A day in the life of Elise

Nat had planned to go sailing around the Farallones. However, in the process of setting the boat up, and toward the last couple of todos to get this done, a small incident hapened (and, just to make Serge happy - 'Serge broke the boat by letting the tag lines loose inside the boom without the reefing lines attached to them') - 

Elise has two tag lines inside her boom so that we can easily run reefing lines in the morning of offshore races and then remove the reefing lines for Bay races. They are a little heavy and they do take up some space on deck. On days that we know for sure we won't need them, no point in carrying them up with us.

Unfortunately, that meant that we would then have to un the reefing lines though an enclosed tube of alumimum. We missed the planned start time of the race (but then since Nat had missed the registration deadline, it wasn't a big deal) - going out to the Farallones without any means to reef the main easily on a single-handed trip when things could be fixed at the dock was probably not the best way to go. There are always ways you can tie a line in a hurry just to the back of the boom or even to the outhaul (like a flattener basically) if your reefing system has broken and you need to jury rig something, but typically a jury rig isn't for before the start.

Elise does not have any rigger tool or any kind for this kind of job, so it required taking the boom apart so gravity could do its job...

We also did spend some time to install small cable ties on the reefing lines so that with a tiny tag line tied with a simple knot to the cable tie we can easily pull the lines through. It should make future jobs really easy.

In the end Elise got her reefing lines ready to go. We will leave those in place for the next couple of weeks and Nat will take the boat out on single-handed practices a few times.

Since the day got to a late start, we decided to repurpose it a little bit. 

First, Nat tested the autopilot (worked great, tried at gain 1, 4 and 9) and measured the power consumption. 

Unfortunately, even with the big battery and the teeny solar panel, the autopilot could really be used only for a couple of minutes at a time, basically, this means that on a day sail, you can not use it upwind and you can use it on gybes and potentially some sets for the pole and that's it, 30 seconds at a time, and then it takes a while for the battery to get recharged in-between. It is ok for a Farallones race but even hard for a Bay race when you need to potentially gybe many times. So we decided to install the 40W solar panel on the following day to give plenty of humpf.

We also installed an easily removable sheet bag to help take up some of the lines that are lying around in the cockpit. We will look to do something similar on the other side. When single-handed (or short-handed), we run the downhaul symmetrically so we can be pulled/released from either side and it is fairly long. Nice to have it out of the way. Also halyards may have to be stored above deck on ocean races as we need to be able to seal the boat closed. Slightly different use-case compared to the Bay.

 

Nat also changed a block for the backstay that was very corroded, so correded that it required hammer action to get the pin out. This required crawling to the back of the boat.

We also started to look at the wireless Tacktick.

Nat is looking up the users's manual to check which lines would bring the NMEA signal to the wireless trannsmitter.

We screwed on the wireless terminal and brought power to it right where the rest of the autopilot and instrument panel is screwed on, in one of the dryest parts of the boat. 

We also displayed the E27 polars outside in the cockpit to assist with racing and we taped up

the heavy equipment diagram inside the boat.

So overall, a fairly productive day.