Memorial Day is Inspection Day
Straight off a flight back from 12 days in Europe for work we spent the long weekend on Shearwater getting ready for Pac Cup. One of the big activities was going up the mast to fix a wonky deck light, tape up the spreader tips better, tape over the steaming light a little to make it a narrow focus forward to shine on the spinnaker at night, replace the steaming light bulb with an LED so we can run said light all night without using too much juice, and fixing the tri-color light.
The last ended up being an interesting lesson. We had installed an LED bulb in the traditional socket back in 2012 and to be honest I was a little disappointed with it, because it seemed to be very voltage sensitive, dimming anytime the voltage dropped to what seemed like still a reasonable level. It turns out that transporting a mast for 2000 miles horizontally is really hard on a heavy LED bulb and the little prongs that hold it in the socket broke plumb off. The bad news was that meant a second trip up the mast to replace the broken bulb. The good news was we got a much better LED bulb that draws less and is more tolerant of voltage changes. Call it a win!
The rest of weekend was filled with a nice sail on Sunday (see tomorrow’s blog post) and preparing for our race inspection on Memorial Day. All in all, the inspection went really well. Our only deficiency was one of our strobe lights on our life buoy was deemed not sufficient because it was not self-righting. Well, the rules don’t stipulate it must be self-righting, so…??? Turns out to be a non-issue because in discussion with our entrants someone volunteered up a self-righting strobe and I jumped on it. Thanks Greg! We also need to tighten our lifelines, because it turns out that cranking on them the night before with a 6:1 purchase wasn’t enough. Who would have guessed that? It seems that either a turnbuckle or friction free pulleys in the purchase are needed to get them tight enough.
Our final inspection item was demonstrating our emergency steering. So, out we went into the Bay dragging our Galerider drogue that we tested in Galveston Bay back in April. This time using just the motor, we made a couple of failed attempts getting the lines adjusted to just the right length and then found the steering was quite passable while motoring at near cruising rpms. Lesson – Going faster makes the drogue more effective. Drag from the drogue increases dramatically with speed. That said, we just picked up a used SOS e-rudder from a former Pac Cup entrant. We’ll have it modified to fit Shearwater and add the mounting brackets before the start. The belt & suspenders approach I guess.
Official documents and operations manual
Emergency tiller
SOS rudder
Safety inspection items at the ready
More safety items ready for inspection
All in all, it was a great weekend on the boat. We love hanging out at RYC and in the little downtown area of Richmond.
And we are back again in 4 weeks time to have Shearwater quick-hauled on a single-point hoist for official weigh-in. I’m quite optimistic that she’ll come in roughly 1500 pounds or 10% over design weight (while fully unloaded) and we’ll get a nice rating credit as a result.
Great job on your prep; your boat looks fantastic! Congratulations for passing your inspection so quickly, I am really impressed by you guys. By the way, that was some terrific spinnaker handling on your “Golden Gate Fly By” video.