Day 412, Year 1: Sails and Rigging Day
Date: Monday, December 4, 2006
Weather: Partly Sunny Day, Rainy Evening
Location: Whangarei, New Zealand
Calibre Sails arrived at 8 am this morning just as promised. Dave is the person we deal with at Calibre, and he came with Bill of Windsong. Windsong is a boat that came here last year and stayed and Bill got a job with Calibre. Bill will do most of the sail repair work under Dave’s direction. All three sails came down quickly and the repairs will be done and sails back on tomorrow or the next day. Whangarei Sails and Rigging arrived before Calibre left, but unfortunately their visit was not as quick and easy. They were able to quickly replace and/or tighten the set screws on both of our Profurl roller furlers, but there is a problem with the staysail furler that is going to require drilling out screws and retapping to replace them. The bigger problem, however, is that they discovered that one of our 18 month old lower stays was frayed. The stays hold up the mast, and frayed stays are very dangerous. They cut it down and took it back to the shop to dissect. They need to figure out why a relatively new stay would fray. There are three other stays that were replaced at the same time and it is possible that all will have to replaced. We are very impressed with the caliber of workmanship here. Everyone responds quickly and all seem very competent. This was not always the case when we had the boat in Boston, so we are very impressed so far.
The rest of the day was spent continuing to clean and dry out everything from under the v-berth and working on polishing stainless. Right now the work seems endless, but it will end next week, done or not, when we fly home. We can’t wait.
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| 061204 Day 412 New Zealand–Repairs Needed |
