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Went sailing with Judy. Very nice day on the water.. Wind was about 15 knots from the N/NE coming off the coastline. It layed the waves down so that the water was flat near shore. Really nice sailing. Breck in Runnaway just scooted by us.. even though he is much heavier the longer waterline paid off today.
Made the mistake of not re-leasing the boom vang after practicing putting a reef in. I shook out the reef and then tightened up on the main halyard to put the sail all the way back up. It got stiff and I heard a spang!!! sound.. lol don’t ask me to tell you what spang!! sounds like :). Long story short It bent the stainless fitting on the mast base that it attaches to and turned loose. I fixed it the next morning.
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I took Mirriam, Emily and William out on Sea Puppy today. It was an interesting day in more ways than one. We made a convert to sailing and I learned some lessons I should have already known.
William had a very bad first experience with sailing (very bad case of moition sickness) and has been very forcefull in his resistance to going out sailing since.
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Talk about your epic tantrums. Anyway Mirriam is working hard to help him overcome this fear before it becomes a long term problem. I knew he was going to be a handfull when I agreed to let him go sailing with us. There isn’t much on earth as loud as a young child who is scared of something and doesn’t want to go. To be honest for a little bit I started to want to just crawl inside myself and turn the noise off 🙂 He has a pair of lungs and an impressive streak of stubborn in using them.
Went with Judy to the sherman and back… about 7 hours altogether… actually we went down the coast for a while before working our way out to the sherman and then back..
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short and sweet for now.. 🙂 3rd place in first race.. 1st place in second race.. it was close in the first race and we were way ahead on second race.. 🙂 everyone did a stellar job of it.
We bent the spinnaker pole around the babystay. I forgot that the babystay was on and the foredeck guy 🙂 didn’t notice either so when we put it on the first time it was on the wrong side.. when we pulled in on the guy to pull the pole back it bent around the baby stay… 🙁 now I need a new section of tubing to put the fittings back on.
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Ok I got the second battery and installed it.. I had to create the jumper cable from one negative post to the other battery’s negative post and then connected it all up. So now I have two 92 ah AGM batterys wired to a OFF/1/2/Both switch.. it works well.
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Well I actaully got around to replacing the head.. It was very easy.. took about 10 or 15 minutes to take the old one out and about that to put the new one in… much easier than rebuilding it. and only abuot 30 dollars more expensive.. 🙂 good deal to me 🙂
picture of new head
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I had to use the old right angle fitting from old head to get the hose to the holding tank to go on it. The fitting on the new head was only a 45 degree angle and wouldn’t let the existing hose reach correctly.
Well I took my battery back in monday to west marine and they put a tester on it and then exchanged it out for another battery. They didn’t have any group 27 gells in stock so gave me a group 27 AGM battery. I got 13 dollars in change back as the AGM batterys are cheaper than the Gel batterys now. The GEL was 87 amp hours while the AGM is 92 amp hours.. So I got about a 5 amp hour upgrade. The downside is that AGMS do not last as long as GEL batterys. I will be buying another Group 27 AGM to make a two battery bank on Sea Puppy. This will give me a much larger capacity and also some redundancy.. As I have already installed the cabling and connectors prior when I was rewiring the batterys to be on port instead of starboard it will just be a matter of hooking up the second battery.
Waking up to the lapping of water on the hull before sunrise is an unbeatable combination. I sleepily got up and started hot water to boiling for tea and hot chocolate and then took my camera up on deck and took some pictures of the sunrise…. truly gorgeous..
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After sitting in the cockpit and watching the sun come up while sipping on a cup of hot chocolate we got moving and put the jib and mainsail on the roller furler and boom respectively.
Well I intended to go sailing saturday but one thing after another ate up the whole day as I made my way to the boat. We finally got out of the marina about 5 pm and I realized that the battery was dead. We were planning on anchoring out for the night so this was a bit serious… no anchor light no depth gauges no lights inside or running lights.. So we turned right around and redocked. I drug out the charger but when I started to charge the battery the charger kept giving a F01 error and wouldn’t charge it.
Sunday I pulled the sails off of the boat and took them over to richards house and we sewed up some seams that were pulling apart on the jib sun cover on the leech and repaired a batten pocket that had worn a hole in it on the main. The next day or so we started to hear about Ernesto so I didn’t bother putting the sails back on the boat. Just waited till after the storm..
Luckly Ernesto came and went with not much effect.. by the time it got here it was 40 mph winds and lots of rain. 🙂 I like this sort of storm!!
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Well we took Sea Puppy out racing today.. I thought I was going to be the race committe today but Chapel and her husband were in town and volunteered to do it. 🙂 so I got to race Sea Puppy.
I was supposed to have lots of crew and most of them ended up not showing up. Miriam was the only one left with me when we left the dock and because of her surgery she couldn’t help sail… It was looking more like a casual solo race for me than anything really competitive. Once we got out there though we took aboard Richard off the committe boat. He had helped Chapel and husband as well as her niece and friend get the committe boat out and the course set prior to the race. Chapels niece and friend were starting to get sea sick on the committe boat which was anchored so I took them onboard also ( the perked up after getting moving again.)
Again I was supposed to have a full boat.. I had invited some friends out and they called saturday evening and canceled. Then I invited my neighboor and his wife that have the slip next to me to go out and they said yes but canceled at the last minute. I ended going out with Mark a newer member of the club that was at breakfast.
We put sails up just outside the intrance to the marina and sailed the five miles down the waterway to the inlet and onto the ocean. Winds on the ocean were running 15 to 18 through early afternoon and then picked up to 20 to 22 mid afternoon when we were headed back in. Once out on the ocean we headed torward southport and ran about 6 or 7 miles up the coastline and then back.
With the new head sail arrangement I didn’t feel as if Sea Puppy were overpowering and wanting to head up quite as soon as she used to. Mabye the slight change in rake is responcible for that or maybe the fact that I put a lot of bend in the mast with the backstay adjuster when the wind started to really kick, as well as pulling in on the cunningham and flattening reef to flatten out the main. I would say the wind was 18 to 20 when we finally put a reef in the main and running a little more than 20 when we pulled the jib into 100% down from 150%. We didn’t reef the jib because we felt we needed to but simply because I had not tried sailing her with the roller furling reefed before and wanted to see how the sail set. I was very impressed. The luff of the sail has the foam strips sewn on to help with furled sail shape as well as the furler being designed to take one whole wrap in the middle of the sail before it starts pulling in on the foot. Between the two I had a very decent sail shape when brought down to 100%.
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