Relaunch

Wednesday 20 June started off as a beautiful sunny day with very little wind; perfect for lifting BV back into the water and refitting the mast.  A quick light sand of the new Coppercoat to activate it was just finished as the travel-hoist engine revved into life.

The pictures tell the story:

The yard team hard at work plus an unknown interested bystander

Having reattached the shrouds, forestay and backstay,  the crane moved away and I was cast adrift to motor back to our mooring.  What a relief to have BV back in the water and the mast re-stepped!

That did, however, mark the start of a lot of work putting everything back together.  The first task was to set the tension on all of the new rigging wires.  When stepping the mast, the bottlescrews were wound up to little more than hand tight.  The mast could be at any angle and the wires were certainly not balanced and at the correct tensions.  The cap shrouds had to be adjusted to set the mast so it was vertical and then the shrouds adjusted to 15% of their breaking strain.  The intermediate shrouds were similarly tensioned making sure that the mast stayed straight.  With the correct tension on the backstay and some tension on the inner forestay, the lower shrouds were tensioned to give the mast some pre-bend shape.  All of that took several hours as quite often, particularly with the lowers, having got one set of wires at the correct tension it threw off the careful adjustments on some of the other wires.  It all came together in the end though and throughout the Loos tension gauge, pictures left, made the task significantly easier and more accurate.  Having got it all set up the only disappointment was realising that as the shrouds bed in with use they will stretch a little (0.05%) and so I will have to go through the whole process again before too long.

Once the rigging was properly tensioned, the mass of ropes sitting around the base of the mast screamed out to be untangled and re-run back to the clutches in the cockpit area.  That certainly smartened things up but it brought me to the next challenge of trying to re-fit the heavy boom on my own.  In the end I lifted the gooseneck end with the main halyard, the outboard end with the topping lift and, with an extra line from the outboard end around a snatch block at the port quarter, I was able to play three winches to position and reattach the boom.

With the boom back in place, the rod kicker attached and many of the line back in position, BV started to look much more like a sailing yacht.  Unfortunately by now the wind was blowing far too strongly to attach any sails so my last job before dusk was to rebuild the two Furlex systems in the hope that I would be able to re-attach the sails in the morning.

What a day... we had our sailing yacht back in the water and nearly ready to go again!