Alajuela 38
Sailing from Bahia Algodones to Bahia San Padro, the starboard jib block failed. It’s nut suffered unseen crevice corrosion, causing the pin to pop out and the sheave to be slingshotted across the cockpit. The nut that failed was split in four places! Chloride ions can cause localized corrosive attack (pitting and crevice corrosion) of stainless steels.
Fortunately, the winds were light at the time , all of the parts were recovered, and a replacement nut was on-board.
I replaced some temporary carabiners with a block on top of the mast through which a back-up halyard runs. The halyard is a static climbing rope that I also use to climb the mast., At one point as I replaced the hardware I was clipped into the top of the mast and without a rope to descend the mast. You can be sure that I was extra careful not to drop the rope, especially as it is Friday the 13th.
We took the Aegir-Ran out for a shake-down sail today. The wind was blowing about 10 knots when we began and about 25 knots when we brought her back to the dock about two hours later. We raised the three sails and achieved almost 8 knots. Docking after the wind picked up proved challenging. Using the “stern upwind rule”, we had to back the boat into the slip.
The halyards are cable spliced onto rope. The cables of the staysail and mainsail halyards were too long to allow the sails to be raised completely because the winches were not designed for wire. Today I shorted each by a couple of feet (as I did previously for the jib halyard), so all the sails are operational.
