The House Looks Like a Sail Loft!

Replacing the sacrificial UV protection strip

Now that we are back home I needed to spend a bit of time giving the genoa and the staysail some TLC. There were a few runs of stitching that needed redoing because the thread had been weakened by UV light, a couple of patches to attach to reinforce some worn spots on the sails, plus a section of the sacrificial UV protection on the staysail needed replacing. Nothing too major. However, when I unpacked the foresails at home I quickly realised that 750 square feet of sail and our living room don't go too well together. The staysail, which looks fairly small and insignificant when it is on BV, seemed to fill all of the available space in the living room. The genoa, which is three times the size, was definitely a bit of a monster to manhandle around and work on.

The UV protection strip on our staysail gets a bit of a battering from the genoa sheets which run across it at every tack if the staysail is furled. So whilst it is a pain to do, it is better to replace the strip promptly before there is any risk of damage to the sailcloth below it. The old adage 'a stitch in time saves nine' seemed very apt.

All in all it took a day and a half to complete everything; far longer than I expected. On the plus side I only got a couple of stab wounds from the awl when I was hand stitching a really thick area near the clew. I think it worked out as 16 layers of sailcloth and acrylic fabric so it was a bit much to fit under the foot of the sewing machine.

It's not just been work on the sails. One of the lightbulbs in the main compass had blown whilst we were away so you couldn't read the compass very well at night when on port tack. Replacing that was another job that seemed like it should be a relatively quick fix but turned out to be a little more fiddly; a common theme on boat jobs it seems! What looked like a simple 'undo 3 screws and lift out the compass' job ended up as a 'take the compass surround apart in situ so that the compass could then be lifted out' job. Fiddly but a lot easier than disturbing the stainless steel work, wiring and radar display. Typically, access to some of the screws was awkward and needed some improvisation. Having got it all apart, changing the tiny bulb took just seconds to do. With the compass removed we got rare access to the upper gears for the steering wheel so they got a healthy dose of gear grease before everything went back together. 'Change compass light bulb' crossed off the list of jobs and, having disturbed it, 'swing the compass' added to the list.... I think we are making progress but the list never seems to get shorter!

I also managed to tidy up the way that the bottom mainsheet block is attached to the traveler. When we got BV the bottom block used to flop over and catch so, as a 'quick' fix, we had supported it with a short length of large diameter hose pushed over the shackle and attachment loop. Not pretty but it has worked for the last 5 years with an annual replacement of the hose which cracked. However, at the Southampton Boat Show last week I finally found a suitable spring to hold up the mainsheet block - a much more elegant solution than a piece of 38mm sanitary pipe!