the problem got no better so we reached out to the local Selden dealer in Panama.

The dealer spent a few minutes looking at the mast, agreed with my assessment that the halyard swivel was “basically toast”, and we worked out a plan to get one quickly and get it installed so we could have the boat in order before my parents arrived.  The parts had to come from the Selden supplier in the U.S., but with help from Fedex it should have been doable but for some mistakes on the local suppliers part.  The ship deadline was missed for reasons that were entirely avoidable and we got the parts the day before Will and my parents arrived back in Panama.  We’d long abandoned going to Costa Rica by this point – everyone just changed their flights.  We weren’t about to tackle this with my parents on board, so we really lost two weeks or more with this mistake.

Returning from a visit with my parents I decided to run with a different horse to solve our troubles and contacted another rigger.  Unfortunately the tides were poor the week we returned from Las Perlas and we had to wait until this past Monday to fix the problem.

We needed the tides because the Halyard Swivel is inside the mast, there is no real access to it except through some small holes near the bottom of the rig that are not big enough to remove the swivel.  And it needs to go onto the rotating extrusion which can only be done from the bottom of it.  So the mast had to come down which meant bringing the boat into a yard, hiring a crane, and setting up the mast to work on.  Since the mast weighs in excess of a ton this is no small feat.

So on Monday…down it came.  It is sitting in a yard near us where the rigger and I have worked on it all week.  Today we finally got the main halyard swivel back on and the mast reassembled – we also opted to replace the head sail swivel since it was acting up but not frozen yet.  It’s been a dirty, sweaty expensive process with a with a lot of hard work to get it ready but we should have a mast back on tomorrow.

Just in time for me to go throw myself on the mercy of the bureaucrats at Customs and Immigration to deal with our visas and paperwork that expire this weekend…I need to buy us a few more days to get ready to sail West!