One big annoyance from my first few sails has been the combination on continuous lines and rail mounted cleats. The cleats are uncomfortable to sit on and much worse kept coming uncleared. The main cause of uncleating being over exuberant use of the continuous lines pulling on the backside of the far cleats. Once the cleats on the rail are undone you have to reach them to recleat, likely a problem as your weight goes to the wrong place. Looking at rigging pictures I found images of Daryl’s Farr on face book where the cleats were centerline and led through eyes at the rail. This seemed to fix all my primary issues so I decided to copy. Original layout: Removed and holes filled. Also marked out an extra area for more non skid: At this point I commented on Daryl’s picture and he replied that he no longer ran lines through the eyes, but instead to low friction rings on elastic. As I thought about this made a lot of sense as it would allow more control from outboa...
I had a scrappy piece of paper with my final "get it on the water" checklist and Vida added her own item.... I'd always joked with the kids that Farrout would get broken and repaired many times, partly just to get them used to the idea that this was fine (like capsizing, or falling off your bike). Anyway.... To work off some Jetlag I took Farrout for a lovely winters day sail. By the time I got on the water the wind had died down a bit from it's midday peak but it was still strong enough to have us skipping across the harbor. First things first I needed to do was test some of the changes I'd made. Improvements to rigging setup: Great! Fast setup of shrouds, quick attachment of rudder, boat breaker line just the right length. Took 20 minutes to rig and next time will be quicker as it's tuned already! New Zhik sea boots: Comfy, but not the extra grip I was hoping for. Going to have to extend the foot rests higher to get better purchase I think....
With the gantry in place it was time to start building the lifting rudder head mechanism. Lifting firstly because I have kids and there is a beach in the harbor at low tides. Secondly because there are some lakes and bays I plan on sailing from where it will come in handy. This piece gave me some angst but with it 70% complete now I'm fairly confident it'll work well enough to get me sailing. My assumption is I'll be rebuilding some areas once we start sailing but really hoping to focus on the foils. As with most of Farrout I approached this with a mixture of 4mm mahogany ply, cedar and carbon / glass / epoxy. It all starts with a dry fit. Epoxied in some cedar Checking rudder fit Checking fit against the gantry Testing fit with both sides against the rudder. Some reinforcement on the rudder Bagging the rudder box Starting to get there. The tube on top was made by wrapping some carbon around the 1" carbon tube I...
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