Diesel Hickup

This morning at the marina I ran into Colin the mechanic who was chatting with a friend. After starting to move away after saying hello he told me that they were putting a new seat in the head. "A new valve seat?" I asked. Yes, one of the valve seats is being replaced. I asked him if he still wanted me to phone him in the morning and he said Yes.

The only thing that I can figure out is that he must have seen something that he didn't like when he was picking up the reworked head and asked for the seat to be replaced.

At this point "hickup" is a good description because I don't see it causing a significant delay if any.

Back to yesterday, I fitted the starboard netting in about an hour less that the port side had taken. During the work Bob paid another visit and we continued bouncing ideas off each other. We talked about the staysail problem and he said that it should be a "storm jib" of about 100 square feet. [5% of the (I measurement squared)] This morning I looked at the measurements of my staysail and computed an area of 312 square feet. No wonder I was overpowered in 45 knot winds! My staysail is marked "No 3" so we figure that it was Pachuca's number 3 sail before a roller furler was fitted. In Gavin Abbott's handover notes of over 10 years ago he noted that that staysail worked beautifully with "30 knots over the deck". I believe him and now realize that 30 knots does not mean 45 knots. So now I am very, very interested in procuring a proper staysail that I can carry in gales and use to heave to from gales up to storms. If I get enough advance warning of an advancing storm to make preparations I reckon that the storm trysail with the storm jib hanked on the inner forestay would be a great heave-to sail plan, with hanging from the 18-ft parachute off the bow the last resort.

But the help hasn't been all one way. Bob thought about my remark that I have an unfortunate tendency to accept things as they are and applied it to his boat, looking at his jib halyard setup with fresh eyes and coming up with some improvements that pleased him very much. He then said that he still had one problem of transferring the tensioned halyard from the winch to a cleat in order free up the winch and I suggested using another rope attached with a rolling hitch ahead of the winch, which is the technique that he had suggested that I use for removing tight crossovers on my winches. That was the solution and he told me that it was a case of the student teaching the master.

At 4.30 I was finished with the netting job and was hot, tired, sweaty, and hungry. It was time to reward myself. I went ashore and had my first real shower and shave in about 5 days. I hadn't even had a cockpit bath for 2 days. There is nothing like boating to make one appreciate the simple things of life. I then went to the Dock cafe and had a cold Corona beer then ordered a second beer and my first restaurant meal since Arnold departed: a Combinacion Mexicana.

My project for today is to set up lines to reef the luff (front edge) of the mainsail from the cockpit. This was an idea given to me by Nancy Earley in Port Townsend. Bob showed me how I could do it by tying off unused spinnaker down haul and halyard lines and utilizing their paths to take a line from each reefing ring on the sail, through a turning block at the base of the mast, through the line organizer and through the clutch cleat next to the companionway. That way I don't have to estimate how much of the main halyard to let out, then run to the mast and put the ring on the goose neck. I've had instances where I didn't let out enough halyard and had to return to the cockpit to let out more, or let out too much and the ring came loose before I could tighten the halyard. All of this back and forth motion to the mast has its own risks and dangers and should be minimized. According to Nancy, I should be able to mark each of the two new luff reefing lines so that I know when to jam cleat off the line before I tighten up the halyard again. No guesswork and no leaving the cockpit.

I may not be able to complete that job because I am not game to raise the mainsail in the strengthening wind. In fact we are expecting 20-knot winds in the next few days which will curtail my activities both on the boat and ashore, since a ride to the shore in 20-knot winds is quite wet.

One of the reasons for going ashore so early was to check out some movie DVD's from the Club Cruceros. I got three movies of the usual thriller/adventure/escapism genre.