Messing around with boat

Unfortunately, the way I work makes it hard to sail during week days - I arrive at my boat too late in the evening to have enough wind and time for any meaningful sailing. This however is a perfect time to mess with the boat - fix some small jobs and simply be on the boat, enjoying “bryggsegling”.

Tonight I’ve installed steel mesh in most vents. Wasp queens have woken up from winter sleep and look for a place to build nests. I don’t want to experience having wasps in my boat, like last year, so meshing vents is necessary.

Last week was hot and sunny but weather forecast shows heavy showers coming. High time to properly install mast collar. It’s a home-made collar, will suffice for this season but I need too buy a proper, rubber collar before next summer.

I’ve removed sea-water pump from the engine - to repair it at home. All parts are delivered so it is time to get into this job now.

The last thing I wanted to do was to change cleats for genua sheets: current jam cleats are too small for sheets which annoys me since last summer. I want to change them to alladin-lamp type of cleats - made from Tufnol. Unfortunately, port side foundation has developed a split and upon drilling it totally broke apart.

So it will be epoxy work first - to bring it back into one piece and to close all old holes. Better now than during sailing, I suppose.

There is a big event in Stockholm this weekend: Skärgårdsmässan and Veteranbåtsfestivalen.

First sailing!

Perfect weather for first summer sailing: moderate southerly wind, sunshine and blue sky!

Jim has mustered in around 11 and helped preparing Meritaten for leaving Rosättra servicevarvet. We left the harbour around 11:30 on engine, unrolled genua and continued on sail. It became however motoring for most part of Vätosunded - wind died there, behind high coastline.

Entering Norrtäljeviken welcomed us with good wind so we put up mainsail and genua, killed the engine and continued on sails all the way to Norrtälje.

It was a quick sailing, with wind back all the way. We could run sails in butterfly configuration - talking and smoking pipes all the way.

We’ve met just a handful of boats - two - all of them motoring against the wind.

We’ve entered NSS harbour on engine and at 15:00 Meritaten was tied to her summer place. Klar on the boat, one more pipe, tea with honey - and so came my family to pick us from the harbour.

Very nice beginning of the season indeed!

Thanks Jim!

Mast climbing solo. Mainsail sliders. Rigging

I had to climb the mast again, this time only to spreaders: after tensioning the rig I needed to adjust positions of shroud lockers. When I bought Meritaten spreaders were just taped to shrouds to keep them in the same position. That’s asking for trouble: for shroud and spreaders to work properly the shroud needs to be fixed at the spreader end. Same principle as in hanging bridges. Ideally would be to use two wires instead of single shroud but then tensioning such a rig would be tricky.

I bought wire-stops at Benns. These are small clamps which sit on the shroud directly below and above the spreader’s end. With heavy load on the mast the shroud will be tensioned, giving strength to the mast. At some point the spreader may move which will change the angle between shrouds and the spreader resulting in catastrophical collapse of the whole truss. Wire-stops will prevent that.

To climb the mast alone I used proven technique of Prusik knots: one for bosun-chair attachement and the other as feet support.

This method works pretty well once one adjusts length of both loops so that it is possible to move the Prusik once it is offloaded. Otherwise it may jam against the other Prusik.

It took me a while to climb this way, with several jams forcing me to start over again. In the end I used short Prusiks with longer loops attached for feet support. Somehow it worked smoother than using a long loop directly for feet support Prusik. Mainsail halyard was used as a security line, folded against clamps on bosun chair.

Once this was done I moved to attaching mainsail hardware. Sliders on my new sail are made of stainless steel, contrary to old one where they were from nylon. The trick was that my mast track is of very old design so there are no sliders which can directly match. Maciej at Sailservice has found sliders made of stainless steel which almost match the track profile. Some modification was needed to fit them to the mast track.

It went quickly to modify these sliders: I opened their profile a bit.

Finally I could rise my brand new mainsail, insert battens and attach it to the boom. It is loose-foot sail that that was very straightforward.

Meritaten is now ready for sailing. Tomorrow I will provision her with fuel, food and water and we can sail to summer harbour on Saturday!

Rigging and other small jobs

Tonight I tensioned the rig and mounted genua onto the roller. All grease points on Furlex got Selden grease, turnbuckles followed.

Boom is mounted but I didn’t manage to instal mainsail - it became cold and dark. During the day it is 16 degrees but after sunset temperature drops to zero. Deck becomes iced so I take no risks dancing with ropes on it.

Last couple of evenings I was finishing some small jobs. I’ve installed rescue line on a drum - it supposedly will enable retrieving MOB after he/she grabs the rescue ring. I’ll test it underway but it seems that the drum has too much friction to seamlessly release the line without dragging rescue ring.

Sail track installation was finalised with tensioning the bolts and anchoring it to the hull.

If all goes well we leave Rosättra on Saturday.

Stepping the mast. Boom gooseneck modification

It was foggy Saturday morning, raining the whole night. Anders agreed to squeeze me into the queue - but I needed to be very early to prepare everything.
I came at 6 a.m and started with relocating 10 ton Staika which was blocking Meritaten in the slip. I could then motor out of the slip, around the harbour and into the crane.
Mast was prepared the evening before so now I just inspected that everything was rigged as it should. Checked navigation lights on mast top, prepared tools, tidied the deck and then Anders arrived.

We stepped the mast in 20 minutes. I motored to temporary mooring where I can stay until next weekend, preparing the boat for sailing.

At this point I did not fully tension standing rig. Too early for Meritaten - she needs some more days to fully swell her planks. I noticed that after stepping the mast we took water a bit faster. However - after partially tensioning the rig water inflow diminished to original level.

Before I instal boom I wanted to modify gooseneck. The original has no hooks to attach tack pennants when reefing with slab-reefing method. The boom has build-in rolling mechanism to roll-in the mainsail as reefing. This works somehow for the first reef but after that the sail becomes baggy and looses its form. It’s also very slow. I’ve decided to abandon this method and go with time-proven slab-reefing method.

Börje gave me boom track with two sliding cheek blocks - to handle clew pennants for 1st and 2nd reef. My gooseneck lacked any connection for tack side so I needed to fix that.

Benns sells custom made fittings and I was able to find one which should fit my hardware. The problem was that I could not remove the original bolt in the fitting - the nut and thread were smashed to form a rivet. I needed to remove the whole thing from the mast to take it to my workshop for proper procedures.

Trying to unscrew stainless steel screw which blocked gooseneck on the mast resulted in breaking one of my forged-steel screwdriver bits and bending the other. Only bit brace worked here - half century for stainless screw inside aluminium mast means it was welded in its place. In the end I twisted and broke the screw, releasing the gooseneck. I’ll need to make a new screw later.

Back in the workshop I cut the nut/rivet with angle grinder. Carbide blades are really something - they cut A4 steel like butter.

Benns screw fitted ideally, just one nylon washer was needed for spacing the nut from Tufnol block for mainsail downhaul.
One more screw - also “riveted” - needed to be grind, this time with hand tools as access was very limited. The same evening I came back to the boatyard and tried the modified gooseneck. It fits perfectly!

I read few reports that these bull-horns sometimes loose tack ring, resulting in unexpectedly shaken reef. I’ll see how it works. It should not be difficult to modify them anyhow.

As with most mast stepping activities - there can be one of more halyards which happen to be on the wrong side of the mast. This time it was just one. I climbed the mast and corrected that.

I take a mental note to change all running rig at the earliest convenience - old spinnaker halyard broke when I was testing it as my security line, just before climbing!

Kitchen was installed back into pentry, following the ship’s bell and my huge oil lamp which also serves as heating element.

I’ve connected navigation lights and checked them. Green, starboard lantern, was malfunctioning. After I disassembled it I found that plastic housing developed cracks, resulting in loose electrical connection.
I need to change all these lights anyway - they are ugly and have aged to the extend of being unreliable. Toplicht has a range of nice lights, matching more my old boat than these plastic ones I have.

Yep, one more item on the to-do list.

So now I have few days to clean-up the boat from all tools and rig sails and sheets. Water and food provisioning on Friday and Saturday - if weather allows - would be a departure day.