Well, we fixed all the things that needing fixing (except the autopilot) and then beat feet before something else could break. We still haven’t made it past 12 hours without something breaking, but we’re keeping up with the damage…barely…

We spent a bit of time shaking out things in So Cal and then hit a good weather window to go North up the California coast. We’re anchored in Half Moon Bay at present (20 miles S of San Francisco as we didn’t want to be in the Bay during the holiday weekend) The things that we’ve managed to break so far on our northward trek:

All the old leather lashings on the foot of the sail (all 15 of the new ones I installed held just fine, I guess I should have replaced all of them in the first place!).

Had a retaining pin on a snap shackle break apart but luckily it isn’t on anything important and we captured the pin/spring as it happened. New pin in place and all is good.

Blew out the clew on the #1 jib during some high winds. Had to go to the 80% Yankee style jib. The hanked on jibstay is 11 feet out there on a bowsprit and David forgot to attach the tricing line/downhaul to the Yankee while hanking it on so we had a very difficult time getting it down in 40 knots of wind a few hours later. Lucky us, after about 30 exciting minutes of dealing with it, we got it down without damage.

The bolt rope along the luff of the mainsail has a spot where it is coming unstitched from the sailcloth. Same with a spot along the foot of the mainsail. I’d already inspected the boltropes and re-stitched about 15 feet of it. Seems I need to re-stitch about 30 more feet. Long project.

With very high winds, both the staysail and the Yankee have excessive leech flutter. I’m not really sure if a leech cord would help or if broad seaming is needed. The staysail has battens and I suspect broad seaming is needed whereas the jib might make due with a leach cord, but I’m not an experienced enough sailor to know what’s right for this.

Other, “humm…so that’s interesting” things:

The prop wash on the rudder due to small aperture really sets up a vibration when pushing it hard while motorsailing.

When the foredeck is submerged (as it was every few minutes for about 10 hours of hard motorsailing in heavy seas going to windward) some water eventually seeps in around the seams between the raised deck and the cabin wall.

Waves breaking over midships can actually push a little water up under the combing around the butterfly deck hatches/deck lights. My stove got rained on.

We need winch handle holders at each mast rather than letting the winch handles get stuffed in among the lines to fend for themselves. It is only a miracle that we haven’t lost one yet.

Though everyone says that a gaff boom will always come down (benefit of having gaff-rigged sail), its not true. When winds are high and you’re trying to reef a gaff sail, that gaff boom just stays way up there even when the throat and peak halyards are loose and it should be falling like a rock.

A loose gaff topping lift WILL wrap itself around anything nearby and with amazing speed turn itself into a knot. Question–what to do with the gaff topping lift when it can’t be kept tight (i.e. when there’s very little wind and keeping it tight doesn’t help matters).

When you’re anchoring in 40 knots of wind, after you start backing down, you have to keep the boat in forward gear (not reverse) in order to back down at the right pace.

Cooking on a non-gimbled alcohol camp stove isn’t smart when the boat is rolling in heavy seas. Spagetti goes everywhere and does stick.

Well, we’re now a day into our 6th experience aboard Mahdee of a serious gale or storm (as recognized by NOAA National Weather Service that is) since last fall; This one sounds terrible from below deck, but is actually quite nice. Sunny and bright with sparkling and streaming whitecaps on the (small) waves in the harbor.

David is outside in the cockpit, shielded from the worst of the wind and enjoying working on making a wooden storage box for the cockpit. He’s grinning because the sawdust is flying away in the winds and he’ll not have to sweep up the mess of the project.

OK, we’ve been living aboard since August of 2008 (in the boatyard, remember?) and relaunched the boat in April 2009, continuing to work on it in the water and do local cruising. Here we are A YEAR LATER! and all I can say “can we go more than 12 hours of sailing without breaking SOMETHING?” We’ve only moved up the coast a tiny bit from San Diego (and our storage garage) to Newport just because we’re constantly fixing things. Every sail we do means a long, longer, longer still list of things to fix.

OK, perhaps that sounds a bit melodramatic, but seriously, the record for us–12 hours of sailing time before something necessary broke, shook loose, leaked, chafed through, or something “revealed its evil side” which is my term for design defects, chafe areas, or equipment that is inadequate for the task and must be beefed up, modified, replaced, whatever…

It’s always something. We haven’t experienced these sorts of problems with other sailboats. But, we’ve not pushed other sailboats very hard like we’re pushing this one.

We’re confident sailors. We know what to do and have the wherewith-all to do it…usually. However, today, we’re less confident that we’re ready to go offshore with this boat than we were 6 months ago. Give us another 6 months and we’ll be looking for a comfy little anchorage in the Sea of Cortez that we’ll just stay in forever more.

The sorts of things which we’ve been dealing with is really varied–simple stuff like the white motoring light on the foremast burned out with only 30 hours of use (climb the mast); or more serious stuff like an APC Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) catching fire.

Lots of things have created big “projects” for us to complete before we can get out of Southern California. These aren’t want-to-do things they’re need-to-do things relating to functionality or safety. The clock is ticking for us in that we need to start our trip to the Pacific Northwest…NOW…or at least by the first week of May or so in order for us to not be fighting the winds and currents too much. We’ve more-or-less written off the idea of going to Hawaii simply because we’d have to take crew along since David and I would be constantly fixing things–every 12 hours, right? Many times things that need to be tweaked, fixed, changed, take two people to do safely.

Then there’s the “big” issue of “big” too. We seem to be constantly pushing our bodies, our tools, everything because this stuff on this 29 ton schooner is…big. Last week I modified my Reliable sewing machine with a Sailrite Monster Wheel so I could push it harder as the clutch wasn’t up the the task of more than 3 layers of our 12 oz Dacron sailcloth. And, I need to go through 6 and 8 layers of it. Now the Reliable can do 6 layers but oops, this weekend I messed up the timing by pushing it to try and do…9 layers… So, back to sewing machine fixing for me tomorrow.

A lot of stuff we do bring on ourselves, breaking something or mis-using something. But…most of it is legitimately a big surprise for us when something just breaks down or doesn’t work as it should.

Enough with the whining. Yesterday we re-installed our newly modified main goose neck. We’re sitting here in the middle of a gale (last night through tomorrow) with bouts of rain so I’m at least smiling that my (last week’s) re-setting of the glazing in all the butterfly hatches isn’t leaking

Maybe we can shoot for…13 hours???