Dad and I are heading down to the boat tomorrow for the day. It will be interesting to see what the guys have achieved from the list of things we've asked for, and I have the anodes to change (we had to order one of the two in as it wasn't in stock last Monday at the chandlery) and Dad wants to finish cleaning off the prop.
He made a start on it Monday, but the Dremel he was using proved itself not man enough for the job, so he's going to bring a bigger power-tool with him tomorrow and what I think he told me was a "flapper wheel", which sounds like fun.
We won't stay the night (technically, we're not actually allowed to when she's on the hard), but assuming all is going to schedule, we only need the one trip down this weekend so we can head home Saturday evening and I can go race around the cans with Amanda at the lake on Sunday.
A quite sensible requirement for having your boat lifted out and stored on the hard at QAB is that you take the headsail down and, except for the sprayhood, which can be lowered, any other cockpit canvas, which in our case includes the cockpit tent.
The latter was easy, of course, and we did it on arriving at the boat on Sunday evening before retiring to the pub for supper. I'd originally planned to take the headsail down at the same time, but, typically, Sunday evening had the wind gusting in at up to twenty knots from the southwest. Which, where we're berthed, brings it in over the aft port shoulder of Petrella. Awkward for manually handing the headsail of a 36' yacht, and potentially dangerous if doing so single-handed.
Conveniently, the wind was forecast to drop significantly and veer into the north at around 0100 and stay there until mid-morning. The neap tide meant our lift out wasn't due until 1200 on Monday, so there would be plenty of time in the morning to drop and store the headsail.
I found marina flat calm when I crawled out of my bunk at 0630 and climbed topsides. There was the barest whisper of a breeze drifting in over the bow of the boat; perfect conditions. The sail was stiff in its track on the forestay, but with a bit of brute-force persuasion to assist the natural inclinations of gravity, it was easy enough to drop the sail to the deck.
Tidying up such a sea of canvas so that it goes back up again painlessly was a different matter altogether though. Dad's mobility is slowly improving, benefit of regular gym sessions and, apparently, water aerobics, but he's still not at the point where he could really help with flaking the sail. Last year, I tried, then accepted what seemed like my inevitable defeat and bundled the sail into a trolly and took it off to the local sailmakers to be laundered. It came back beautifully folded.
This year I resolved to do better. I stretched it out along the top of Petrella, and after initially leaving the tack attached to the furler in an attempt to keep some tension in the foot, released it, and (here's the key) instead used one of Dad's tool boxes as a handy weight to hold each fold in place at the bow as I flaked the sail along its luff then worked down the foot of it to stretch out the folds.
After which, starting from the clew, I folded the flaked sail up along its length, and then temporarily rolled the folded package up to make it easy to move it below to the forecabin where I released the sail-tie to let the flaked and folded sail lie flat on the bunk until it's time to bend it back onto the forestay again.
I know it's a trivial thing, and it's a given that a sailor should be able to flake and fold his own sails. But I found myself inordinately proud of my efforts.
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