Piton, St Lucia

Persevere
Pat and Bruce
Fri 3 Feb 2012 00:13

13:49.38N 69:03.88W

 

3 Feb 2012

 

After what seemed forever we got some critical parts fixed.  All repairs were due to bad designs by the original manufacturer.  The boom vang bracket (this holds up the boom) was made of a weak aluminum casting that flexed and eventually cracked.  This is dangerous as if it totally failed the 700 kilogram spring pressure could launch things.  So I took the casting over to my local guy to make one out of stainless steel with a improved support to the mast.  This was done in three days at a large price but it is simply cost of labor to fabricate a part.  Nicely done and polished.  Now I have a bracket that could lift the boat!

 

Once that was done we could take the mainsail down to make repairs and take out the vertical battens.  Bad design to try to have vertical battens on a furling mainsail.  They never seem to furl in line with the mast causing them to wrap slightly.  When the wrap the battens act as a giant coil spring pushing the sailcloth out into the aft gap that the sail come out when it is unfurled.  Of course this causes tha jamming that many people experience.  Speaking with the manufacturer (actually the owner of the company) they state that vertical batten sails are a bit harder to furl than non battened mainsails.  All this is fine except the whole concept of a furling main is to make life easy for a short-handed crew, this is the opposite.  

 

So the short story is a couple of local worker helped get the jammed sail out of the mast, took over an hour of tedious work with one guy up on the bosun chairs yanking, pulling and kicking the sail to finally get it free.  Then the vertical battens came apart on trying to get them out so we could lower the sail.  So the main came down with most of the battens in place.  Over to the big grass lawn to lay out the sail and cut the batten pocket to get the remainder out.

 

Kenny the local sail maker did a great job and a fixed the cuts and a few wear spots.  So with the local guy we raised the mainsail without battens and furled and unfurled it successfully.  Still temperamental but workable.

 

Several other small fixes were done on the boat like buying a propane tank to replace the European Camping Gaz bottles.

 

So we finally left and head back south to the Pitons on a mooring.  A couple of days on the mooring with snorkeling for Pat and hull cleaning for me.  Met some friends at the mooring next to us, small world.