Brain surgery on the nerve centre

The last remnants of Ye Olde Diesel are departing to make way for the Maximal Control Panel of the Beta 60. I say "maximal" because not only does the more dial and warning light-laden Beta Marine control panel convey more information than the old Westerbeke panel,, but it also occupies just about the entirety of the helm's top. Embiggening was required.

How a motorsailer ran its engine only 1,313 hours in 20 years will remain an unknown. We put on 200 hours in two seasons.

Fitting it requires some carpentry, some metal cutting, sawing and deburring, and of course vacuuming of the inevitable deconstruction debris. The old one wasn't exactly tiny...

Good on dials, less so on lights or things that go aa-ooo-gah...and soon to be seen on Craigslist.

Below is the new control panel. After extensive cutting, grinding and reaming out, it should fit in both dimensions. If there may be, as I fear, a chance that the wiring harness may brush against the shifter assembly (currenty a rope hook) on the left side of the helm, I can put together some sort of collar or ring from HDPE or even teak or the black cherry I have in abundance in the backyard and raise the control panel a centimetre or three. The existing trim throughout the boat is black cherry, and a visit from the arborist yields plenty from the vast, about 120-year-old black cherry tree in our back yard.

A well-made panel, on close observation. And it goes bzzt, etc.

This is what the above panel looks like from the front. 

The rather extensive cabling leading to the control panel necessitated opening up the DC panel mountings and carefully snipping away the black ribbed conduit cover from a bunch of power leads.

The general tidiness of this area, plus the very helpful labelling, are habits I've acquired. Mostly.

It's clear that some items were purchased with an aft cockpit in mind. I may, for the sake of easy access, remove these excess leads (I think they are for the KVH AC103 fluxgate compass)

After the EPIRB, the Dymo label maker lets me sleep at night.

The old aperature for the old panel was not only insufficiently wide, but supporting metal bar stock underneath the plywood and plasticized top layer was in the way of some of the new panels gauges and buzzers.

Modification was instrumental to my plans.

That small blue device is a "thumb rachet"; merely the head of a typical 1/4" rachet driver (I have a 3/8" version as well), it allowed the blind unbolting from below of the fluxgate compass display and control panels needed to chop away the excess helm top.

Dry fitting Number 1: Not quite there.

 A tentative dry fitting of the new panel revealed the need to trim back a bit of the supporting steel "box".

Hydraulic steering rules! Grinders rule! Vacuums rule! Sandals...not so much.

 This was done via 4-inch angle grinder followed by sacrificial Dremel cutting wheels.

Yeah, probably not prudent throwing sparks down into the engine bay, but hey.

 The end result was a tight but functional fit. Connections, trim regluing and lighting up to follow.

The key shown is the real key...just add volts. Also seen: the blogger's toes.

Salty sculpture and a reason to learn how to dive

Most sailors have a touch of the poet in them, unless they are the mad mariners of Melville or Conrad, perhaps. I like to think that a keen eye for a navigational star on a cloud-torn night might lead to an appreciation of art on land. But since when does art have to be on land?

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/

It's stuff like this that makes me think half the fun of sailing is getting to be at home under the sea.

Just a little diversion as I contemplate tomorrow's swapping out of engine control panels.

Cleaning the fleet

Astute readers will notice a new photo on the "title box" of this blog. Instead of the rather dated photo of Alchemy's blotchy bottom paint hovering over the parking lot that was her home for too many seasons, a more positive view of a hosed-down and very nearly sparkling vessel tied to her dock has replaced it. This is a more positive and representative (and recent) shot that makes a nice change.

Rail, rail against the dying of the light-coloured Cetol.

Now, I am clearly not obsessed with appearances; I am more function over form. Nonetheless, this spring has revealed the necessity to apply spit and polish in the form of Cetol, sealant and power washing to the fleet.

Very little external teak...just the way I like to varnish, which is to say "not much and not often"

The interior of Valiente got a lot of teak oiling and general tidying, plus the varnishing of what external teak exists. I appreciate teak in boats, but I actually prefer little or none on the outside. Steel and plastic are frankly better to keep the elements on the outside than is wood, and teak has become problematic from the point of view of sustainability and black marketeering.

Clearly, I'm not willing to do more than a cursory job. I just don't care enough to do more than make it more weather- and UV-proof

Nonetheless, the boat owner faces a stark choice: Either get used to masking tape and foam brushes (on perhaps an annual basis in the brutally sunny tropics), or "let it go gray" with the application of precisely nothing. The trouble is in the transition: External teak, unless stripped, oiled and left alone, looks pretty crappy even to an indifferent skipper such as myself during the time of transition to "attractively weathered".

Err...grubby.

Alchemy has very little wood on the outside, and I would like to see none at all in time.  What it had was several types of grime of the sort that collects in the corners when you are on the hard next to a busy airport. Again, mea culpa on the exterior junk and grime on deck: my interests are in movement and electrons and plumbing, oh, my. Being 12 feet above the earth, I have simply pushed off the snow and hoped it took the filth with it. This not being an option on a dock, out came ye olde pressure washer, soap, brushes and allied tools and products of sailorly virtue.

After: The dirt and goo sluiced gratifyingly from the scuppers, revealing a couple of rust spots not associated with grinder waste. IGNORE THE BADLY COILED HOSE

The inside of the pilothouse roof has a couple of leaks, and all its insulation and stylish cherrywood battens are currently out for wire run routing and because having the roof rapidly removable facilitates getting engines, tankage and batteries down in the boat. So tarps kept the water out, the light lower and some of the heat off. But I heard through official channels that the sight of my tarps gave offence, so we did some fixes along with the vajazzling of the deck and topsides.

Before: Apparently, the sight of tarps annoys the crackers-and-white-wine subset of boat club members. 

 At some point, I will renew the anti-skid (see some spilled paint) and will paint out some rust flecks left from various grinding jobs. There are some actual areas of rust on the deck that need attention, and suggest that the otherwise durable paintjob on deck is reaching the end of its life. So the "function" side of my nature may yet make Alchemy prettier than I require before we leave.

Still to come: a new "dome shaped" cover for the fluxgate compass currently under a bucket. The rubber snake keeps the duck poop down. Note the resealed top hatches. I still need to get some new rubber gasketing.

A reasonably thorough clean-up took Mrs. Alchemy and myself only a couple of hours of labour to make a visible difference. I guess this periodic activity will be the case going forward, as I no longer find myself in the splendid isolation of being at the far end of the parking lot and must consider my hermit-like labours at an end. At least the hermit part, certainly not the labour part. The upside is that little failures of the coatings are far more visible, and while a mirror finish ain't gonna happen, I accept that the care of a steel boat means a regular process of touching up to avoid that which never sleeps.

Yep, that's a brace of top-end Polyform fenders scored on sale over the winter. Much more "expedition-boaty" than the usual recycled Taylors.

Yikes...the saloon hatches are sitting on teak frames! NOOOOOOO!!!!

Looks great, less filling

Part of my income is made from writing and editing and another part is made from graphic design. Just as sail tactics books from the '70s and '80s (when our boats were made) are of interest to me, so are magazines from the mid-'90s, when I began to learn computer-based graphic design as a side effect of being a partner in a now-extinct music magazine. I didn't know at the time that such skills would pay mortgages and buy boat gear. But then I didn't know in 1995 I would ever own a boat, either.

The past is always low-res, alas, but I was proud of this one because when it ran in 1995, it made largely accurate predictions of how the internet and computer-aided music production and distribution would transform the music industry. And so it has come to pass.

But there you go: the butterfly effect of small decisions leading to large change strikes again. Another side effect of being a newbie sailor at the end of the '90s was being an avid consumer of the monthly glossy sailing magazines of the day. In 2013, I subscribe to Practical Sailor and Ocean Navigator only, but both are at the point where the return on investment in time and subscription fees is nearly zero: between doing my own sailing and working at a so-called career, at parenting or at boat restoration, and given the value I place on more interactive contact with better sailors online, perusing even the decent sailing magazines is for me getting less attractive. I have a small stack awaiting me at the breakfast table, but there's never enough time, or so it seems, to read their shiny pages.

Looking good and weighing less

Not that they aren't well-produced: Graphically, both PS and ON look fantastic, particularly ON's writer-supplied shots of distant anchorages in ridiculously high-numbered latitudes. My knowledge of print production means I know that they are produced at a lower cost and with fewer staff than in the past. Content-wise, however, there is simply less text and more ads for underbuilt, too beamy dock queens. These days, I find my remaining sailing magazines subscriptions indifferently edited, either because they let Microsoft Word do it, or because even the editor in charge can't recognize errors in English composition any more. I used to be a copy editor, too; think "designated grammar/spelling Nazi". It's the publishing equivalent of a buggy-whip maker: not a job worth paying for, whether you require it or not.

Back in the day, however, my favourites were Cruising World and Sail, both still extant. In one sense, I grew out of them as I had my own sailing experiences and made (and, it is hoped, learned from) my own bone-headed decisions at the tiller. In another sense, they grew away from me. Recently, I picked up in my boat club lobby the May 1994 issue of Cruising World, which came out exactly five years before I began sailing in earnest (or in Lake Ontario).

Large format and chock-full of content. Even the ads seemed educational.

I was struck by several things: the length of the articles, the depth and breadth of the seamanship discussed (this was at the dawn of affordable GPS rigs and therefore pilotage techniques and celestial navigation were still used and respected), and the pretty much equal focus on new boat reviews and the care and repair of the older boats it was clearly assumed most of the readership of that time would own.

These days, would the article read "New app for locating a sail-furling repair tech using your iPhone 5"?

There was apparently, to judge by the tone of many of the articles, also the assumption running through many of these articles that not only should the aspiring boater (whether coastal or offshore) know a wide range of seamanlike techniques and repair skills, they would want to know such things: Calling in a consultant or repair person would be, if not an outright moral failing, a case of last resort. The option of hitting a big red "HELP" button was in the future, although realistically, even today, more than a couple of hundred NMs offshore is beyond the range of most countries rescue services, where such services even exist.

But this...this could be manual labour! Where's the A/C remote control?

Regarding repair and fabrication, I've reached the point (and purchased the right router and jig) that constructing, for instance, my own dorade boxes isn't out of the question. But there aren't many who wouldn't just outsource that to China these days (it's where the best stolen Burmese teak is, after all), due to the time investment in skills acquisition. And yet the sail magazines used to be premised on the idea that people in small sailboats would possess quite a few skills beyond that of sail handling/avoiding dock scraping, because "jack of all trades" wasn't just a catch-phrase, it was a way to save yourself from a damp fate. There is also a sense in this vintage of magazine that it is a Good Thing to save your wallet from indifferent/expensive/hurry up and wait repair or installation folk who themselves might be learning on the job. See "why I bought a welding machine".

So long ago, Beth and Evans were newbies.

To the right in the "Helpful, Strange or Irrelevant" portion of the blog is the website address of Beth Leonard and Evans Starzinger, who have been sailing for ages, and have been profitably (one assumes) writing about it. Beth wrote The Voyager's Handbook, which is a methodical and clear exploration of nearly every aspect of offshore planning, preparation and costing out, while Evans is also a writer, lecturer and a regular contributor to various sailing forums. I like their ideas and have had a bit of email/forum back and forth with Evans, who is pretty humble and still questioning even after two very accomplished circs.

In this May, 1994, article, however, he and Beth are relatively new offshore sailors in a tight spot with bad weather. They clearly list where and why things start going wrong...at a length inconceivable in a current magazine as attention spans have grown gnat-like...and their article's points are then critiqued at the end by a more experienced sailor.

Holy crap. The best article I've read on sailing to Bermuda in bad weather is 19 years old. It's one of the better things I've ever read outside of the first-wave cruising narratives of the Smeetons and Hiscockses. Boats change and sailors change. Our technology changes. The ocean, less so. Perhaps we may reconsider from time to time as we go forward that which we have left behind.

In which the blogger again advocates salvage as the key to cheaper cruising.

Speaking of which, I have long noted that people chuck things out at boat clubs all the time. From a locker at our club one step removed from the dumpster, I have retrieved perhaps too much stuff from the boats of others, including all of the mandatory foam-vest PFDs (some clearly never worn) I require for Valiente to be legal; lengths of tinned wire; new SS nuts and bolts...unopened in their packages (!); vast lengths of line (wash once in net bag, use as needed); light bulbs and cabin fixtures of every description; safety gear in new shape; boat hooks; winch handles; several fenders requiring only a power-wash; all manner of serviceable clips, shackles, brackets and small blocks; and truly impressive amounts of superannuated navigational gear. Don't get me started on the books!

Free to me: Unlike an eBook, may be read by oil lamp.

Now, I understand the impulse to upgrade: Life is short, boats are small, and old crap you never touch should be recycled. I myself have left old displays, bits of plumbing and VHFs I have no longer a use for (and yet which work) in said Locker of Free Stuff, but I think necessity and the expressed Scottish gene means I run a leaner operation aboard than many, if not most. Having a GPS on one's iPhone does not preclude owning a paper chart, so why have I scored three-armed protractors, dividers, parallel rulers and compasses and a perfectly good celestial navigation calculator for free?

Built like a tank, like the teak box it came in.

Don't get me wrong: I haven't stowed a bunch of dumped LORAN-C receivers in the garage...just a Furuno radar I plan to revive as a spare...and I remain pretty selective. Still, it never fails to amaze me what people will chuck out.

A small sampling of recent acquisitions bears this out.

Suunto hand-bearing compass: More portable and more accurate than my Davis "pistol grip" type, and I use these for pilotage.

This hand-bearing compass works, of course, on the plastic boat, but will work on Alchemy, too, if it is held as is its wont at eye level, about 165 cm (in my case) off the steel deck. My Suunto compass watch will, too, but this is easier and less fiddly. Chucked for having a peely label? No clue.

Quite illuminating, I thought.

This is an Aquasignal 40 masthead fixture. It's a well-made, not-cheap bit of gear, and this is slightly scratched on the Fresnel-type enclosure, but with the 25 W lightbulb clearly intact. Ten minutes of stripping and crimping with some old marine wire (also free to me) and it was restored to service. This is the same model of masthead light I carry on Alchemy's mast, with similarly oversized port and starboard fixtures on the pilothouse sides, so this can be a spare, or it can replace the one atop Valiente, which is just about shot. On Valiente, I could step down to either a weaker bulb or an equivalent LED as I'm not required to carry 25 W of dazzle on a 10 meter sailboat.

Used extensively this season to test conduits, and now fit for house "blackout" lanterns

This is a simple 12-volt battery I've used as a "tester" for all sorts of things, particularly as Alchemy's battery capacity is a mere Group 24 to power a single bilge pump until I bring aboard its half-ton of electron buckets. Also seen is the new Ancor double crimper, which along with the lightly used Klein wire shears I picked up recently for nine bucks and the Ideal wire stripper acquired last month, are making my electrical work considerably tidier, and, one hopes, longer lasting.

I neglected to get a picture of the tossed pump, but it resembles this.

I found on the same day a clean-looking Shurflo freshwater pump that resembles this photo. It's sized similarly to my existing FloJet pump, and might make a good spare, as might this cheap alternative, of course. The Shurflo, particularly if I can rebuild it, could also be part of an as-yet deckwash setup. It gurgled and spun up immediately upon hook-up to the battery pack, however; there may be nothing particularly wrong with it other than being No Longer New. A few cycles of disinfectant, and a close inspection of its innards could be worthwhile as I was thinking of building in a "cross-transfer" capacity to my planned new water tankage, wherein I pump water to whichever tanks will stiffen the boat on a particular tack. In the Trades, days can pass on a particular tack. Regardless, another nice little score for the maritime "freecycler" I seem to be.

The mother of all spreader lights, or something that would work in the engine compartment?

Here's a very solid deck or spreader light found in the chuck bin. I think everyone's going LED these days, and rightly so, in most cases, but the housing is top-notch, and if I need a strong, rarely-run light in the engine bay or to illuminate some seldom-seen area (like the steering hydraulics "locker"), I would want something this freakin' bright. With thicker wiring, naturally, and a fused switch.

Awww...it's the Cabin Boy's First Sextant.

Also found languishing and unloved was this boxed Davis 15 sextant, complete with instructions. I bought one without its box for $25 a couple of years back for my kid to learn celestial (the utility of which I will argue with any readers, if only for the mental exercise while on passage of doing sight reductions and running fixes).

The bit I can use is to the right

For me, the Artificial Horizon is the real catch. I have a couple of metal sextants, an Astra IIIB and a Freiberger, already, but an artificial horizon means I can do CN in the park, without having to haul boxes of optical gear down to the lake. While I have a very new handheld GPS, I don't care to lose more venerable means of navigation. No wonder I enjoyed that 1994 Cruising World issue.
 

Apparently, sharks have been known to eat the trailing parts.

Speaking of venerable, former commodore Henry Piersig very kindly gave me the device pictured above just before this year's launch; it had been passed onto him by another sailor who didn't have a use for it anymore. It is, like the label says, a Walker Knotmaster Mk. III A. This part with the dial is lashed to the stern rail and works by trailing a spinner in the boat's wake. A length of line is twisted and the twist turns gears and before you know it, you've done a nautical mile or two hundred. Besides making one's reckoning less dead, like the sextant, my Patay Ocean Master manual bilge pump, my Whale foot pumps, the Tank Tender and a decent spring starter, it does its job without electricity. I do not (clearly) wish to run without electricity...but I think, like possessing the skills and experience the sailing magazines write about less these days, it's a prudent option to retain.

Even if it involves a spot of garbage picking, or as I prefer to think of it, liberation from the dustbin of history.

Cry me a river...of krugerrands

I think our vessel would qualify as the bum boat to this.

Privilege is relative. I am well aware, coming from a familial background of distinct financial humility, that to own a boat in which one may swan about locally, never mind one in which the crew proposes to bugger off around the planet for a few years, is a relative privilege, when compared to the lot of the "what garbage shall we scavenge for unrotted protein" lot of untold millions of humans.

The author's ancestors prior to the decision to emigrate.

Nonetheless, over this past weekend, I installed a wine fridge in the kitchen (a gift from my appliance-potty sister) and disposed of a (broken) elderly dishwasher (also a gift, but alas, an unneeded and now long-deceased one used basically as a countertop). The wine fridge looks nice: it eats a mere 1.5 amps, and yes, we drink two or three bottles of reasonably priced red per week. It's part of the more-or-less Mediterranean diet I wish to cultivate on land and sea, after all. And Neptune knows I've been cultivating a diet of late...I may need to downsize the foulies.

Very nice in the kitchen, but not wanted on the voyage.

But the undeniably bourgeois activity of not only unpacking a wine cooler cabinet, but selecting which wines shall be cooled from the wine cellar (an elderly IKEA rack in the laundry room I've had since I started collecting cheap wine in my 20s) made me consider how the relative privileges of drinking nice wines and sailing nice if non-mega sailboats are relative indeed to the problems of, say, mega-yacht owners who have run out of 100 metre docks to which they can tie their floating heli-pads/fun sub ejectors.

Mega-yacht Octopus: I'm surprised it's not called "The Blue Screen of Death", really. Nice waterline, however.

We don't own a car and so, unlike mega-yacht owners, our "parking problems" usually start and finish with finding a post to which to lock our bicycles. The problem of parking is apparent even to us, however: should I wish to take advantage of it, we could earn $100-$200/month by renting out half our garage, but I prefer to keep it as my bike barn, sail loft and man cave, thanks. Clearly, however, owning stuff comes with it the need to put it somewhere, no less for a Russian plutocrat as for the owner of a J/24. One of the keys to "privilege", therefore, is to simply refuse to purchase classes of items that require knock-on expenses: no car, cable TV, use libraries, don't carry a credit card balance, barter goods and services, walk/bike a lot, etc. It is not hard to do these things, but it does require a sort of determination to avoid falling into the "trap of stuff" and to try to maximize value in most of life's little transactions. Because the whole basis of our economic system is that others are trying to maximize value from you:  to buy access to channels you don't watch because you have memberships to gyms you don't attend because you are working harder and longer than ever because you have a mortgage (French for "death contract or gamble") and car payments and grass treatments and bikini waxing and...well, I found it all too much personally even before I had the money to spend on it. Note: I have never spent money on bikini waxing.

We don't take vacations, or at least haven't in the last dozen years, except for camping weekends on a friend's land, yacht deliveries (not really super-relaxing...), and, of course, selected weekends on the (smaller) boat a couple of times a summer in a 100-NM radius. It's a modest outlay, our leisure, geared not only to saving money, but in the rather Protestant anticipation that the "reward" of the actual pushing-off from the dock will constitute the start of a lifetime's worth of vacations, only run continuously.

Realistically, we do not have the income to pull this off. That's what the "cruiser budget" information says. We do, however, have the habit of modest living, and the anticipation that rental income (from the house we are not required to sell up in order to sail) and our own rather portable skills will create enough cash flow to pay for food, sundries, boat consumables and repairs.

Of course, a certain level of wealth allows you to ship your ship and avoid the nasty bits altogether.

That's the hope, anyway. Ours is not a retirement dream so much as a working sabbatical, if that makes sense. I fully anticipate that both myself and Mrs. Alchemy will have to work until the Topsiders are skyward...after we do our trip.

But we will have done the trip...that I can live with. And a privilege I hope to earn, Krugerrands optional, as is insurance.

Boogie on the water?

Sealant trimmer and auxiliary caulking iron...oh, and pizza slicer.

It's not unusual when one is in "boat mode" to look at lubberly or commonplace objects with a squinty, sailorly gaze. A serrated breadknife could be handy to cut a line on deck, a pizza slicing wheel could make a nice clean-up tool for overflowing bedding sealant. It's very common to see the sort of "picker-uppers" found beside the recliners of the elderly, for instance, aboard boats with deep bilges.

Used several times a day during the engine installation.

Slocum had a crippled alarm clock to aid his navigation, after all. It doesn't all have to be "marine gear", although if it isn't, you'd better have anti-rust treatments handy.

A man who knew how to tack.

Cheap LED headlamps...seriously cheap, not the nice xenon ones cave explorers and rock climbers have, are great "hands-free" illumination for the sailor. I haven't done a delivery without one. They usually last that long without corroding.

Add a red scrim for nighttime chart work...why not?

Also, I have never bought sailing gloves. Gardening gloves of the "rubber dot" type or a variety of half-fingered cycling gloves (which I almost always wear to bike to the boats) are a reasonable substitute at a fraction of the price.

Endorsed by "Wheelie" Harken himself.

It was in that spirit that I looked recently at a sort of toy my son, who needs penmanship practice fairly badly, received a couple of birthdays back.

Hmm. Might need a shot of conformal spray.

It's called a "Boogie Board". It works like an LCD version of what I once knew as a Magic Slate.

Magic Slate? It's a sort of basal Etch-a-Sketch, the sort of thing parents bought for kids to keep them occupied on long car trips prior to the invention of the portable gaming console.

Magic not shown.

Something like this is superior to a notepad or a Post-It on a boat, I feel, because it can stand the humidity and is not likely to end up crumpled and soaked in the bilges. Nor will it adorn the ocean as blown-aft trash. It's necessary on a number of occasions to take short notes (lat/lon, weather observations, radio contacts) or to leave short notes for crew coming on watch (bilge required X pumps, remember to set radar guide alarm, etc.). Sometimes you just need to walk a few figures from a gauge to a logbook. Something erasable and cheap that isn't paper and ink makes sense to me.

Familiar, and yet unsuitable.

Whether deck-top note-taking needs to be done on a Boogie Board remains to be seen. I could get a dozen Magic Slates instead for the price and not be particularly bothered if a few fell off. And no, I am not interested in an iPad with a handwriting app. I actually reviewed the first generation of OCR/PDA devices like the Newton years back and was not impressed with the overthinking when compared to a steno pad. I simply want to record ephemeral information ephemerally. And then erase it.

Rigging: The game

Rigging, the "standing" parts of which hold up the mast or masts of a sailboat, is a complex and somewhat contentious topic.

An undesirable outcome. Photo copyright Vincent Bossley.

To the more lubberly of my readers, it helps to think of a sailboat's mast like a tent pole. Various lines, or, in the case of a big tent or a sailboat, wires, are led from the mast/tent pole into stakes in the ground, or, in the case of sailboats, chain plates. The difference, and it's a significant one, is that whereas the tent must stay supported statically (the tent shouldn't move) against the forces of wind and clumsy/drunken campers, the sailboat mast is designed to support a device (a sail) that is continually exerting dynamic force in a range of vectors against itself. In turn, the mast, being strongly tied into the hull of the boat, is a relayer of the sail force: the wind blows, the sail experiences the lift of its airfoil shape, and that energy is transferred via the largely static mast to make the heavy boat move.

An oldie but a goodie from which I finally grasped how sails and hulls interact.

Please note that compared to masts and sails, all boat hulls are exponentially heavier, unless you are an America's Cup design.

As mentioned previously, while the upkeep and maintenance on my first boat, the 1973 Viking 33 Valiente, could be considered a distraction, the truth of the matter is that, despite age and lack of most mod cons, she remains a pretty hot boat. She is a great deal of fun to bomb around in during those parts of the summer too blazing for needful tasks on Alchemy. A secondary benefit keeping her in play is that I frequently use Valiente, which as mentioned is largely amenity-free, as a test platform for projects I wish to install on Alchemy.

Alchemy's standing rigging is in excellent shape. It's never seen salt and is of high quality with Sta-lok fittings and beefy turnbuckles. But it dates from the boat's original launch date of 1988. The smart thing to do would be to replace it, at least the standing and running rigging parts; to service the rest, maybe upgrade the furler, and save the "old" (if sparkly) rigging as ready spares should a typhoon or collision break things.

But I don't need to do that this year. If I even get the stick up on Alchemy in 2013, it will be to reposition solar panels, to use the boom to hoist batteries into the guts, and generally rewire neglected conduits. Sailing Alchemy this summer? An afterthought, a big maybe. Much would have to go right and in the right order.

Valiente, on the other hand, may have been until last fall been sporting her original, factory, 1973 rigging. When I bought her, she was just short of 26 years old (Hull No. 32 and a date of "Nov. 73" on the original Monel gas tank..maybe she was first bought at a January 1974 boat show...I would have been a stripling 12!).  She is a boat that, despite being sailed hard and overcanvassed (by myself for the last 14 years..I'm the fourth owner and likely no less aggressive than the first) had by 2013 its original standing rigging for 39 years (1/4 inch 7 x 19 with really nice Merriman forks/turnbuckles).

Like this, but my are in 95% rather than 50% condition. Fresh water for the win.

This sort of ridiculous endurance is probably more common on the unsalted low seas of the Great Lakes than is generally admitted. Certainly I've noted on ancient Albergs and the like, i.e. boats a decade older than mine, pretty grotty looking standing rigging that never seems to get replaced or even looked at critically.

Uhh...time for service. Photo copyright  JG Jones.

In brackish places like Florida, a lifecycle of 10 to 12 years for standing rigging is generally considered prudent by mariner and insurer alike, and 15 years seems on par for the active cruiser who regularly inspects her rigging in a strong light, reefs early and often, and rinses with fresh water when rain does not suffice. Still, a snapped stay can ruin your whole day, and 39 years is older than Mrs. Alchemy, whose snapping can be equally fearful.

So I said to myself: "Skipper, this can't be that difficult", and removed the old rigging and bought new standing rigging as a 40th-birthday present "just because".  While the old rigging still looks fine, it's cheap (under a boat buck) insurance. The fact that I've had to retab bulkheads and cabin furniture under my stewardship makes it clear that the boat has and will continue to flex, especially as I like to make it go fast. The rigging is hardly exempt, and the concept of "cycle loading" must inevitably apply.

Alchemy, the redoubtable steel cutter, has, by contrast, 11 5/16ths-inch stays and shrouds with Sta-lok terminals on a similarly sized, if thicker in cross-section, Seldén mast (40-45 feet) as the old racer's excellent Klacko mast: The whole rig of Alchemy is "overdone" by comparision to both Valiente and a "typical" cruiser, and has, like the 39-year-old stuff on Valiente, no visible wear. But as mentioned, it too is original to 1988 when the boat was splashed and so before we leave for the ocean, I will "roll back the odometer" with all-new standing (and running) rigging, due to concerns I've got, and which many share, as to the nasty surprises lying in wait for those who ignore what years of tiny movement can do to objects under tension.

Many of the items I am replacing or upgrading on Alchemy are getting better and larger sets of fasteners and fittings based on the same logic.  A related habit for the ocean-voyager is to examine the deck each morning for evidence of popped pins or bits of line or metal where they shouldn't be. They say rust never sleeps, and they are right.

Upon reflection, I could probably spray-paint a better "black band", but it rained a lot this spring

So firstly, the older boat has the new rigging. A close peer at the existing clevis pins and through bolts and tangs/straps indicates plenty of beef, no cracks and no corrosion, so back they go, with a couple of replacement bits:

The pig-sticking point

Some wiring is updated, and the new crimps and crimper and heat gun are brought to bear. I had an idea (not pictured) to wire up a couple of 6V lantern batteries to make a weak but fully 12 VDC dry cell...it's all the battery system planning affecting my mind; I see Ohm's Law everywhere...and this served to test anchor, trilight and new deck/steaming light connections. Unfortunately the wind direction/speed device leads were too short to attach without splicing in wire I didn't have handy, so that's a no-go for this year. Maybe I'll try to fix the knot meter instead!

Horses for courses

Spreaders on, some running rigging installed for convenience, and even a hoist for a pig stick...by Neptune, that's looking almost yar. 

What Constantine may have seen at the Milvian Bridge. Or not.

After a rather rushed, and therefore typical, mast hoist, and the solving of a problem with a forestay tang caught up in a block (solved by a fellow boat club member who did a Spiderman trick with a boat hook up the crane!), we were home.

As I broke the venerable easyBlock last season, this is the new Garhauer triple-block mainsheet. Not entirely pleased with my reeving job, and may soon revise. There's too much line, too, but I got it at a discount.

Note that this guy, whose video is even in 3D(!), is "Maine Sail" level of thoroughness and DIY-itude; if your boat is sufficiently popular, the rigger will have all these measurements at hand and would notice if your old rigging deviated very much from the expected dimensions. Label early and often!

Being avid readers, we WANT to sail away with a couple of hundred books, but this is one of maybe four books we would NEED.

Periodic inspection of the rigging and replacement if necessary is good practice, cheap insurance (this rigging cost under $1,000) against catastrophic failure, and is prudent seamanship: whatever the as-yet murky fate of Valiente, I now have reasonable confidence that she won't snap a stay short of getting caught in a full gale with all sail out.

And now I've been through a re-rigging myself, I feel more confident about doing it for the bigger boat before we push off.

UPDATE: June, 2013:  I took a little time last week during a calm spell to tune the rig at the dock. This consisted of getting a couple of levers for turnbuckle turning and a Loos Gauge.

Most people who aren't racers tend to have somewhat slack rigging, I've found

I will assume that those interested in the topic of rig tuning can read about it from the rather basic level of knowledge I possess. Nonetheless, even a basic tuning that "takes up the slack", spreads the loads among all the stays and shrouds, and keeps the mast in column can add significantly to sail performance. Good tuning also reduces vibration, wear and the tendency of the mast to want to bend or topple. Laudable, self-evident things, one would think, but to judge by some of the indifferently tuned boats I've been on, it's not a skill or even a tendency that is understood among all recreational cruisers. Which is a shame, because I consider it at least as important a factor in efficient sailing as mastering various sail controls. A Ferrari with under-inflated tires just isn't a proper sports car.

Unlike some people, I can't pluck a shroud and tell from the note if it's taut enough. I need the tool.

There are suggested tensions for rigging based on diameter and a set percentage of "breaking load". I tend to load up the forestay slightly more than the backstay, and the uppers and lowers to the suggested values. My mast is original and frankly, the fact I use recycled main sails means I'm not really going to benefit from distorting the mast in the sort of interesting shallow parabolas of modern race boats. I'm going for stable and straight most of the time, and will retune in September to see if the new standing rigging has stretched at all and needs a couple more threads of dogging down.  Alchemy, being deck-stepped and, as is generally the case, over-built in the rigging, has a greater number of larger stays: I'll need a different gauge than the one I am using here.