Back aboard Salty Ginger!

 Pristine clean boat

Coming aboard this time around was, quite quite different from the years before. First, the boat is not just in the water but on a mooring. Second, my friend Sasha splashed Salty Ginger in mid-June and commissioned the boat: the sails are on, the bimini and the dodger create a welcome shade, there is water in the water tanks and seltzer water in the fridge. Not only that, before leaving the boat he put pretty much everything into lockers, so at first sight the boat was so clean as if ready for sale (not just sail!).

When Frank, Peter and I arrived it was +31C, but windy. So opening all hatches aired the boat in no time and without losing much time we started with projects. Priority number 1: find stuff. The water filter cap had a crack, and I was pretty sure that I had a replacement somewhere aboard. We needed electrical devices like lights and label makers to get charged. Finally, we needed to prep for our big projects: replace a sheave (sailor term for a wheel in a block) in the boom and to run a second halyard for the spinnaker and gennaker/code-0.

Peter was helping to take things out of various compartments and quickly stumbled upon nautical flags that consist of letters A-Z, numbers and a few other things. Four years ago we spelled the name of the boat as “SALTY GINJER” (what are you going to do if only one flag exists for every letter) and Peter said that we cannot possibly proceed with any projects until we fly the flags above the foredeck. Reluctantly I obliged.

In a totally wrong box I did find a new lid for the water filter so now the pump could build up pressure and we have fresh running water to wash hands and whatever else. Unfortunately we discovered a strong smell of glycol (antifreeze used to winterise the water system), and the PUR filter so the water is not pleasant to taste, but passable.

Project 1 completed!

One of the discoveries from last year annoyed me was the broken sheave in the boom. Besides creating extra resistance it had the potential of weakening the line that was going over it. Not a great combination.

Last year a rigger came by, said that he has “a tool” that could take care of the job, but then getting a hold of these over-booked riggers was impossible. Last year I could get through on the phone, but this year even the boat yard manager said he couldn’t get through. After spending hours researching which exact boom fitting it is, and what other people to do fix the problem, the decision was to knock out the pin with a driving pin and a hammer. I was rather concerned that the oxidation between stainless steel would make it very difficult if not impossible. Sasha sprayed some penetrating oil onto the pin before he left 10 days ago and Frank added some more while we were messing around in the cabin. To our great relief the pin came out only with a little bit of resistance and a new ball-bearing sheave with a larger diameter is now in place!

As one can see, we had to rerun the line through a different slot because the original one was much too narrow for any of the sheaves that I bought. Perhaps that was one of the contributing factors to the failure of the original sheave. Of course, now the lines have to be re-labelled on the clutches, so finding the charging cable for the label maker became critical!

Food!

Frank is super organized as far as food is concerned. He cooked a turkey chilli and brought some rice, so our dinner was a snap to prepare. However, we lacked food for breakfast, so while being too tired to think about provisioning for the week, we made a trip to a local supermarket to get butter, milk, eggs and a few other things. We stopped by a liquor store on the way back to pick up some wine, but arguably that was a disappointing experience for the adults. Poor assortment of wines (we picked a Portuguese wine that was was quite nice though), beat up paper signs like “Out of State IDs require 2 IDs”. Peter was however happy: we got some cranberry juice and that along with made his shopping evening successful!

The wind started to die down into the evening, so sitting in a warm cockpit enjoying chilli and some wine was just marvellous! A shower was followed by crashing onto the pillow and immediately falling asleep. Sleeping alongside Peter is still an adventure because the boy is like gas: he tried to occupy all the volume available to him on the bed. Nevertheless at 6:15 I woke up rested, made coffee and now the first blog entry of the season is done.

The wind is quite light, so that should make it possible to go up the mast to run a new halyard and then make a provisioning plan for the week before dropping off the car and getting Sasha and his son Pasha aboard.

I sense the smell of scrambled eggs that Peter is making, so I better go…