ramblings on the outhaul

Click to EnlargeRunning rigging is anything that shapes or moves the sails around. Standing rigging is anything supports the mast. Generally, if it's made of metal or wood, it's standing rigging, and if it's made of cloth or fiber, it's running rigging.

On a sail with three points, you have the head (top), tack (bottom forward), and clew (bottom aft).

A sail with a boom, which for most people is just their mainsail, uses a line called an outhaul to pull the clew (bottom aft) part of the sail towards the end of the boom.

It's pretty straightforward: if you have a three point sail, you're probably going to need to pull on it in three directions in order to make it stand up and be flat. And that, honestly, is about as complicated as it needs to be.

A case in point is the outhaul pictured here. It's just a line, wrapped and tied nicely around the end of the staysail boom, that is pulling on the clew, extending the sail out.

This particular outhaul leaves a lot to be desired (it's a poor choice for reefing needs, as another point on the sail is used as the clew), and in future posts we'll go over how to reef and rig outhauls in easy and simple ways!

bending the yankee onto the seafurl 5 roller furler

 I remember taking the yankee off the furler a long time ago; it was pretty mysterious to me back then. I'm really down on furlers in general, and would feel much better with a hanked on sail. But my rigger convinced me otherwise, and honestly spending time on the bowsprit dousing a sail is pretty rough.

But it was pretty interesting, because I had a conceptual idea of where things went (head up, tack down, clew out).  I know the furler, well, furled. But I didn't know how the luff (leading edge) of the sail connects to the furler.

I managed to get it 80% up, then it jammed. I went for the winch handle, and as I fit it into the winch I started remembering that somethings are not supposed to be winched.

I called up the rigger, and he told me the track (that the luff tape sits in) might be dirty, so I should clean it out, use a lube, or both.

I opted for the lube, and had great results. So the yankee is on the furler now, and the halyards are run. One step closer to sailing!

It seems all the rigging is done and ready

Minus our yankee, which still needs to be connected to the furler, we should be ready to take our fine ship out of the slip, hoist our sails, and let the wind move us around.

I got off the phone with Fritz at Pacific Offshore Rigging on Tuesday, and he gave us the green light for everything but ocean passages. Only cautioning us on that one that he'd like us to put on new turnbuckles before we head out into the great blue yonder.

The plan now is to hoist all the sails in the early morning (and therefore windless) hours, and make sure there are no chaffe points, and all the sail controls look good. I think I'll have a notebook with me looking for flaps and flutters once we go out under sail, so I can go back into my Annapolis Book of Seamanship later in the evening and do some homework on how to solve those problems.

The mast is back. We're (almost) sailors again.

 It was one year and seven months ago that our mast was removed. About a week ago, I got a phone call from Fritz over at Pacific Offshore Rigging letting me know that he was ready to step the mast.

I hustled as fast as I could, took three days off work to prepare, and Charlotte and I motored over Friday morning with some real anticipation. I had been running the engine every couple of weeks getting it up to temperature, but a million things worried me about the simple transit to the boat yard; barely 400 yards away.

Our mast was laid out getting ready, and within thirty minutes the crane was rigged and 46' of timber with all our rigging swung into the air.

Fritz, and the people at Driscoll, are experts at this, and within an hour we were casting off mooring lines and reversing with our rig attached.

It's a great feeling to have the mast back on the boat, and unless you've been in a mastless situation for that long, Idon't know if you know the feeling of being on the lame duck boat for such a long period. All your hopes, dreams, and goals are separated from you by unknown timelines and unknown quantities of money. Bad enough, but remember you're still living on a boat. Which can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes. So it's sort of the worst of all worlds. You're stuck in the limbo (for over a year and a half) where you have to deal with all the problems related to living on a boat, with nothing but a shrinking memory of the joys of sailing.

But now, we're back! We hauled piles of halyards and assorted rigging out of the quarter berth; where it's been living for the last 17 months.

One really nice thing about putting the rig back on like this is that we know a lot more about how everything operates. Sailboats have a lot of crazy stuff. Outhauls, Cunninghams, clews, leech lines, oh my! Conceptually I know what those all do, but I've never had to rig them myself from a bare boom. I even had to make my own little sail-to-hank fittings, which is another chip in the "now I know how to do that" bucket.

We did the right thing as well with the main sheet. Rather than just bend it on like normal, we opted for laying it out in a very convenient little grassy spot barely a few minutes walk from the slip. We put blue tape on anything that looked weird, flipped it over and did the same.

Anything that looked frayed or worse got cleaned with alcohol. Charlotte did some of the more involved patch work, and I put tape on a lot of things. Even if I could have done better, at the least it should keep some things from fraying further and potentially unravelling.

There are some missing pieces on the rig right now, but running and standing. A few bolts here and there, all the main sheet reefing lines, staysail outhaul, and the yankee isn't even fitted onto the furler yet because of something still outstanding that our rigger is going to take care of for us (not his fault; he fixing the previous owners shennanigans).

I'm still focusing on fixing leaks; there are a lot to take care of, and the rain is slowly but surely building up. I read in Coastal Pilot #7 that Samoa can get 55 inches of rain in one month during the "wet" season (bit of an understatement there). So before we leave San Diego this boat has to be airtight against leaks. Long passages shake things loose, but whatever I can get done now to prevent deck and cabintop rot will only free up more time later on for other things.

The mast saga: moving it to the rigger

We finally left Koehler Kraft, and wheeled the mast over to the rigger. Made a quick video. Couldn't do more to show it; didn't want to crash the 46 foot mast spiralling into the asphalt. My friend Ryan gave me a hand scooting it along the road.

The mast is epoxied and ready for paint

The mast is getting much closer. This morning I stopped by and dropped off the hardware that has been sitting in the quarter berth for the last six months. All the small pieces were in individual Zip-Lock bags, with their position (starboard, 56" up from base) written on the bag.

I put some pictures up on the gallery, so you can see some of the extremely high quality workmanship that went into this project so far.

We're also ditching the roller furler and putting hanks on the yankee. Go ahead, call me old fashioned. But that's one less line running along the deck (although I'll probably add a downhaul), and a couple less moving parts. Also, here's some sobering advice from Larry Pardey:

The most common at-sea rigging failures we observe tend to be shrouds or headstays failing due to metal fatigue. The majority seem to be the stays inside roller furling headsails.

Beyond that, I just really don't like moving parts, and especially parts I don't understand that well.

Update on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 09:02 by Eric

Huzzah! It's been painted! I dropped off all the hardware on Friday, and there's now a pretty white mast waiting some rigging and spreaders. I've had the option of doing some of the remaining work myself, but honestly I've been busy as hell working on other parts of the boat over the last few weeks.

mast news: the saga continues

To bring you all up to speed, three months ago we had the mast of our boat yanked off. I often refer to this process as being "de-mastulanated". Our boat is left in shambles, as the following things happen when you remove the mast from a sailboat:

• It doesn't sail anymore.
• The boom (in our case, both mainsail boom and staysail boom) are draped over the deck, looking like crap.
• The boat is used to having a certain compression on it, so with that gone, things tend to bend in ways they normally wouldn't, creating new leaks (and sadly, not removing the old ones either).
• There is rigging everywhere. I've been moving our gooseneck around almost daily, as it's next to the trashbags now. Rigging is everywhere inside the boat and outside.
• The boat rides higher on the water because it weighs so much less, reducing stability, and making for a bumpier existence.

In short, it's been very turbulent and upsetting for both Charlotte and I to be mastless for the last 90 days. I swung by the boat yard (which we will not speak our opinions about until our mast is back on the boat) and it looks like, God willing, we'll have the mast back on within a month or so. I can't wait, and am really looking forward to being a sailor again. I'll keep the blog updated as this progresses forward.

The mast saga: part deux

Boy oh boy do I have some updates for you guys. The three people I know (who know wooden boats) told me that my current mast is fine, and well capable of going around the world with the proper repairs. This list includes Ryan, John (of S/V Sea Raven), and Jay Greer (who the Pardey's mention in their books). Jay was nice enough to swing by the mast yesterday, and although we couldn't hook up directly, he checked it out and called me this morning to tell me his findings.

Also, Robert Perry chimed in on the issue, after I sent him an email explaining my problem, and how I was looking at putting the new CT41 mast on:

I think a wooden CT41 mast would be way too heavy for your boat. I would not
recommend this change.

So, if Robert Perry is telling me not to put the new CT41 mast on, it's a dead issue. Doug Jones of Traditional Boat Works was very cool throughout the entire process (he's the one with the CT41 mast), and honestly I can't knock him for not knowing that the mast would be too heavy for my HC36. I'm the skipper of the Rebel Heart, which sometimes means I get to sit around with my stupid yacht captain's hat on, smoking from my pipe. Other times, it means that I have to deal with every aspect of this vessel, including the power, lights, steerage, plumbing, electrical, safety, and in this case, sail plan and weight balance.

On John's (again, my neighbor and skipper of S/V Sea Raven, another Hans Christian) advice, I made a few calls around for some aluminum masts, but didn't find very much. There was one nice deal: a mast+boom+hardware for $2,000 over at Pacific Offshore Rigging, but I'd lose two feet on my mast height, and a Hans Christian is already a little underpowered as it is, so chopping two more feet would be brutal. I'll make a few more calls, but the aluminum route seems tricky as heck. It would probably be wiser for me to keep my ears open in general, after I get all this fixed. Buying spars is like buying anything else, in that the time to buy it is when you don't need it. With the mantra of "al taytseh friar!" running through my head, I should be buying things when I've got the upper hand, not when I'm mastless and desperately wanting to turn this power boat back into a sailboat.

So, the new plan is as follows:

1. Measure out the pieces of spruce we need for the repairs.
2. Open up the screwed in (non scarfed) repair.
3. Contact a fumigating company to bag and gas the spar, killing the termites. Also, Jay Greer mentioned that some gasses can kill dry rot spores as well, so he recommended me getting that done as well.I'll be pumping copper into the
4. Do the repairs... I have a feeling there might be several blog posts just about this.
5. Epoxy, paint, and re-attach the hardware.
6. Turn my power boat back into a sailboat.

Well, this whole experience has certainly put me in closer contact with my rig, and demystified a lot of it. Honestly, looking back, I think part of my desire to get the new mast was a spinoff of our disposable-consumer culture. If your TV breaks, you don't fix it, you get a new one. When was the last time you put a patch in your jeans? You toss them, and get new ones. I'm not positive how much of that motivated me towards the new mast (instead of repairing the old one), but there was something there to be sure.

Being the captain of a boat is a lot of responsibility. I consider myself fortunate that I was raised around boats, enjoy them, and have spent a decent amount of time on the water. Even with that, there are times when I have to make big decisions, and have very little information to go off of. It's frustrating, because the buck stops here, and unlike software (or some other topic I know fairly well), making an important decision with little information is a recipe for disaster.

But I'm happy with the way it played out thus far, even if it has been a bit traumatic. I exhausted a lot of different options, got advice from several different people, and bounced that advice off of others to try to come up with the correct approach. Those are skills that I continually hone in my corporate life, so it looks like my office job does actually have some direct benefit towards my nautical life (beyond financing it, of course).

We've escaped the boat yard, and are now mast-less.

No mast, so sad!Where do I even begin?

As I blogged about earlier, we had the boat hauled out for a paint job, and removed the mast (a process called "unstepping") so we could inspect it, and refinish it. Within a couple of days, we found a couple patches of rot, a couple of termite nests, and a previous repair that was botched. The cost of repairing it all is around $6K.

I put a post on the wooden boat forums, and got in contact with someone who directed me towards towards Doug Jones, of Traditional Boat Works. They mentioned that Doug might have two spare spars sitting around, and sure enough he does. I went over and checked it out; it's nearly a perfect match for my existing one. Saturday I'm going to head over and make sure my hardware fits, and that there aren't any other surprizes. Predicated that the plan works, I can have Doug pick up my old mast, and get started on getting the new one ready. Of course, this also means that it's a great time to replace the shrouds and stays ( = more $$).

It's a very traumatic experience getting your rig pulled. Living in a filthy boat yard for four days (no toilet, running water, or privacy) isn't that much fun either. I'm sitting at the public dock on my cellular card at the moment. The wind was pretty strong this afternoon, and I didn't want to risk playing bumper boats and smashing into anything. So, I'll wait out the wind, and have my friend help put the boat in. I'm going to feel really good when I'm safely back in the slip.

These last four days have been really crazy, and emotionally draining. It's really sad seeing our beautiful boat with no mast, and seeing the shrouds and stays all piled up on a concrete floor, looking like trash, is hard to deal with as well. I have a lot of love for this vessel, and she deserves better than that.

I'll update more as things progress, but like I said, right now I'm just looking forward to getting a good night's rest, being able to cook a meal again, and if I can spare a moment, have a bit of fun.

Update on Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 19:38 by Eric

Safely back in the slip. Whew. We're not out of the woods yet, but it's very nice to be out of the yard and back in the slip. Tonight I'm going to watch some TV, read my books, and chill out.

The hallout (read: "mast saga") has begun

I'm dead tired, and only taking a break because Ryan had to go to work, and I need to grab lunch. I've taken two weeks off work, and this is the first week. We hauled out Koehler Kraft, a notorious wood-oriented boat yard in San Diego. The bottom has been painted, and the mast was pulled. I have pictures of all of it, but of course forgot my cable to transfer the pictures to the laptop, so they'll be arriving in the next few days most likely. I'll start with the highlights:

• Pulling the mast. What a crazy experience. I got to be on the bowsprit, muscling the yankee furler over the rails, making sure the aluminum doesn't bend. I had to chop two electrical wires in half, because there was no way to undo them from the source. It's laid down on some horses now, and the fun has only begun.
• Peeling varnish. We're more than halfway done at this point, which is amazing. Rory and Ryan (Ryan was there from 8:00am - 10:00pm) slaved away with me yesterday on this. I've gotten really good at scraping varnish and 5200.
• Rot. We found a nice big piece, about 5 feet south of the mast head (the mast is 44 feet overall). Cost to repair, $2000 (or so).
• Termites. Some termites decided to make a nice little home in the rotted section. I think we've found them all (famous last words...), and it seems like they were localized to the rotted section. Either way, termites are frigin scary.
• A bad joint put in by a previous owner. I'll put the pictures of this up soon, but the patched in piece that they put through is cheap, not load bearing, and sadly not something that should stay up there. Cost to repair, $2000 (or so).
• Living in the yard for a couple of days. Our boat is our home, so when the boat goes onto a cradle in a boatyard and gets filthy, so does our home. Also, when you need to climb a 12' ladder to get onto the boat, you can imagine how much fun that is when needing to take a dog to go pee... three times a day.
• Charlotte is in Utah with her family. This is good for several reasons, but from my point of view I'm glad that she's insulated from boat hell right now.
• I'm dumping the roller furler.

All in all, I think this is going to cost upwards of $7000 by the time it's all said and done. That's not chump change, and although the idea of shelling out that much money is shockingly painful to me, so is the idea of navigating around the world's oceans with known rig problems. The idea of pulling the mast was to lay it down, inspect it, find all kinds of problems, and correct them. So in that regard, I'm 3/4 of the way through.

I like to provide dollar values for my blog readers, as to put some reality into the costs of owning a boat. I spoke with a friend of mine about it, who asked "if you knew that you were going to have to deal with this when you bought the boat, would you do it all over again?"

It's a good question, and the answer is absolutely yes. In reality, I probably would have ponied up an additional $20K onto the original purchase price to have the rig in spectacular shape. It's more the trauma of watching our home get torn apart, seeing termites eating it away, and things of that sort, that's the real tough part to deal with.

I'll get some pictures up soon; probably late tomorrow if I can't get it done by today. Blogging is therapeutic for me, so I try to find the time to do it. As helpful as it may be for my mind, however, it does not get the varnish stripped off the mast any faster, so I must get back to the grindstone (a.k.a. "my vacation").

Update on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 22:38 by Rebel Heart

Okay, I got the pictures up. The one on the left is the mast getting swung off the boat (by the big 70 ton crane in the background).