Line Back
After last time’s unsuccessful attempt by a Sea Scout to get the jib halyard back on the mast, their Scoutmaster, Mike, offered to do it for me. So, the following weekend, we met and he donned the climbing harness that Liza had used the week before.
I had been concerned about being able to get Mike, or any full-grown adult up the mast, since I don’t have alot of upper body strength and I figured that alot of the physical part of overcoming gravity would need to be done by me and the winch trying to raise Mike on the main halyard. Mike assured me, however, that he could shimmy up the mast to help in the effort.
Well, it didn’t quite work that way. Apparently, my mast was too slick for him to climb. So, like with Liza, he climbed onto the boom so I could get enough slack to get the line through the catch block we had set up and onto the winch to turn it to lift him up.
Mike atop the mast
The job turned out to be much simpler than I thought it would be. Gotta love Newtonian physics in action! There was enough mechanical help from our setup that I had no trouble turning the winch and lifting him up. Mind you, it took alot of turns to get him up – it was a slow job. But it was fairly painless from my perspective.
Not so Mike. He got as far as the shrouds and asked me to stop. I assumed he was tired and needed a break. Luckily, the line was through a clutch, and on my self-tailing winch, so I didn’t have to hold it while he rested. It also made it easier on the climb up because I didn’t have to worry about losing ground.
Once Mike reached the top, it was a quick job to get the line in place. He had pulled the core out of the line and woven the ends back to make a loop that was narrower than the line itself. He then attached a string, and attached the straightened coat hanger to the string. The whole thing went in and he was ready to be lowered in no time.
Lowering Mike down, with that setup, was no problem either. I wrapped the line around a nearby cleat, to give me some leverage, lifted the clutch, pulled the line out of the self-tailer, and started lowering him. Again, it proved to be much easier than I expected.
When Mike got down, he said he’d gotten dizzy when he was up there, which surprised him. That had never happened before. He did take some time to lower his head and get back his equilibrium before pronouncing that this was the last mast he was likely to climb; he was going to leave it to the Sea Scouts from now on.
Mike, after his rest
Climbing the Mast
I discovered last year, when replacing the jib, that the jib halyard was starting to look worn. But the line itself was much longer than I needed, and the rest of it, beyond that top foot, was in really great shape. So this year I asked a friend of mine if he could reweave the eye back in for me. He agreed.
So I attached an extra line to the halyard I wanted to pull down and pulled the new line into place as I pulled the old one down. That way, when the old one was repaired, I only needed to reverse the process to get the old one back into place.
Well, my friend fixed the old one over a weekend, and the next weekend, Erik and I went down to run the halyard back up. It was quite breezy that day, so we decided to wait. We wouldn’t be able to reattach the furler jib, so it seemed a waste of time to mess with the halyard, so I tied the line back up, re-stuffed the jib into the cabin (we’d taken it home and I’d cleaned it off while it was down), and headed home.
So, I must not have tied the line off well. Because the following weekend, when we came by to try again, the line I’d used as a placeholder was neatly coiled on my deck.
So back to my friend I go. He happens to be the scoutmaster for a Sea Scout troop, so I asked if he thought one of his scouts might be willing to climb the mast and replace the halyard. He said he thought so.
So today, I met Liza (the Sea Scout) at the boat with Mike (the scoutmaster). Liza donned a climbing harness that Mike had brought along, rather than the bos’n’s chair I had borrowed. We moved the jib pulley back so it was next to the jib winch and hooked Liza up to the main halyard. We pulled the halyard through the pulley and into the winch and pulled her up the mast.
Liza up the mast
We had sent Liza up with a straightened coat hanger to use as a guide, the halyard, and some painter’s tape, to attach the halyard to the coat hanger.
Liza first had trouble trying to get the coat hanger through. It was apparently not a straight shot. She was doing this from the rear of the mast and finally came around to the front and figured out how it needed to go. She tried again and got it through, after a few more attempts.
Next problem was the tape. The painter’s tape wasn’t strong enough to hold the halyard on to the coat hanger. So we passed her up some duct tape to use instead. This worked, but now she was having trouble pulling the coat hanger back through. The coat hanger had been straightened out. But one of the spirals in it was hanging inside the pulley.
At this point, Liza had been up the mast for an hour, so Mike asked her to come backd own and we’d try again another time.
So now my conundrum. Do I ask Liza or another of the troop to try this again? Do I get one of my experienced buddies, whose more heavy, but would know what they were doing to do it? Do I attempt to do it myself? Or doI pay to have someone at the marina do it?
We’ll see. No hurry. I don’t need to have it done until April when racing season starts.
[Top]Barnacles!!
Argh!! The bane of my existence.
So, when I first bought the boat, I found that the previous owner had painted the prop with the same stuff used on the bottom. And it worked pretty good. The boat had hard paint on it and the hard paint was keeping the prop cleaned as well.
The first couple of years I had the boat, I used the same paint, and I did the same thing with the prop. But I am not a hard core racer, and I don’t play one on TV even. So the marina owner suggested that I might want to switch to ablative paint. That way, I could just slap it on and go, rather than going through all the prep process. So I did. He also suggested using PropSpeed to prevent barnacle growth on the prop. I did that as well.
PropSpeed is a pain in the patootie. It’s a two part application, and part two has to be applied immediately after applying part one. So it takes two people to do it.
So what happens when I pull the boat out in the fall? Well, the prop is full of barnacles. So much for PropSpeed. And at $250 (at the time – price is up another $50 now), that was a very expensive experiment. Mind you, I still have enough around for a second application. And there are still alot of people I’ve met who swear by it. So maybe I just didn’t get it on correctly.
But I moved onto the next suggestion: Barnacle Barrier. It’s much easier to apply. You just spray it on. But I pulled the boat and, again, the prop was filled with barnacles. Mind you, they were easier to scrape off from the prop. But the prop was still covered in Zinc, the main ingredient in the spray, and covered with barnacles as well.
Again, there are plenty of people who swear by the stuff. But with this, I can’t see how I could have applied it wrong.
Lately, members of the CAL mailing list have been touting the use of Lanocote for preventing barnacle growth. The literature says that it only works for 6 montsh. But I could be happy with that. It can also be applied underwater. So, if it isn’t working as long or well as expected, whoever is diving the boat can apply some more.
I’ve applied this to the prop and to the knotmeter paddlewheel. The latter may not be a good test, since it’s plastic, not metal. But it can be used as my canary in the mine: if the knotmeter isn’t working, it means the paddlewheel is covered in barnacles. So we’ll see how well it works.
It does apply pretty easily. The directions say to heat the metal to apply easily. I heated the substance, which melted under a blowdryer pretty well. I could then paint it onto the prop. Since I really couldn’t heat the paddlewheel easily, this allowed me to apply the Lanocote to the paddlewheel fairly easily as well.
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I’ll try to update here to let everyone know how well it works.
[Top]Engine Efficiency
I checked the engine out the other day, when I had the luxury of a winter sail. It was making some awful racket. It was rattling quite a bit. So yesterday, I pulled the panels off to take a closer look. It seems the bolts holding the engine in place had worked their way loose. So I tightened them up again and took the boat out for a spin (hey, someone has to take her out! 🙂 ). Much better! Looks like I need to put some Locktite on the engine support bolts as I did with the coupler to the shaft.
While out there, I took some measurements on the efficiency of the engine. It’s something the electric boats mailing list recommends; it’s a good way to determine how far you can go on your setup. The wind was blowing, and the tide was coming in pretty strong, so I’ll need to do this again come summer when everything is calm. But this was a good ‘first run’:
Amps vs Knots
Not exactly a straight line, and it probably never will be, since I’m not running in a bathtub where I can control all the environmental factors. But interesting nonetheless. However, part of the ‘hiccoughs’ are because I would run downstream, then upstream to see how the values changed.
20120202 – Amps vs RPMs
This is actually more interesting, because it will help me determine how far I can go on a charge. I’m guessing the formula would be:
Battery amp-hours/amps * knots/hour = knots to travel
That’s amp-hours, as in the amount of energy stored in the battery, not amps minus hours.
Using this calculation, it appears I can go about 16.5 NM on a single charge, if I stay under 2.5 knots. If I up it to 5 knots, I can only go about 2.5 NM.
As I said, I’ll recalculate this in the summer when things are a bit calmer. But it’s interesting nonetheless!
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