Sailing the World and Building Businesses

I wonder how many of these sit idle from projects?

Let’s just say that sailboat maintenance and I have not always seen eye to eye with one another. When I sailed my friend’s boat for the first time returning from Iraq, it had been beautifully maintained by the previous owner and  there was nothing stopping us from cruising through the water those first few weekends. When I bought my Catalina 25, I carried the naive thought of a maintenance free boat from my friend’s brief experience. I was quickly humbled when we took her out on her first voyage and found the outboard die on us as we strapped down the sails and prepared for our final approach to the docks. A week later my anchor light (permanently affixed atop my mast) burned out. And then came the leaks – slowly at first, and then a series of new ones appeared as I discovered more about my boat. I didn’t go looking for maintenance, maintenance found me. Progress was slow at first and it seemed like I was constantly asking the boat yard in those days for the best way to do a job, but I eventually fixed all those issues along with a few new ones. My Catalina maintenance break-in was the perfect precursor to my time with Blue Magic.

Flash forward to last weekend. When it came to maintenance and projects, I finally felt completely at ease. Using an exploded diagram off of the Lofrans website, I tore apart my windlass and found out where it had broken during our trip through Beaufort.

Luckily it was a twisted key and I was able to fix the problem by swapping it out with a new one. I wasn’t comfortable with another piece that had twisted as well that made putting the windlass together awkward and unnatural, so I went ahead and ordered that part on Tuesday, and hopefully it arrives before the weekend ends. But depressing the deck buttons and watching the windlass spin again was a satisfying sight.

This is what a 2 speed winch looks like with the top off - this was only the beginning.

For me, accomplishing a project like that is usually enough for me to call it good and go sailing on a normal weekend, but I didn’t stop there. The last time I was out sailing, one of my winches didn’t seem to be pulling my jib sheets as easily as it should have been. In fact, all my winches felt rough and difficult to handle compared to what I’m used to. So I hit Google again and got the disassembly instructions for my Lewmar winches and went to work taking them apart. I gave all the parts a good wipedown with mineral oil and re-greased where the instructions told me to. My worst winch had a broken pawl, so that’s yet another little piece that should be arriving by the end of this week.

Alas I can’t say I feel like Pirsig and his motorcyle quite yet. There’s definitely one type of project I love to hate: plumbing. I am nearly done with the infernal fresh project, and I made a a lot of progress on it as well, but only after I played with the windlass and winches! I hope to have a working system jury rigged this weekend until a new Lexan cover I ordered comes in for final installment. If this warmer weather holds for a few more weeks or spring comes early, it shouldn’t be too long before I’m ready for a bigger trip.

Let me know where you’re at with a few of your own boat projects. For those of you in the northern latitudes where your boat’s hauled out for the winter, I imagine you’ve got a great opportunity to knock some projects out on the hard.

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