MdP - Rigging Progress

This morning Alfredo escorted me to a firm that deals with chains, hooks, and that sort of heavy industrial equipment.  Alfredo had a friend there, Alexandro, whom  he knew through his work.

The company could not provide stainless steel wire but had a good range of galvanized wire and turnbuckles.  After much discussion about the end points of the stays we came up with the requirements and specifications and tomorrow I will visit Alexandro to learn if the headquarters in Buenos Aires has the required items in stock.  If they do I will order two D1 lower shrouds and the inner forestay.  They will be made up in Buenos Aires and sent to here at Mar Del Plata.

The cable is 8 mm in diameter and made up of 7 strands of wire.  It is double galvanized in that each wire is galvanized then the entire cable is galvanized again.  The breaking strength of the wire is 5,870 kg (about 13,000 lb), which makes it considerably stronger than 10mm stainless wire, if my memory serves me right.

This will prepare the rigging for sea, and given recent more favorable information about the prospects of sailing to Buenos Aires there is a good chance that I will make that sail and if so I'll have the entire rigging replaced in stainless steel there and keep the galvanized stays as spares. 

I've got no doubts about the strength of the galvanized rigging.  It is has a better tensile strength than stainless and resists metal fatigue much better.  However, given the choice I'd rather stick to the more orthodox stainless steel rigging for Pachuca.

This morning at the footbridge I was approached by a man who knew my boat and asked me if I had charts of Brazil.  I told him No because I had sailed from the south but took him to "Wind Chime" and introduced him to Antonio.  Soon we had 4 laptops on the go with two concurrent projects: Antonio was transferring electronic charts to our friend's computer and I was helping Antonio with my netbook to track down a problem that he was having with his weatherfax software.

The man's story was a bit sad.  He has a large boat - 55-60 ft I estimate - at the end of our jetty.  He had rounded the Horn then went through a severe storm and lost his hydraulic steering which led to the loss of both of the masts on his ketch.  The boat has been here for almost a year and he will take it north to Brazil and have one mast fitted, then he'll sail back to France.

Then on the way back from dealing with the rigging Alfredo introduced me to an American on one of the boats.  When I told him that I was Australian he told me about an Aussie named Ron who got dismasted rounding the Horn and managed to motor 600 miles to Ushuaia.  At the age of 55 he met a lady in Brazil and now he's sailing with a wife and child.

This cruising life, eh?

I posted the first video clip on the blog.  I was impressed at the speed of the upload.