Sailing Vessel Still Time: ACE First Sail

Saturday, April 23, 2016

ACE First Sail

Had a work party to get ACE ready for sailing.

Me
Michael Cullen
Micheal Ahearn
Jenny
Peter
Mark
Christine
Brent

We had lots to do:

attach mainsheet deck block
rig mainsheet
install spinnaker topping lift cleat
tension rig
fix outhaul purchase
install reefing line
remove wind instrument

The wind instrument is not working at all, so I went up the mast in a bosun's chair:

I spent about half an hour at the top of the mast removing the electrical tape and bolts to remove the wind instrument. I pulled the cable out of the top of the mast with a tracer and lowered it to the deck. When I took the connector apart, sure enough the ground pin had come loose. Going to replace the entire connector this week.

We spent ALMOST 3 HOURS trying to correct the outhaul purchase. There are two blocks inside the mast that were not rigged properly and would not allow us to flatten the sail in strong winds.

I had got all the sails from my house delivered to the dock the day before. As we were loading them into the boat, we had no mainsail: the racing main is in to Evolution Sails for batten pocket repairs, and the dacron delivery main was at Kris' place in Oakville. No problem, we got Sumac's main.

It was a LOT smaller, but a good sail. It was 8ft from full hoist, and the much shorter on the boom (ACE's boom is 16.5ft, while Sumac is 10ft).

We went out with this fractional main, and #2 genoa With 15+ knots from the south, we got the boat moving upwind at close to 8 knots. We hoisted one of Razorbill's symmetrical spinnakers and got the boat doing close to 9 knots.