Ever notice how it rains right after you wash your car? We’ve had quite a few good storms roll through Northern California over the past week or so, and I even had the chance to go sailing through one or two last weekend (my buddies boat, not Ramble On).
So of course, since I started pulling up our teak decks, you can thank me personally for solving California’s drought problems. Luckily most of the boat interior is dry, but we still have a pretty good leak at the chain locker and down into the bilge through the sampson posts. I need to get the bowsprit out of the way eventually to pull that last little bit of teak decking underneath, and also to possibly replace the posts, and/or seal up the joint where they come through the deck. I did some probing around on the bowsprit with my new moisture meter before the last storm hit, and it’s looking like I’m going to need to build a new one from scratch. Ours is a solid spruce timber, but my plan is to laminate new Sitka Spruce planks with thickened epoxy. One project at a time…
In order to take this rig down, I need to get a few things out of the way. One of them is the staysil furler & halyard. When we bought the boat, the torn staysil was neatly folded up in the v-berth and we were flying a naked foil. Whomever pulled down the sail also ran the furling top swivel back up to the mast. Once again I turned to my trusty homemade halyard fetcher, a 50′ length of utility cord (for a safety line), and my main halyard (the one i finally got down). The way the lines were ran, combined with all the standing rigging in the way made for an interesting 11 minutes of dicking around with this thing, but I finally got it! And, I thought I’d be tricky and set up the GoPro to capture it all on digital media, so here it is: