Bob and I spent an afternoon taking care of odds and ends on the boat. The first goal was to climb into the wet suit, swim under the boat, and check out the keel, rudder, and anodes. I expected to learn as much from the diving as from looking at the underside of the boat.
I've been on more than one cruise where the prop got wrapped up in a poorly placed crab pot line (poorly placed being any location within fifty yards of my propeller). The bloody things are everywhere. When it happens, what are you going to do? If you're in the south pacific, you go for a swim. If you're in SE Alaska you suffer - or you have a wetsuit along. The suit is new, so I wanted a trial run in friendly waters. Getting into the suit is hot business on a sunny day, so it actually felt good to get into the water. Unfortunately my weight belt is about half as heavy as it needs to be to let me under the boat. That is exactly the kind of thing that a trial run is intended to find, so in that it was a brilliant success, even if I didn't accomplish anything else. Next time.
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| Rod sneaking up on the water... |
The second objective for the day was to run up the mast with Bob keeping a firm belay. Here again I had two accomplishments in mind: install a new Windex (the boat has never had one under my ownership), and try out my new ascending system. I tied my home built etriers (French for stairs) up the mast with the spare halyard. The etriers are forty steps tied into 165' of nylon webbing to span the 55 foot mast. You can see them in the next couple of photos. Hoisting myself up one step at a time, Bob just had to belay me with the halyard winch on a redundant line (the topping lift). I also clipped my harness into the steps periodically along the way. Arriving at the top, Bob placed the necessary tools in a bag and I hauled them up with a tag line. I installed the new Windex fairly quickly. The Windex shows the angle of the boat with respect to the wind. Then Bob lowered me to the deck and we were done. It wasn't until we were cleaned up and put away that we discovered the shaft that goes on top of the Windex to keep the birds off of it. It was lurking at the bottom of the box. Hey! What's this doo-hickey? Oh well; it'll wait.
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| You're going to trust your life to that knot?! |
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| At 55 feet, it's only high if you think it is. I keep telling myself that... |
