I don't have any pictures from the spreaders this time. Things did not go all that smoothly. Saturday we installed the new water pump, a small Flojet. It worked perfectly from the first moment. Of course there are no more leaks since what is left of the water system is fortified against extreme pressure now. The Flojet is super quiet and very low draw. The lights don't even flicker when it comes on. LOVE IT. It took us probably four trips to Lowe's to accomplish everything we needed to do, so the day was largely spent driving around town and getting back only to realize we didn't have everything and had to go back out. Then by the time we had everything we needed the powerboat traffic was in full swing. We ran the Mastmate up anyway. We had a couple of false starts as we had not used one in a year and had to try to remember how everything is supposed to come together. We didn't have any sail cars for it so we ran it up loose and then winched it down at the bottom so that there would be tension on it. Unfortunately it was still a wild ride up, with Matt swinging from one side of the mast to the other, vertically or horizontally and everything in between. By the time he got to the spreaders it was clear this was not going to be an easy sojourn up there. The mission was to repair a loose spreader boot (my top priority) and install blocks just under the spreaders for the lazyjacks (his priority). He got his drill out, drilled the first hole. Then he got out his tap and tried to tap the hole. He got a little way done before the swinging of the boat caused him to break the tap off in the hole. I sent up some vise grips to get it out, but we had no way of finishing the project without it.
We went back to Lowes and then went to West Marine and found, luckily, 8 sail cars that would fit our track. I put them on the Mastmate, and lubricated them in anticipation of getting up super early and trying again at sunrise while the power boaters are still sleeping.
The next morning everything went pretty smoothly! Matt got the lazyjacks installed (I think they might be pretty crooked but it doesn't matter one little bit). He couldn't manage to get the waxed thread in to position to do the spreader boot with riggers thread, so we . . . we put duct tape on it. I don't even care. It's perfect. I love it.
Anyway, I cut the legs for the lazyjacks, ran up the stack pack, ran up the sail, took the boat out for a sail to make sure everything would hang right, and then realized the whole front end of the stack pack was off from the angle between the mast and the boom by about 10 degrees. No big. I can fix this. So we had to take the whole thing down and back home for a little adjustment but honestly, that's about as little adjustment as I might have hoped for.
I had to undo a lot in order to pull the front back, and now there's a weird fold in it that I'm not happy about but I didn't have enough room to but it down and then reinstall the common sense fastener grommets further in so this was my only choice without adding a strip of fabric and thereby two more seams.
The other thing I learned from putting it up is that the bigger the stack pack the harder it is to work the zipper. It definitely needs an external loop of line to run the zipper pull so I added some cheek blocks to make a triangle loop and i am really crossing my fingers that this will actually work. Mack Pack does this for larger boats but I'm not sure how they get the line from the top of the stack pack down to the side without just having it drag across the ends of the material too much. If it works I will post pictures to clarify this post.
I started cutting the material for the hatch covers but I need 96 inches of three inch wide strips for the casing and edges of the cover. I think I got maybe 48 inches done if I am being kind, before I got tired of it and quit for the night.
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