Team Seacats

It’s not quite that close yet, but it’s getting there. I got the sails up tonight and determined that I have to modify some of the rigging. I need to cut off a tail on the forestay that was setup for the ‘new’ jib system (which is not reliable enough IMHO for ocean distance racing). We’ve gone to the old-school wire halyard for the jib instead and the extra ring is just hanging loose up near the top of the jib.

I still can’t get the right length spinnaker pole bridles, so I’m going to have to cut these, re-swage them, and since they will now be too short, use high-strength vectran to fine tune the spinnaker pole height. It’s nice to have this adjustment anyway.

Because we forgot to rig the spinnaker halyard the other night, I wasn’t able to check the hoist height of the spinnaker (a concern of mine since we had some trouble with the new Nacra20s at the U.S. SAILING Multihull Championship). We’ll have to lower the mast and re-run the halyard to check it too.

There was an additional problem we had at the Championship with a patch that wraps around the luff of the mainsail near the foot – it jams in the entry to the luff groove in the mast making hoisting the sail difficult. As the mainsail is downhauled this patch transitions the entry point leaving it jammed and with some downhaul on the main. Eventually the patch begins to stretch open making the issue worse and when it comes time to drop the sail (we have to raise it slightly to clear the halyard hook at the top of the mast) it can be impossible. We need to find a solution to that.

Tommorow night I’m going to run around the boat with a tape measure and make a list of the needed hardware and lines.

Originally uploaded by Team Seacats.