Macguyvering

May 1

We're in a fairly closed system out here all alone in the middle of this great big ocean, particularly in the auditory sense.  The ocean and the weather have their sounds and the boat has her sounds.  Then there's the 4 of us with our voices and our music.  But following those, there's nothing else, unlike on land where there's the odd siren or dog barking or stranger calling out to you.  So yesterday when I heard a funny "whirring/clicking" that I hadn't heard before, I immediately went out to investigate.  It sounded like the fishing reel turning, but more muted.  We didn't have a line out though, so it wasn't that.  I looked up at the sails.  Jib was fine and full, but the main looked....wrong.  I waited a second more and heard the whirring/clicking coming from the main - not right.

I popped my head into the hatch and said to Oly, "Something is wrong with the main." 

He came up, looked around and agreed there was a problem, but it took him a minute to see it - he tugged on a line coming out the boom and came up with a short, frayed bit of line.  "Our first reefing line has snapped.  S#$%."

Reefing is a way to make the main smaller so that when you're in heavy weather you don't have to have all of your sail up running on full power.  Doing so puts too much strain on the rig, and you're liable to break something.  Percentages vary, but 1 reef takes a bit of the sail away, 2 reefs take some more and 3 reefs get you down to a handkerchief.  On this passage we'd been putting 1 reef in fairly regularly.  On the boats I learned to sail on, a busted reefing line is no big deal.  You just run a new line through the proper blocks and off you go.  Bubas is different; she has an "easy" reefing system (I'm not sure of the proper term).  It's great for single-handing and very safe as you can reef from the safety of the helm.  But the price for easy to do is hard to rig.  The reefing lines run through the boom, and as our old line had snapped somewhere in the middle of the boom, we had no way to pull a new line through.

I suggested using one of the lines already in the boom to pull through a new one, but each reefing line has its own block inside the boom up at the mast, and there was no way to reach in and re-route a line attached to another.  So Oly thought of using a weighted fishing line to send down the boom, but we couldn't make it heavy enough and still small enough to come through the other end.  Then we tried attaching the fishing line to an existing line and pulling it through - success!  We still had to get it through the right track up at the mast, and sadly, not a wire hanger lives on the boat (an important addition to every toolbox methinks).  We fashioned a hook out of some rigid wire, and together with some patient threading and my small fingers we were able to get it routed properly.  So now we had a delivery system through the boom - nice!  Then it was just a matter of running the new line and rerunning the one we used.  It wasn't long before we were back in business and sailing along with our newly run first reef in the main.

The whole process took just under 3 hours.  I didn't want to say it at the time as we could've been stuck with a really annoying situation (lacking our 1st reef), but I was having a blast.  I love thinking through problems without an obvious answer...digging through everyday items in search of a hidden tool, having mini successes and failures through the various steps A-Z to solve the problem.  I call it "Macguyvering".  (I watched Macguyver religiously everyday after school, followed by 90210, I was an odd girl.) 

So in the end, we have a brand new first reefing line, Oly and I got a healthy dose of Macguyvering and you got a blog post.  All is well.