Home-work

We have owned BV for just over 5 years and I have finally got around to painting out the name of our old boat on our dinghy.  The dinghy is made from Hypalon so the paint has to be a special, especially gooey sort.  It doesn't provide the smoothest finish but apparently nothing else sticks to the material.  Our dinghy is rather ancient and over the years that we have owned it, it seems to have stood up well to being landed on beaches and abandoned on rocks as we have made various trips ashore.  Therefore, once the paint has dried, it does deserve some TLC to stick down a couple of patches on its bottom that are starting to lift.  That should keep it going for a while longer.  I'll need to track down some white gooey Hypalon paint too so that we can paint on BV.

In true DIY style I retreated into the garage with some tools and some wood.  After a short period of sawing I now have version 3 of the template for the shelf in the lazarette.  The old adage of "measure twice, cut once" has been ringing in my ears so I decided to go for a third version of the template cut from thin plywood as a final check of dimensions before cutting the proper material.  We'll check it all fits at the weekend and make any final adjustments before moving on to making the actual shelf.



Yachting 'homework' wouldn't be complete without at least some 'playing with string'.  Before we set off we are going to replace the halyards that haul up the three normal sails.  We have gone for Dyneema which is a high spec rope which has very little stretch.  That does mean though that I will need to learn some new splices as Dyneema needs a slightly different method for splicing a loop for the shackle to get maximum strength.  Probably a job for winter so the halyards will be ready to be fitted just before we go and won't have been outside over winter.  For the time being I have been splicing hollow soft eyes in the lazy ends of the new halyards to make fitting them easy.

Another project which has now been finished was making up a parachute anchor.  We have a Seabrake drogue which we can deploy in extreme weather to slow us down but there are also various other opinions on what to do if you are caught out in a storm.  We have read a variety of the well know books on the subject but Lin & Larry Pardey's Storm Tactics Handbook in particular puts forward a convincing argument for having a parachute anchor which can be deployed whilst the yacht is hove-to.  I also like the idea of having a couple of options open to us as ropes can wear through quickly in a storm and sea anchors lost.

An online military surplus equipment store provided an appropriately sized unused braking parachute for a fast jet which will work nicely for us.  It's smaller than a full parachute and so will take up much less storage spare.  More storage space but at the expense of slightly more drift at sea in a storm - everything is a compromise!  I just needed to spend a few hours measuring out and attaching the parachord as well as seizing on a heavy duty metal thimble to cope with the wear at the attachment shackle.  The lines are all now in a plait which will come undone with one pull and the whole thing is stowed in a waterproof bag ready should we ever need it.  Like the storm sails, it's kit we will have onboard but really hope that we never have to use.