Bending on the Sails

I awoke to the sound of silence on Thursday morning.  After a disturbed night of very strong winds that was somewhat of a relief but it did mean an early start to try to bend on the the sails.

Hoisting the foresails on your own is much easier with no wind and so with around 5 kts of wind I tackled them first in case the wind got up later.

Then started the fun of fitting the mainsail, sliding in the five battens and then reattaching the luff fittings to the mainsail track cars.  An extra pair of hands would have really helped but I managed to get off lightly with only sore fingers and one blood blister.

 But then it started to rain.  Fortunately, based on the forecast of rain, I had already managed to feed all of the wires from the base of the mast through their deck gland fittings.  That meant that as the rain stopped play on the top-deck, I was still able to progress things down below.  I connected up the AIS, VHF and NAVTEX aerials; the navigation, tri-colour, steaming, and anchor lights;     the Raytheon Seatalk system for the wind vane/anemometer; and the thickest wire with all of the connections for the radar.  It all looked much simpler when the wires were tucked away neatly as in the photograph on the left.

And so that was it.  After a  couple of weeks of hard work BV was ready to go again.  It felt very strange.  Weeks of planning and preparation had gone into getting all of this work done and it had dominated my thoughts.  A milestone moment then and I guess the reality of how much we have achieved so far will sink in properly after we take BV to sea again.