Forestay Surgery

Nathan checks our repairs.

There are three things that you dont want to lose...
1) hull
2) rig
3) rudder

Losing your rig isnt necessarily an emergency just yet. Especially if it is not banging on your hull perforating it. You can rig up your spinnaker poles with a trysail, or anything to get you going. Still, knowing that your mast isnt about to fall is a nice thought...

Nathan talked to the rest of the fleet during childrens hour and it looks like this might just have been a random act...the rig was quite new (2 months or so) but had been tried upwind under heavy breeze in the Bay. Weird.

We didnt want to have our halyards all used up as we couldnt fly a headsail. We also wanted to make sure that we had a good solid and chafe-free solution. Nathan had the idea to use the jackline (webbing, it stretches but is very strong). we would replace those with a high-tech spinnaker sheet (by the way, we lost one sheet in the process of taking the kite down as the shackle just opened...@$%)*%&%$^&)

We werent sure about the integrity of the rest of the standing rigging at this point so we rigged the spare external halyard back as a failure of teh backstay would be really bad downwind.

Nathan going up the mast to bring the webbing at the forestay attachment point (Nat was grinding and Nick, the autopilot was driving)

Nat done with connecting the autopilot

Nathan removing the jackline to replace the forestay

and Nick driving...

our new forestay...and an old halyard which we were going to use as a safety line for Nathan as he was going up the rig.

We both looked at each other in disbelief, thinking that the race was over and feeling sorry for each other. Now, and the more I think about it, the more I think that this is what sailing and racing is about. i mean long-distance. it is about the ability to deal with shit like that. a sailor is really a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, a rigger, a sailmaker, a doctor and a nurse -just about anything it takes to face adversity with no outside assistance, pretty far away from anybody...

Now, if we had been real good racers we would have known how confident we could have been in our repair and done just enough to keep a headsail up ASAP. Then figure out the rest...I guess that there is still a lot for us (or for me, I was the one advocating prudence) in this department.

A passage when nothing breaks is probably suspect. If what breaks is pretty race critical it really is a bummer. Maybe I didnt trust our repairs early enough. We didnt load up the rig very fast. We slowly did it and watch the repair carefully as we did so, effectively taking 3 days off the race. At the end of these 3 days, we had fallen in position 4 (out of 6 and from #2)

a bitter pill to swallow