End of Season Sail Care and Repairs.

-


This week I took advantage of a few nice weather days to do a little end-of-season sail care. The Mylar Genoa had a few frays at the seams so I trimmed them back. Flacked it down nicely and it is ready to go for the Spring.


My main sail was attacked by spiders this season. So I decided to give it a good cleaning.

For this, I used a Davis Sail maintenance kit. However, I modified my technique. The kit calls for soaking your sail and I felt that this would lead to a wrinkly sail and mine is still good and stiff. 



I laid my sail out on the lawn and used the Sail bath product from the kit mixed with the soaking directions. I brushed the product onto the sail and waited. It did a pretty decent job but I'm not sure there was much to clean off to begin with. However, the Foaming cleaner was really nice. I used it to spot-treat a few areas where spider nests had formed and it did an excellent job pulling up the stains. 



After the final rinse, I grabbed all the lawn chairs and draped the sail over them to dry.








.










 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building a Spinnaker Sock DIY

-
Image
Spinnaker Socks are super nice for launching and recovering your spinnaker.  My last two boats have had them and after using one the benefits are clear. 1st off, sail handling is much easier especially if you're short-handed. 2nd, safety spinnaker socks let you launch and recover your spinnaker without everything being perfectly packed in a turtle bag another word fewer things to tangle up keeps it safer. Woodstock does not have one so we have not used the Spinnaker yet and our trip to Lake Mac last week would have been the ideal time to use a Spinnaker.  So it is time to look into this.  $17.00 per foot x 28 ft =$476 plus tax.  Hum lets go see what's in the garage.  Any past readers remember this old post Boom Tent   Well this is one sewing project that didn't work out. However, I still have the material sitting here on a shelf and it is light enough and long enough to make into a sock. Now just to find one of those fancy fiberglass hoops they use to ...
Read more

Main sail rigging

-
Image
This post is a quick reference for rigging the main sail of a Cape Dory Typhoon.  Each boat over time has different modifications made to it based on the skippers preferences so your boat may not be exactly like this one.  However this is how I put mine together. I   first start with tuning the mast in.  I like to have a bit of rake in the mast and to be sure that it is in column.   Next I slide the booms goose neck into the mast. I slide the boom down to the sail stop and make sure it is tight with a screw driver. Then I clip the back side of the boom to the back stay catch. After that I get to work on untwisting the main sheet.   My current main sheet set up goes something like this.  It is a bit of a variation from the original set up.  You can see I still use one of the original Schafer stand up blocks to guide the sheet line to the cam cleat but the Harken fiddle block does most of the heavy lifting here.  Later this season I'm hopping t...
Read more

A removable compression post

-
Image
So this season I have been gearing up and changing my rigging around bit by bit as I find pieces here and there.  My ultimate goal is to  rig up a mast top spinnaker for use later in the season.  So far, I've got the mast head halyard set up.  Today I took the next step and installed a removable compression post.  My Typhoon has the saddle supports that came with older Cape Dorys but I thought it best to add a bit of extra support before trying out the mast head spinnaker. So here is what you will need:  A nice piece of teak, two other (less nice) hardwood boards for underneath the floor cut to 4 1/2 inches,  epoxy, 3M permanent mounting tape and a master lock adjustable door jam.. I routered the teak to give it a soft edge for when I bang my head into it.   Nice board ready to install. Setting the Teak upper. I drilled holes in the back of the teak plate to match the mast step through bolts.  I did not remove the mast step and ...
Read more