The cost of making a mistake

[Frank B.]

I've routed my running rigging dozens of times and only this last time did I make a mistake, routing the main halyard and topping lift across the masthead pulley sets then OVER the pin that holds the forestay, rather than under as is proper. Old age driven negligence?? Of course that mistake is the worst because it means the mast has to come down, or you have to go up.  Mast down won, found a spot on a pier with a dogleg that if I back into alongside, I could drop the mast to eye level and do the reroute standing on the pier without having to take out the pivot bolt.  So set up the gin pole and baby stays, release the forward lowers, ease the tension on the back stay until I can pull the pin on the furler drum plate on the bowsprit, take off the boom, with sail and cover, drive the boat over to the selected spot and crank it down.  Reroute the two lines (this part took five minutes to do right so you can begin to see the cost of the mistake) then start cranking the mast back up.  Now I built this system and posted an illustrated guide to building it and to using it.  One of the instructions states "The mast will crank up with relative ease if you have resistance STOP, GO LOOK FOR THE CULPRIT AND FREE IT.  So I'm hanging on the crank handle about to pop the line not following my own instructions.  But finally woke up and  found the upper shroud hanging on a furler line block and cleared it. Then put everything back together and tuned the rig with the Loos Gage. The whole thing including the two seventy minute round trips cost me about ten hours to correct a job of five minutes done right.

I might add that the two days spent on this were absolutely perfect days to sail, a rare occurrence in Feb.

I had to take the boom/sail/ cover home no place to store it on day one, so took the opportunity to wash the cover and the sail.  Sail wash station is two trees fixed and a lawn tractor to tension it and turn it over.

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[Wolverine]

I can lower and raise the mast on my Compac 19 very easily without a gin pole or counterweight. Which is good because I'm always forgetting to install the windex.

I used to stretch my sails between a tree, a fence, and a swingset so that setup looks good to me. I also found adding Oxyclean to the detergent made a huge difference in removing stains.