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Loads of people put little tips and hints on their blogs about “sailor-like” things including folding sails. That’s not what I’m going to do. No. If you want to know how to fold a sail–google it. My story today is all about lugging around our mainsail one day last week and folding it so it can fit stowed somewhere inside the boat. I hate folding laundry. I also dislike folding sails. With the laundry, it’s a combination of 1. not wanting to fold wrinkles into things by working too quickly, and of 2. being reminded that “my transom is wide” while folding my pants. In terms of sails, we can say the dislikes are similar–I don’t want to fold things wrong and Mahdee, well, she’s a hefty boat so she has some huge sails made of very heavy-weight Dacron.
Our spare mainsail is now bent on and the one we used to use is now the “spare.” It sat on the foredeck smooshed under the dingy and peeking out for a month while it waited to be folded. Finally, as we packed up to depart the marina, David and I decided we could no longer procrastinate folding that big sail. He wanted to fold it on deck and I really couldn’t imagine that happening neatly and I did imagine the voluminous sail would knock me right overboard. Sometimes our days are spent doing mundane but amazingly tiring tasks like…folding the mainsail.
Because the piers and connecting docks are narrow and I didn’t want part of the sail to end up in the salt water, I coaxed David into us taking the sail up to the grass between the sidewalk and parking lot of the marina. Given the biggest dock cart the marina has, we hauled the sail over the side of Mahdee, dragged it a bit, and loaded it onto the cart. This, in and of itself, is no small thing. The finger pier alongside Mahdee is narrow and has a concrete piling right smack in the middle with about 18″ of dock on either side of the pile. Not enough room for the dock cart to pass so we had to pass the big sail down from the boat and then around the piling to get it into the cart. The piling was covered in nasty, sharp marine growth because we timed this whole thing…let’s say “poorly.” Umm…we’ll check the tide tables next time. Of course, procrastinators can’t be choosers and in this case, with ominous rains in the forecast, it was the afternoon of the last sunny day we would see before sailing out of the marina. Getting the sail contained atop the dock cart without a spill into the water was a major victory.
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Then it was up the steep ramp from the slips to the grassy area. Again–reminder to self–next time, look at the tides before doing this. The sail itself weighs about 100 lbs and the 50 or so big bronze slides add a little bit more weight to that. Once in the grass, it was not too hard to fold it quickly and bring it back down to the boat. I’ve put a before and after set of pictures at the beginning of the post so you can see what a difference the folding makes.
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