Sunday 16 July
A bright, warm, breezy day which Mate took full advantage of, walking several times around the bay, past the unusual and evocative war memorial,
t
o catch up with all the laundry and peg it all out on my smart red line, invoking washing line envy from a lady who’d seen us in her home port of Conwy a few weeks ago.
Skipper’s spent a lot of time while we’ve been here ticking off some of the endless list of maintenance jobs needed to keep me shipshape, especially around my domestic water system of filters and pumps.
Today he fitted a new D-ring into the aft end of the slot at the base of the boom, so the preventer can be tied in properly, instead of through a reefing pennant loop. A preventer is used when I’m sailing a reach, where the wind is coming from my beam or further back, and the sail is let out a long way over my other side. Should a rogue wave cause me to lurch, or the wind suddenly gust from the opposite side, behind the mainsail, the preventer ‘prevents’ (see – clever nomenclature) the boom, the horizontal bar along the bottom of the sail, from crashing across the boat in an accidental gybe, which could cause a lot of damage. A reefing pennant is a rope threaded through the mainsail at the mast and the leech, the diagonal back edge, to pull the lower part of the sail down onto the boom to reduce its area in strong winds. Sailing is a whole different language…