Sailing Alison

Another weekend rolls around and guess what - it's too windy to sail! Yesterday it was blowing an 8 with gusts up to who knows what. Today and tomorrow are both forecast 6 with gusts up to 9. The upshot is, it's another maintenance weekend. A couple of weeks ago I took a look at the dodgers and the spray hood. They've all lost a lot of thread due to UV damage and the spray hood windows are completely opaque. A bit of time on DuckDuckGo revealed AW Marine. They specialise in spray hoods and covers and they offer a spray hood revamp which covers Seam restitching, cleaning and reproofing. They also said they would restitch the dodgers. I'll send them off this morning and let you know what the results look like. The other task for today is to take a look at the impeller. I've got a couple of spare gaskets now so I should be safe to get the cover off and have a go at replacing it. I'm learning that just about everything takes two goes so let's see how we do ...

Alison has four winches. Two are very old (original?) and are attached to the mast. The other two are relatively modern Antal W40 two-speed self-tailing winches that are fitted on top of the cockpit coaming. As I was preparing her for sailing I noticed that the port winch was very stiff. A quick bit of googling revealed that you're supposed to service winches twice a season and that it looks pretty simple to do. As last Saturday was a bit too windy for a sail (well I was more worried about getting out of the harbour short-handed than the actual sailing) I decided to give it a go. Winches are supposed to be pretty easy to disassemble and service and in practice this turned out to be the case with Alison's Antals. All you need is a flat-bladed screwdriver, a cross-head screwdriver and a couple of Allen keys and everything comes apart pretty easily. Inspecting the winch, all the grease looked pretty crusty so I spent a happy hour scraping the grease from the cogs and cleaning ev...