Failed Chainplate--for folks who like the close up shots...

When an okay looking chainplate like this one....

has a crack like this hidden in the rusty areas or under the fittings,

you can end up with something that looks like this.

Which results in this very unhappy looking experience.

Sailing, we are sailing...

When you spend years re-building a boat, you stop sailing, you stop hanging out together and, if you’re not careful, you stop dreaming. Every weekend, and often weeknights, Evan would head to Ceilydh. Sometimes I would tag along with Maia and we’d all install hatches, lay-up fibreglass and remove old fittings. But mostly Evan worked alone. The project, while often fulfilling, also wore us down - it taxed our marriage, diminished our bank account and pulled us away from family and friends. If ever there were a time I longed to just go sailing - this was it. But instead, the tasks stretched on.

Then you hit the point when you're done, or done enough. And nothing can compare to that moment when the wind fills your sails and you're free. When you sail to the next harbour, with a warm breeze on your face and a dream in your mind, it's almost possible to forget what it felt like to miss yet another event because you had fibreglass to sand.

Ceilydh hasn't sailed since Oregon. We've put plenty of hours on the motor, but it's sailing that first brought Evan and I together and sailing has been what's propelled us through our years.

Evan likes to beat the pants off of the other boats. I like to gather friends and family and combine all the elements I love best. Both are good ways to sail.

Steve and Irma (before there was a Maia, Ellie or Clara) shared in our dream about someday owning a boat and sailing away. Later they sailed with us on little Ceilydh once we reached the east coast. They came with us today to test our repaired rig and see us off as we start south again.

Our day was perfect. The sailing was perfect.

Booo! Trying to scare up a decent Hallowe'en

It’s the holidays that really mark time when you’re a kid. And Maia, being eight, is at that intersection where the magic and mystery of the seasons is just beginning to give way to the reason of adulthood.

So holidays are important to her (which makes them important to us) but this whole sailing thing is putting a crimp in her joy.

So the pressure is on to make Hallowe’en special. We already messed up Thanksgiving and no amount of day-after-pumpkin-pie could repair the damage done when we failed to produce a turkey. Even though we had a nice dinner with good friends the absence of a bird and its trimmings was definitely noted and will probably come up in some future therapy session.

The complication with Hallowe’en didn’t come with not knowing when it would occur (Maia started counting it down right around our non-Thanksgiving) the complication came with the fact we didn’t know where we were going to be for the occasion - which made it hard to plan. Until yesterday afternoon our fate was in the hands of our riggers. But this morning, after signing a cheque that had quite a few numbers in it, we were released into the wilds with a mast that could withstand just about anything.

But today is the day before Hallowe’en and our next planned anchorage is two days away. See the problem?

So despite the fact that we’re parked at a dock beside a loud bridge and across from a cement plant, right in the heart of an industrial district – we decided being in a place we sort of know is better than going to a place we're clueless about. So we’re staying put and we’re going to make this work.

We have pirate costumes – thanks to the nearby Sally-Ann (actually we have a bunch of new clothes – this place has the best thrift stores ever!) And we have a pumpkin, which was carved with a ghoulish glee. The pumpkin seeds are roasted and the boat has a festive look. I've found an outdoor hybrid ice rink that’s having a Hallowe’en skating party (which is puzzling, but we’re game) and after our skate we’re going to parachute into the closest posh neighbourhood for trick-or-treating.

Hopefully, despite my worry about the holiday (which Maia claims is the best of the year) not being just right, a little ghastly enchantment will come our way. And maybe, with a bit of luck, childhood magic will soften the rough edges of our efforts and Maia will remember the year she went trick-or-treating in a strange and random neighbourhood with just her parents at her side as a good one.

If not we’ll send her to our friend’s place for their party next year – that should make up for it.

On a completely different topic, my other blog for a green living magazine called Granville just won Best Blog at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, so feel free to pop over and check it out.

The Smoking Gun

So we’ve found the smoking gun that caused the wobbly rig.
This bit might be better written by Evan, because despite the fact I’ve written a number of technical articles, I’m not particularly technically minded.
I just fake it.

Anyway, the recap is: while sailing toward California the wind came up on our nose and so we tested out our ability to heave-to while we decided what we wanted to do (we both have the goal of avoiding as much bad weather as possible while Maia gets her sea legs.) While hove-to we noticed that the mast was bending over, the wrong way. Not that there is a right way for a mast to bend…

It was 4am on a windy, moonless and overcast night, aka dark and stormy. Ev got the sails down pronto, which was a bit of a tough thing because we were trying to keep the wind on what appeared to be the strong side of the mast and the sails slightly filled while he was hauling them down.

Then Ev checked all the shrouds to see which of them had gone.

None of them had broken, which rather confused us. But then again it was the middle of the night, on the 3rd night of our first offshore passage, that’s a generally confusing time…

So Evan secured the mast as best he could and we began to motor back the way we came, to the closest safe harbour, which was Coos Bay.

When the sun came up and Ev rechecked the rig, we were still confounded. We had one very slack inner shroud and a general looseness in the rest of the rig but no obvious failures. If we didn’t know better we would have guessed that some sort of shrinking spell had been cast on the mast during the night.

Once we were in harbour the first working theory was that the spectra lashings on our stays had undergone some construction stretch, or creep. But even after Ev had retuned our entire rig, the loose shroud stayed loose. So we looked at it more closely and saw this:

Which if you look closely at the faint line about 1/2 a cm under the swage you'll see it looks different than the other side which looks like this:

Our best guess is the wire has pulled through the swaged fitting about 4-5 cm (the swage doesn't seem to be crimped on it's whole length.

So now it looks like this:

And when we get to San Francisco we’re throwing a whole lot of money at the problem so I can go back to worrying about serious things like when I should buy the chocolate chips…