Sea Trials

We've been pretty busy now, doing sea trials. What that means is we take the boat out for a short time to test out gear that we can't test at the dock and do shake-down sailing.

We first went out on April 16, and just tested the engine. We puttered around the inner harbor here in a fairly fresh breeze. The only weather we've been having are fresh to strong breezes. We came up with several small things to fix on the engine - a dirty air intake and a small diesel fuel drip out of the secondary fuel filter.

Then, last Monday April 20, we took the Debonair out into the open sea to raise sails. This was a strong breeze day, and we just raised the mainsail with two reefs in it (shortened sail area). We had 6 to 8 foot seas crashing over the bow on a beat, and wore ourselves out. We came up with some more things to fix and a *lot* of items to stow. Even with what we thought everything lashed down below decks, this really shook loose stuff that managed to crash onto the floor.

We decided that we needed a mainsail management system, known as a "lazy jack" system. This is a simple set of lines and blocks designed to keep the mainsail from being thrown all over the deck when we bring the sail down. We should have done this years ago, but it took going out into 25 knots of wind, gusting to 30 knots, to convince ourselves that we need one. Here's a picture of what the rigger will do for us:

This is as much a safety issue as ease of handling - when squalls come up, we can just go to the mast and dump the mainsail down without having to worry about it as the wind pipes up.

Almost ready!