keltik

Could you dykem/blue up the shaft of a lifter and see how much it compresses after a hearty nang? Not exactly easy tho but probably cheaper than a high speed keyhole camera

Boat yard guys must be paid per job. Lifted out at 8am, washed and wet sanded by 12. Patched, masked and dry sanded by 2. Sprayed by 3. Tomorrow they'll re-coat the propeller. On Friday morning I'll refill the gearbox and replace the zinc anodes on the prop then back in the drink that afternoon. Just in time for Sundays race

Installed a slightly larger gear oil header tank and fitted it a little higher. Hopefully this slows the water ingress until my new seals turn up. Thanks Mazda 626 at pickapart Sailmaker has got the design of the new sail sorted And I've been trying to art up a logo for a crew shirt

Yeah the antifouling paint is pretty chooched And my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard

Part of the job is tensioning the rigging in the new position. In the first attempt - I just cranked the rigging screws up to what felt right. This is one of those jobs where too little tension can cause the mast to collapse so its better to be sure. So i went out and bought a hilariously overpriced tension gauge. Was shooting for about 950kg of pre-load on the main support wires, my previous attempt to what felt good'n'tight was only about 500kg. The other wires control the shape of the mast. Basically, we are trying to pull the top of the mast down so hard it bends in the middle a little. Then we can limit the amount of bend using tension on the other rigging wires. We're shooting for a nice even curve all the way along the mast. The pre-bend is used to ensure the mast stays bent in the correct direction. If we get enough load into the rig to over-centre or reverse the bend - the mast isn't supported in the other direction so it will collapse. What's the ideal amount of pre-bend? That seems to be a bit like asking whats the best engine oil. You'll get a bunch of opinions that might be right but never seem to agree. So I dialed in a bit of bend that sorta looks right compared to a bunch of the other boats around me. The sailmaker reckons its adequate. There's still room for adjustment and getting the settings right will be a lot easier with the tension gauge. I'll put up some pics of the new sail being made, the process seems pretty interesting. In the meantime, my new prop shaft seals still haven't arrived and the gearbox oil is getting milky again. There's also a sad amount of pubes growing along the waterline on one side - the side I've been cleaning most frequently. So its really time for another lift out and a new coat of antifouling paint. I was hoping to postpone it a bit longer and do it in time for the winter series, but the growth is getting bad enough I cant ignore it. Since we're getting lifted out to do the drive leg oil - might as well throw more money at it.

Hanging a rope straight down from the top of the mast to the deck is the generally accepted method of measuring mast rake. With my adjustments, I've managed to move the line forward around 60cm. Is this enough? Maybe. Went for a sail with the new angle and things felt better. I don't want to go too far forward or will end up with a different set of problems but things seem much closer to balanced. It looks a lot better.

Time for the next project, the main sail is very much on its last legs. The fabric has worn to be paper thin in places and there's 2 or 3 small tears developing. I think its about 10 years old and has been used hard in that time, so its justifiably end of life. As sails wear, the fabric stretches and they lose a lot of the nice airfoil shape - making them more draggy, less efficient and harder to trim. Talked to the sailmaker about getting a new one - the new sail will be made to suit the shape of the rig, so If we're not happy with it, now is the time to change things. So what is the current issue? Weather helm. Here's my simplified understanding as a novice; The boat rotates around a point somewhere in line with the keel. If the front and back sails don't produce equal amounts of torque around this point, the boat will always try to turn itself into the wind and the helmsman will need to apply opposite rudder to counteract the force. This creates drag and makes the boat slower. A small amount of weather helm is considered good, but any more than 5-10 degrees of rudder angle is universally agreed to as being bad. The boat currently has a LOT of weather helm when the wind angle is at 70-90 degrees. This can be countered by reducing the amount of power the mainsail is making, but thats reducing overall power and speed. At the moment, our mast is raked backwards quite a lot. Most online sources think 3-4 degrees is a good number. My bucket trigonometry estimates we have around 6 degrees. We want to move the whole sail plan forward a little relative to the pivot point. This can be done by reducing the amount of rake and putting the center of effort closer to the pivot point (around the keel). So this weekends project is to adjust the rigging to take some of the rake out of the mast. The art is in trying to keep a 15 meter long aluminium extrusion arrow straight using only tension on the supporting wires. I've never tried this before, but we'll see how we go. Unfortunately, a bendy mast profile with fractional rig and multiple swept back spreaders is one of the hardest configurations to get right. With adjustments needed on 3 different stays each side of the mast to keep it straight and tight and inducing the correct amount of pre-bend. Reading can only teach so much. Only one way to learn I guess.

Let me assure mr creme_de_la_canna that a Miata will not and did not make light work of the echo

The series finished and wasn't renewed for another season. It's ok tho because the same writer is working on a new show "I know what you redlined last summer 4...GR"

Lessons learned: Sail changes are a lot harder in choppy seas. Do them early. I knew beating into the wind is hard work but underestimated how miserable it gets on a long trip. Fix that shower drain pump and sink drain and make sure the same thing can't happen to the toilet outlet. If lots of smart people leave the day before, they might be on to something.

There are no photos to accompany this post, so you'll have to use your imagination. I'm sitting knee deep in dirty water with the boat pitching all over the place. I tried bailing the water into the sink but the sink wouldn't drain. So I'd bail it into the toilet, then flush the toilet when the bowl got full. Then spew into the toilet, then it would all slosh out when we got a wave, them bail it all back into the toilet, flush and repeat. Water was coming out of the shower drain pump and seemed to be siphoning in from the sea. I guess the level of the hose was below the water line with the boat leaned over. So I shut off the drain valve through the hull. Eventually got rid of all the water and went back up on deck for another spew. Dad was soaked through having had a load of spray come over the boat. The wind was up to 28 knots, we were on the edge of control and needed a sail change and another reef in the main. Slipper island was only half hour away so we decided to drop sails and motor there to check on our leak and recover a bit. While motoring towards slipper island, dad went down below to change and found the carpets soaked, his bedding damp and with shit weather forecast for the next few days - nothing was going to dry out. The Whitianga race was a DNF, the Mercs were still at least 5 hours away and we would be motoring head first into the wind and chop making 5knots at best. So we turned around, pointed the boat back at Mt Maunganui and put the mainsail up. With 25knots of wind behind us, we spent most of the ride home blasting along at 8-10 knots with bursts up to 14knots surfing down the swell. Made it back home in 4 hours and had a great time doing it.

Legends regatta came around, all the smart people headed up to Mercury Islands on Thursday night to avoid weather but as I had entered a race on the Friday - we left Friday morning for a 7:30am start. Conditions were lovely. They didn't stay that way. We started the race with our #2 genoa, but the wind was lighter than expected at 12knots. So I did a sail change and put up the big #1. A couple hours later the wind had built to 15knots so another sail change back to the #2. Then it got up to 20knots so we reefed the main. Then 25knots. Each sail change was really tiring, we only had 2 people on board and I'm not the fittest person. The boat was on the wind speed limit for these sails and the sea state was building... so I was saving up energy for another sail change to the #4 jib when crewmate/dad went down below and found a lot of water in the shower/toilet floor. He tried to investigate, turned on the shower drain pump but had to come up on deck for a bit of a spew. I went down to investigate and found the shower drain pump hose broken off and the pump running but refusing to prime. As the boat was heeled over to one side, the water was contained to the shower/toilet compartment but was almost knee deep.

Had the next round of the short handed series on the day I picked up the new sail. I was really looking forward to flying it as I was expecting 15-20knot winds but the sailmaker (who was also in the race) suggested I might want to use something smaller as it was going to get exciting. Taking his advice, we double reefed the main and put up our #4 jib, the smallest in the collection. The wind built through the race until it was howling over 30 knots and the harbour was getting rowdy. The boat was ok with those conditions, but with maximum heel on - I managed to fall down the cockpit and mildly injure myself. So we withdrew from the race with a DNF.

Had another lift out and drained a gallon of milkshake out of the sail drive. Filled it with new oil since the seals I need are on backorder and the oil is cheap. I temporarily added a header tank to the gear case (using a Mondeo clutch reservoir from pickapart) so the oil level will be above the waterline hopefully slowing/stopping the ingress of seawater. It's working so far and should get me through till the new bits arrive. The new jib also arrived and looks good. Haven't tried it in anger yet but it flew nicely on a trial sail up the harbour in light winds. The autopilot is also working great! All set for the mega exciting Legends regatta on labour weekend.

The windscreen squirts stopped working, so I've been driving by braille the last few months and praying for sufficient rain to clean the screen. The windscreen washer tank on the early X350 was originally in the driver's side guard in front of the wheel. I don't know why, but on my model year it got moved to the passengers side guard behind the wheel, jammed between the wheelarch and the door pillar. Really needed a banana for scale but that tank holds about 5 litres and is perfectly sculpted to fit in the gap around the chassis rail. i.e it was a bit of a prick to remove and even harder to clean. All that effort just to unblock the little filter thing. I've seen windscreen washer fluid turn to a kind of gel before, this time I just had a little bit of goop in the bottom of the tank. Spent hours googling what causes the gel condition (to prevent it happening again) but the collective idiots of the internet seemed to have no idea other than "non compatible washer fluids react with each other, always use brand X because I say it's the best". I did find one place that claimed the gel is actually a bacterial growth similar to diesel bug which eats the ethanol found in winter formulation washer fluid. Cleaned the tank with some mild bleach just in case and reassembled. Checked my favorite stash of Wurth screen wash additive and yup sure enough, contains 10% ethanol. The rest of that can go in the Toyota which has a much easier to access sensibly designed reservoir and probably won't give a shit. WOF time this week, can't wait to see what horrors await.