Team Seacats

With Tim Owens’ help Saturday evening, we set a record time and applied nearly all the mainsail graphics in about three hours. I had spent about 3 hours making the graphics that morning and used up about 160 linear feet of vinyl material (Bonnie and I have a vinyl graphics business on the side). The first year I did a sail like this, I had over 40 hours in it! I only had to apply a couple of graphics Sunday morning (that I hadn’t yet cut) but the mainsail is mostly done.

Today, Travis Phillips came by to help me check off a number of things from the current to-do list. Travis mounted my F18 rudder blades (2nd generation Nacra rudders that are a little wider and get a little better traction in the water) to this boat’s upper castings. My F18 lower castings were already seated to snuggly retain these rudders. We also checked the rudder alignment and it was spot on perfect (whew! One thing we DIDN’T have to work on). Travis did some metal work on the traveler cleat to get the angle of the cleat to suit a trapeze position a little better and replaced two of the foot straps on the back of the boat. Meanwhile, I worked out the details with the rigging at the front of the boat.

I remembered that we had a dilemma last year mounting the TackTick because we could only mount it under the spinnaker pole because of interference everywhere else. The compass was easily visible but the spinnaker pole shadowed the top-mounted solar cell that charges the battery on the compass and it died on us on the last race day (when we needed it the most!). I set out to rig the pole around the compass and it came out quite nicely. Typically the self tacker turning blocks are mounted right up by the bridle wires so there is enough line to feed the roller furler (even then you have to release some purchase to get it to furl). Since we’ve elected to not go with the furler I decided to move these blocks back on the spin pole to allow room for the compass. That doesn’t mean we can’t ever run a furler again…it just means that we’ll have to continue to be creative to get the rigging to work properly if we choose to do so in the future. I also mounted the new Ronstan swiveling cleats for the jib sheet on either side of the front bram provided by SailMax.biz. The next problem was the jib uphaul line and I found a way to route that control back to the beam again without interfering with the compass.

The jib uphaul is now run back under and to each outboard end of the front beam so it can be tweaked from either side of the boat. I used the cleats where the mast rotation control lines usually go. Since we work with mast rotation much more often than jib uphaul, I intend to run the rotation control back to a new cleat to be located near each dagger board where it is more accessible. I’ve got to place an order soon for hardware to finish up the self tacking jib tail and finalize the jib uphaul. We also don’t have a spinnaker halyard cleat or a tack line cleat sorted out yet.

Travis also helped me mount the mid-pole snuffer hoop this evening as well. We’ve done something a little out of the ordinary with the hoop in that it’s mounted further back on the pole (it’s actually “mid-pole” now). I had some grommets added to the trampoline to facilitate the attachment of the back of the bag. My hope is that this will help launch the spinnaker easier. It’s complicated; With the hoop mounted so far forward, the tackline doesn’t pull much spinnaker out of the sock when it pulls the tack out. The tack line is the only line that goes straight into the snuffer so when it leaves the bulk of the spinnaker (which is pretty much in a ball at this point) in the hoop, the halyard has to pull it out at an angle. This takes a LOT of effort on the sailors and is stressful to the spinnaker. Hopefully, the tack line will be able to “birth the baby” by itself leaving the rest of the hoist to go quickly and smoothly. It also presents less windage than being stuck way out there on the spin pole.