Fixing Your Sails in Exotic Locations

Actually, I believe the phrase is.... "Cruising is fixing your boat in exotic locations."  But sails are part of the boat so this counts. 

The stitching on sacrificial Sunbrella on the headsail shredded on the way down.  Each time we flew the sail, more and more came loose.  I guess it did what is was supposed to do - it sacrificed so the sail would survive.  Of course I had every other color of Sunbrella onboard BUT black.   We popped into Doyle Sails in Roadtown last week and I bought a yard of black Sunbrella just in case some of it needed to be replaced. 

It turned out that all I had to do was re-stitch a bunch of areas....this time.  But it worked.  We flew the headsail today on our way to Peter Island today. 

I also did a small repair job on the staysail.  I double checked ALL the stitching on both sails.

Tom fired up our little Honda generator to run the Sailrite machine and it worked like a charm.  Thank you Wayne and Jan for the generator!!!  Both repair jobs turned out pretty good.  All in all, it took about 6 hours from start to finish including dropping the sails and re-rigging them.  It was hot but the pay off was jumping into the cool, Caribbean turquoise water after the job was done and admiring them while floating around the boat.   REFRESHING! 

Repair wise -the same cannot be said for our mainsail.  I bought a yard of Dacron so I could repair the sacrificial there as well.  However a bigger concern was looming.  We have been having issues for some time getting the sail in and out of the furler.  I really thought something was wrong with the mechanics of the furler.  We discussed this in depth with the guy at Doyle Sails.  Then he hopped in his dinghy and came out to our boat in person.  Furler is fine. Sail is not.  Seems it is past it's useful life.  Sigh.  It's stretch and misshaped.  From this point on, it will only get harder and harder to furl in and out.  Of course we all know it will become near impossible at the most inopportune time so we decided to bite the bullet and order a new one.  Our new one should arrive sometime around Xmas.  "Santa, all I want for X-mas is a new mainsail."  Santa = "Yeah, you and every other southbound cruiser!  Cough up the $$!"

My New Sunshade

I have been thinking of making a sun/rain shade for some time.  Many, many boats here at the marina have sunshades that cover the main part of the deck and help cut down on the heat inside the boat.  There are various designs - some complicated, some simply plastic tarps.  There are fancy ones for sell - Shadetree looks terrific but $$ so I decided to make my own.

I ordered 20 yards of white 60" Surlast fabric off Ebay for $120.  I had a heck of a time figuring out the right side and wrong side.  After looking at it many times and getting a couple of opinions from fellow dockmates, I just went with what I thought was right.  I started last Saturday and finished installing the grommets Monday morning.  Just in time to test it out on a 95 degree day with heat index of 105-108.  While we don't have a thermometer inside the boat to tell us the temp (probably best we don't actually know how hot it is in there), our Nutella turned into a liquid!!  Tom says he can definitely tell a difference with the sunshade up.  He says the salon (which is covered by the sunshade) is cooler than our stateroom (that is not covered by the sunshade).  I still need to add some chafe guard now that it's up and make one for the foredeck but I am pretty please with the result of this one.  We even had a big storm Monday afternoon with high winds and it stayed in place nicely.