Bristol-Blue Lake Michigan Sailing Adventures

It is the end of December here in Michigan and we are experiencing 40 and 50-degree days. I'm starting to wonder if we even needed to pull out for the winter at this point. I'm sure the winter will get here soon enough. Hopefully, its late arrival doesn't me a late departure as well.  Usually, this time of year I am working on a sewing project of some sort but with the warm weather, I decided to push back canvas work and go down to work on the winches. The black tarp I use to cover Woodstock really helps to keep it warm inside on days like this. Here is a recap video no step-by-step but if you are working on your boat it is pretty easy to pop them apart clean them up and snap them back together. This Fall when winterizing my good old Evinrude I drained a lot of frothy oil out of the lower unit. I've known this has been coming for some time. Each year that lower unit lube looks a little worse at the end of the season.  So I also replaced all the seals and the water pump....

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 t...

 

We are still here sailing Lake Michigan.  Lots of adventures. I have not posted much lately so he is a video compilation of the fore deck sails from this seasons adventures. 1958 Herter project we have been restoring this also over the last few months.   

Found a whale shadowing us under the boat today.   

This weekend we got out it was a great run.  After about a hour the fog rolled in and coming back got a lot more interesting.