ACE Final Push

On Saturday Peter and I spent several hours tracing and labelling wires.  We had everything working except we did NOT have wind speed.  We had wind direction.  Cabling inside the boat looked good, so it must be at the mast head.

Final Sunday push to get the rigging done and wiring:

• me
• Michael C
• Michael A
• Mike
• Carson
• Jenny
• Peter

Carson was the first out, and we setup in the clubhouse for him to disassemble and integrate the two new B&G mast displays.  Very tedious work. 

Carson had done a nice job painting the mast bracket.  Will require some re-wiring with some solder crimp connectors and shrink wrap.

One crew worked on getting all the halyards run back to the pit, attached the boom, boom vang, and main sheet.

The other crew worked on planning the cable routing for the new instruments.  With the cables roughly layed out and powered, we verified that everything was working and talking to each other.

However, we still did not have wind speed.  We determined an open circuit at the top of the mast.

We attached a tracer line from inside the boat and sent Carson up the mast:

ACE has a 55ft mast:

Carson detached the masthead transducer from the masthead, and pulled the cable up the mast with the tracer line attached.

Peter, Mike, and I pulled the connector apart, and the black ground wire had disconnected from the pin in the connector:

D'OH

We pulled the pin and soldered it back on the wire with some shrinkwrap.  We checked the functionality before I went up the mast to re-install.  It might seem like this happened fast, but it took a couple of hours.

In the meantime, the guys were attaching the rear stanchions and lifelines.

We had to move ACE away from the mast crane to her temporary slip on dock 7.  Michael and I started the motor and cast off.  We were having trouble with the throttle/gear shift.   There is a button on the gear shift that when you put it in, disengages the transmission.  This button was stuck in.  I was able to jiggle the cable below to get us in reverse to back away from the mast crane area, but we could not get it to go in forward.  Going to get this looked at by a marine mechanic.

Peter and Leigh Davidson got the WYC work boat and towed us into a nearby slip.

Productive day, still have to:

• tension the rig
• connect the check stays
• troubleshoot forestay load cell
• power the displays
• clean up some wiring
• mount mast displays
• wax hull
• clean and organize the insides

Probably won't move ACE to National until the 2nd week of May, when it will be a little warmer!