Like Drillling A Hole In Your Boat!

SHIP'S LOG:

The new furling system on ABISHAG was not furling ie. rolling up the jib -correctly.Quite naturally I felt that the furling system was at fault However, Kevin from the Loft, who installed the system, came down to the boat and after a few tries announced that the problem was not the furling system but the sail. So off the sail came and off to the sail loft with it.

Kevin suspected that a repair that I had done to the sail was done incorrectly (No, Kevin didn't have anything to do with the repair.). Based on how the sail was furling, he described what was wrong with it and when we laid it out on the loft floor, what he predicted was exactly what we found. That was a relief and also a prelude to anxiety for to fix the mistake and then do the repair correctly, the luft (front edge) of the sail had to be taken apart. The luft tape, the patches and the padding all had to be removed . . . . by me. Seams had top be ripped, patches cut, padding removed, a process which took five (5) hours, during which time I was worrying that I would screw up, cut the wrong thing or create a bigger problem than I already had. But evidently everything went well.  Then this morning, a real pain in the butt job, flattening the sail. Don't sound too bad, does it, but a sail is made of straight pieces of cloth that are curved to shape the sail. By nature, it doesn't want to lay flat, do the whole thing has to be laid out and then stretched and pinned in place with push pins. It was a small three hour job. Tomorrow, a new curve showing the new shape of the sail will be inscribed and the patches and padding glued and pre-sewn back in place. The the new curve will be cut (no place for mistakes then) and the luft tape pre-sewn onto the new luft, and voila, the sail will be ready to fly. Ah, the joy of boat ownership!!!!!!!!!!!!!