Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Georgetown, Exuma, Bahamas
23.30.235N
75.45.748W

Tent poles so Dale

 can walk underneath.

Considering I never got off the boat today, I was quite busy.  While Dale was topping off our water tanks, I plotted a route from George Town to Turks and Caicos, fussed around with a new way to deploy the side sun shades we have, wrote an e-mail to our insurance agent reminding her that she was supposed to have a quote to us by last week as we really wanted to leave tomorrow, did dishes, played hide and seek to locate all of my sewing supplies, dug them out and got ready to attack the sail once Dale returned with the replacement parts (and a new water jerry can that should have been made of gold considering its cost). 

I was not looking forward to this as I remembered seeing an inch or two that was damaged but Dale remembered about a 5-6” tear; we were both right.  There was a 5-6” tear along the webbing with about 1” of missing material. 

We started by taking the hoisting halyard off and then rolled the sail off the in-boom furler onto the hard top bimini to the point where we could see the tear—or, almost the whole sail by that point.  Then I studied my options.  We didn’t want to take the sail off the boom and I couldn’t get my machine high enough to get to the tear. 

As the luff line was still intact, I decided to hand stitch the webbing that had torn and then put rip-stop sail tape over the missing piece with a couple of extra pieces over what I had hand stitched.  Then I hand stitched over the sail tape right next to the cording to make sure it was compressed enough to slide up the groove when it was hoisted.  By the time I was done, the adhesive on the tape was beginning to pull away.  We used 5200 to re-glue it to the sail (as suggested by Practical Sailor and the Tinkering Consultant) being careful to keep it under the sail tape.  Lord knows we don’t want to pull it out tomorrow and find that when it was put away, it glued itself in the boom.  Then Dale took over and replaced the broken batten stop. 

We rolled it back into the boom before reattaching the halyard and slowly fed it up the mast.  It appeared to work.  I hope it holds for the next couple of weeks until we can get to Puerto Rico where the entire length will have to be replaced. 

Of course, this took the remainder of the day and by the time we had put everything away and sat down, it was time for dinner.  Since we’re leaving, I cooked two large pots; red beans and rice with ham for the trip and a chicken pot pie casserole for dinner.  Dale wants to depart tomorrow early afternoon, which means I need to get to the grocery store early for some last minute items to tide us over until we can get to Puerto Rico, Dale needs to scrub the prop and maybe the bottom depending upon the amount of growth.  Then we’ll top off our fuel before taking off.  Another busy day I’m afraid. 

It looks like we’ll have to motor sail the remainder of tomorrow as the winds are fairly light (which is what we were hoping for to repair the sail).  Now we need a tad more wind--on the beam--to get anywhere.  We plan on making a direct transit to the Turks and Caicos, so you won’t hear from us for the next couple of days unless I find an errant WiFi signal in the middle of nowhere. 

As always, wish us luck.