Lift out completed - first jobs done..

"Papillon" is safely out and sitting on her trailer in the club yard...

Went OK - went very OK if I'm to be honest... I have a 'thing' about raising and lowering the mast, especially since the dis-masting [click here] but with the discovery of the A frame [click here] last season many of these fears have been put to bed - though I'll admit to a slightly disturbed sleep on Saturday night as I knew I had to both drop it and raise it  on Sunday to get under Hayling bridge...

Either way, as I say it all went really well - really, really, well. Rod came down to give me a hand, I'd already taken the boom/mainsail and jib off and set up the A frame the day before so nothing needed to be done other than to fire up the outboard to check it would run, and check the lashings for the A frame were all good... we then engaged the A frame...

Lessons learnt this year -

1. I again used the mainsheet as my lifting/dropping mechanism (which gives me 3:1, and a cam cleat for easy locking off in the event I need to stop) but this time I used a carabine to attach the mainsheet to the bow roller - quick to undo if I need to, which came in useful later..
2. I used the jib halyard as the fixed part of the lever and found that if I deployed the A frame at about 10 or 15 degrees - about a foot of main halyard let out - I could then use the main halyard to crank on pressure so I could un-clip the roller reefing... genius!
3. This time round I also undid the rear stay before taking the mast down - just bungeed it to the mast to keep it out of the way...  much better than having it drift about the place....

Either way - after a little shove to get her going, the mast came down a treat and was soon sat in the crutch - time for lunch while we waited for the tide to drop enough to allow us under the bridge (5 metre tide!)

Sure enough - while we were sat there we were soon getting hassle to move as the tractor team were saying we were last and they wanted to go home - against my better judgement we had a go at going under the bridge, and just managed to squeeze under at the cost of a slightly bent aerial bracket, and some quick work by Rod to unclip the A frame to lay it flat... we could have done with another 30 minutes...

Ten minutes later we were in the hoist, and ten minutes after that we were on the trailer and safely stashed away - good news, I have the same spot as last year, so handy for water/power and bar...

While the mast was down in the yard I took the opportunity to put the windex back up (item 5. from the worklist already completed then!), but after I put the mast up I noticed that the aerial bracket had bent enough that the aerial now interferes with the windex (gah!) so the mast'll have to come down again at some point - no worries though, I feel comfortable enough to do it on my own now and I have some other stuff I'd like to do while the mast is down....how does it go? One step forward, and two back...

One other good thing - very pleased with the condition of the keels, the hammerite/"decorative garden project" [click here] that I tried last winter has been a success on the whole, and the bottom of the bilge keels look pretty good - so much so I plan to re-hammerite them this weekend so they don't sit rusting for the whole of the winter...

Job list update (see tab at top of page for full list):

2/. Repaint inside of tender.. Now pressure washed - need to get some paint..
4/. New mast crutch - modelled on the old one but using a thicker timber..For lift out I modified the old one by drilling a new hole lower down - this moves the cross point down, and effectively makes the crutch stiffer - I think the old one is now fine as it is...
5/. Replace windex Completed on lift out...