boatwork

Two new headstay wires...check!

Truth be told, spring is still a long ways off (it was 25°F outside last night after all) but the sun did show her lovely face this past weekend for a few hours. Plus, our calendar promises that winter’s end is in sight. One of the top items on our List is to begin replacing our standing rigging. We figure that it is the original wire and fittings that the ship’s notes indicate were installed 20 years ago. Not only is the wire past it’s recommended lifespan, it is also 304 stainless wire which corrodes much faster than 316SS in the tropical environment we’ll be spending the next few years in. In other words, it’s time to replace it all.

Michael drew up a spreadsheet that listed all of the wires that we’d need to replace. It was soon clear we had found one of the disadvantages of maintaining a cutter rigged ketch with a bowsprit: with twice the number of masts of your typical sloop, there really is twice as much wire and rope involved. We have a total of 24 separate stainless steel wires, each with a Norseman swageless fitting at each end for a total of 48 Norsemans (soon to be 54 when we add three insulators to our split backstay for our HAM radio antenna). Thankfully, we had replaced most of Pelican’s (8 wires) standing rigging and all of Rivendell’s (13 wires) ourselves so we’ve had a bit of practice with swageless fittings. But clearly with this much rigging to be updated it was time to get started.

On Thursday, with clear weather forecast for the weekend, we put in an order at Fisheries for the items we’d need to replace our headstay and our staysail stay. We were able to meet the Fisco truck in Tacoma with our new 3/8″ and 1/4″ lengths of 1×19 316SS wire rope and the Norseman cones we’d need to replace when we reassembled the fittings that came with the boat.

On Saturday afternoon, with the smallest child napping and the eldest watching a DVD and munching on a snack, I hoisted Michael up the main mast to release the staysail stay. (We had taken our headsails down a few weeks ago to have the Sunbrella UV covers restitched.) Michael tied a halyard to the top of the stay and took the pin out of the eye to release it. I then lowered him back to the deck and we (along with the excellently timed help of a couple of passing neighbors) lowered the stay and furling unit carefully to the dock. Michael then cut the old wire next to each Norseman fitting, taped the new piece of wire to the old one and pushed it carefully through the furling foils. After lining up the old and new wires and fittings, he cut the new wire to length and unscrewed the Norseman fittings to clean out the old wire and prepare them to be reassembled.

It was here that we first became suspicious of our old rigging. With a variety of wrenches, oils and heatgun at the ready to unlock the sealed Norseman fittings, he was, in fact, simply able to part them by hand. Uh oh. We found that there was no evidence of Loctite being used on the threads as is required. What’s worse, the fittings had not been sealed with any polysulfide to keep the water out but what appeared to be winch grease that had mostly washed away.

With serious concerns about the state of our existing fitting assemblies, we were hardly surprised with what we found the following day. With our staysail stay reassembled (complete with plenty of Loctite and polysulfide goo in them) we hoisted the unit back up, then hoisted Michael up to reattach it. I then cranked him all the way to the top of the mast to release the headstay fitting and we lowered it in the same manner as the smaller stay. When he disassembled the Norseman that had been holding our headstay on, we found again little evidence of sealants used but not only that, the cone was barely hanging onto the wire. It is supposed to be 1.5x the wire diameter down the inside of the wire but this cone was at the very end and the outside wires were splayed out instead of being tucked in, formed around the cone nice and neat.

Bad Norseman

Good Norseman

So, where before we had “replace standing rigging” on our to-do list, now we have REPLACE STANDING RIGGING. Once again, we are reminded that if we have not thoroughly inspected something on our own, we have no idea if it’s ready for sea or not. 4 Norsemans down, 50 to go.

I was just kidding about not being able to find The List, aka Wondertime’s To Do List aka The List of Stuff We Must Get Done Before Leaving the Dock Next June. It was right there on Google Docs all the time. What we did need to find was an evening for both of us to sit down and go over it with a fine-toothed comb. Not only has it hit us that we only have six months left to knock out a good portion of this list, but also that we have a finite number of dollars left with which to do it. With a couple of glasses of $2.50 Buck Chuck (inflation is everywhere!) we did just that one night this week.

It seems in our society that there is a taboo on talking about money, as in how much you do or don’t have or how much things truly cost. (Note that I do not mean the appearance of having a lot or a little as [collectively] we have no problem with creating such an image, whether we actually have a little or a lot.) Perhaps everyone is afraid that everyone else will know how broke they really are. But when it comes to setting sail, the most often question is probably “how much does it cost?” Most people will just punt the question back with “as much as you have to spend,” which, I suppose, is fairly accurate. But a number of other sailing writers have taken the question seriously and have been publishing their monthly cruising expenses for all to see (see s/v Third Day and s/v Hotspur). We plan on doing the same to help answer the allusive cruising cost question as well as to help us to keep detailed records of our spending and stay on budget.

For now, if you take a look at Wondertime’s Current To-Do List you’ll see that we’ve included a column with estimated costs to complete each item (you’ll also notice that much of it is not filled out yet…like everything else about getting ready even our to-do list is a Work In Progress!) We’ve also switched around our prioritizing system a little bit. Where we had been labeling only safety items as #1s, we’ve now included those items that we feel are imperative to get done before we leave town in six months. #2s are things that we’ll probably tick off as we work our way south. 3s and 4s are things to get done as time and funds allow. At the bottom are (hallelujah!) completed projects.

As we sipped our Charles Shaw we examined each item on the list thinking long and hard about how much of a priority each really is. Our focus was those items that we truly felt we could not set off on our long-term cruise without completing. Most of these are the same safety-related to-dos but many are items we simply don’t feel right without doing, like painting the bottom and installing a halyard to hoist our Canadian courtesy flag. Some things we took off the list altogether (such as installing wind instruments) which was a relief.

As we added cost estimates to our #1 priority items and saw the total tallying up at the top of the spreadsheet it became clear to us that a number of items we’d placed as high priority were going to have to be demoted. Two of these included installing a watermaker and upgrading our refrigeration system. While both of these would be really really really nice to have, their sheer cost total (about $2-3K each!) made it clear to us that they are just not going to get done before we leave. With about $10K remaining in our outfitting budget the less expensive (and, admittedly, more critical) items have to take priority. Perhaps it is the influence the Pardey’s still have over our cruising style, being theirs were the first sailing books we read so many years ago, but strong lifelines, anchors and copious amounts of chain are at the top of our list over creature comforts. (Not that we would hesitate to install such systems if, ahem, a great deal was found….)

Just like sticking to a budget, now the difficult part is to stick to our list — or more specifically those #1 items on our list. It will be tempting to drift off course and want to get some easy “nice to haves” done but before we know it our outfitting funds will be depleted and it will be time to leave the dock for good. Money spent after that comes directly from the cruising kitty which means less time “out there.” And time out there is worth more than any item on our List.