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Boothbay Harbor, ME (08/11/03) - It took
over a year to design and build a replacement for our defective
mast. With the new mast and boom from Composite Engeering in Concord
MA, the boat is now nicely stiff and well balanced. It has
a narrower and
much more definite groove. When you get it trimmed properly
the boat pops out like a rocket.
Our new 1200 sq. ft. mainsail is the very first sail ever built
with Doyle's new 8-oz Ocean Weave fabric. Besides being incredibly
strong, it only weighs about
150
lbs. In
total, we have reduced the weight of the boat by almost 10% and the
savings
is almost all aloft.
All sail controls on the new rig are able to be done
manually by one person. There's no mainsail furling, just a Dutchman
sail
flaking system. Oversized Antal cars let the sail drop
in seconds and fold neatly. All of the rigging is designed for
minimum force handling.
The
main halyard is two part and lead to an Anderson 46 hydraulic
winch on
the mast. The furling jib has a soft luff from Future Fibres
in New Zealand. It is hoisted with a 4-part halyard. The whole
thing furls on a Facnor SDG 12000 continuous loop furler. It's
easy and slick, and, of course, there's no forestay when the jib
is down.
Bruce Schwab (www.oceanplanet.org)
suggested using a Hoyt boom for the jib as a solution to limited
space for a track to make the jib self-tacking. In keeping with my
desire to be able to do everything from inside the pilothouse in
the middle of the winter, both the main sheet and jib sheets are
double ended and lead to hydraulic reel winches.
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The reel winch
for the main sheet is left over from the Aerorig setup. We added
a new
reel winch for
the jib which I found from Dockmate in Florida. It was hard to
find a
small hydraulic winch with enough force. This one is normally
used for pulling power boats into the dock. It pulls at 3000 lbs
and
only weighs about 14 lbs. All in all, the rig handles well with
no power assist. With the remote use of the hydraulics, the sail
trimming is fully automated from the cockpit or the pilothouse.
Unlike most of our travels, our overnight passage from
Marblehead was uneventful. We picked the only cloudless night in
the past month. Since then we've been dealing with the humidity,
rain and fog that's been plaguing the whole East Coast. Nevertheless,
this part of Maine is clearly one of the most beautiful cruising
grounds anywhere.
We're getting the itch to head north again. I'm hoping
that we'll make it back to Nova Scotia this summer and maybe on to
Newfoundland.
More >>
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S/V
Barbara Ann
