Good morning from a windy Sec Hayai (with sun now)i!
Well, after our report yesterday with our bowsprit crawling, Murphy’s Law stayed on board!
The afternoon started with a torn in the Mainsail of about 1 meter virtical. We had to take it fully down as it is above the 3rd reef. Took us 90 minutes to make a proper repair (thank “god”, that we have very good sailrepair stuff on board!)..!
This repair included going to the 2nd spreader to check if there was something sharp that was cutting the main there. But nothing found, so taped it again with a lot (!) of tape.
A few hrs later when furling away the code 0, wind is picking up and we decided to lower it. When lowering from the top lock, the pin inside the toplock broke and the whole sail went into the water, happily still attached on the bow and sheets and furled, so reasonable easy to get it back in without any damaged. Only our toplock halyard was gone, out of the mast, so no more original toplock now to use for our Code 0 or A3. The next few day with all the lows this will be not needed, but maybe at the end after the Azores, we might need to be creative to use one of those sails again.
And then, in the middle of the night, our pin connecting the goose neck to the boom came out, so the goose neck with all the sheeves for the reeflines and outhaul was fully blocked and the end of the boom was about to start breaking. We had to react fast!
I was off-watch sleeping and as Frans woke me up saying we have a serious problem, he quickly lowered to complete mainsail. Now we were just sailing under J1 and nothing (!).
A few minutes later a big squall came over us with heavy rain and wind towards the thirties. We were very happy the sail was down!
To repair this we had to disconnect the boom from the mast completely, making sure there was no pressure on the mast from the boom itself due to the lazy jack or other lines,. So we secured the boom, hoisted it separately with halyards and another line to pull it backwards. We took out the goose neck connection to the mast out, and had enough space between boom and mast to make repairs. Happily we made the decision to strengthen the carbon end of the boom itself, so that part is extra thick and very strong.
It appeared only the pin had moved a little bit too far to 1 side and shot out of the boom. In this way the whole goose neck could move inside the boom and it did. Until it could go no further. As all tension was now off the boom and goose neck, we good pull it out again, move the pin back in its original position and as there was no damage, all was solved!
Now we examined how the pin could move at all and we discovered that the end plates holding the pin in the boom were mounted inside out, so we changed that to the correct position and now the pin was unable to move at all.
We put everything back together, hoisted the main and all fine. The wrongly mounted end plates holded the pin in place for almost 28000 miles, so much movement is not to be expected in this part. And now with the end plates in the correct position, it should all be fine. But if we did not make the decision in may last year to strengthen this end of the boom, the problem could have been much, much worse!
Thank ourselves again for all the preparation we did. This has probably saved the day again!
Well you can imagine we were both very tired after all these problems. Small problems that could have easily been transferred to BIG consequences.
Well that did not happen. Now I, Ysbrand, had a good sleep and currently Frans is taking on some good sleep as well. You saw some pictures already, I hope you can make a nice report for the social media.. pffff.
Wind has been from 15 – 30 all night and morning. Now a bit more stable at 25-32 knots. Sailing on J1 and 2 or 3 reefs.
All is working fine on Sec Hayai.
Our gybe towards the east will be coming up in about 3-4 hrs and in 3 days we will be close to Ponta Delgada ready for the last bit to Lorient.
Frans & Ysbrand
