Deck misery

I've decided to nix the plan of sanding the chipping deck paint at anchor. First of all, it generates enormous amounts of dust, which ends up in the water, which drives me crazy. Second, it's completely unclear how far to go: the original gelcoat is light blue, the coat over that was smurf blue and thin, and the white coat over that is white, super thick and chipping. In some parts, as soon as you touch the sandpaper onto the deck, you're down to gelcoat. In other parts the white is well-adhered and you're faced with the dilemma of whether to just feather the edges or keep going to get it all down to one of the blues. To boot, during the time of day when it's not blowing, i.e. in the morning, the motion of the boat is likely to make me queasy in half an hour.
It's either going to take a haul and a proper power-sanding, or I'll have to put up with the deck situation for yet another summer :-(

Shadow in SB

Yesterday Tijn and I brought Shadow up to SB. We started out with a ~8 kt SW wind and ended with a ~13 W one. We tacked up some and motored some. The motor, by the way, is running really well after its surgery. I also worked a bit on quantifying Shadow's groove, which it turns out is pretty pathetic: about 130 deg under the genoa and 110 under blade. I need to read up on what's appropriate car positioning for yankee cut sails, because my experience suggests it's the opposite from racing jibs: the cars seem to want to move forward the more wind there is.

On the way up Tijn managed to remove the stupid compass mount. I'm going to fill the holes, fill and fare the surface and a coat of paint should make it look like there never was anything there. I'll look around for a replacement compass that I like...

Other chores that I need to take care of: install a solar nightlamp, look for a traveler, make a boom-vang, and change the battery.

Motor and gooseneck fixed!

Today was a good day for Shadow. I went and picked up the repaired outboard from Precision. Total damage: $290, $200 of it in parts.
Then Tad helped me remove the half-eaten bolt from the gooseneck and replace that. I lanocoted everything in that area and reinstalled the boom. The nature of the roller furling mechanism still completely eludes me, but at least I think I know what I need to disassemble to figure it out.
Finally I took the mainsail to Bill Paxson, thinking the point at which the headboard was coming apart from the boltrope was an issue, but Bill thought it wasn't. Instead he used a shackle to move one of the slides higher up, so that it's actually *on* the headboard. He also suggested that I can replace the frayed rope that's holding my slides onto the sail with 1/2 inch nylon webbing, which I can sew closed. I may or may not do that, since the current arrangement seems to be doing ok. The reason to do it would primarily cosmetic, so if I get the boat looking better later in the summer, I might take the time...

Outboard gear shear

This past Sunday was our first attempt to take Shadow from CIH to SB for the season. The crew was Alli and Robin, and despite the adventure, I think a decent time was had by most. 3kts of wind on the nose, and motoring, for some reason our speed kept dropping and the motor kept revving higher and higher. I turned it off to investigate and indeed the prop was only minimally engaged in forward and reverse. Knowing we weren't going to make it to SB under the circumstances, we turned around, initially heading for Ventura but then deciding we knew how to deal with things better at CIH. It was a run for most of the time, until the wind picked up and turned a little south just before we got there. We made it back in a whopping 6 hours, and not for lack of attentive sailing. We docked under sail, had some Thai, and I slept on the boat. The next morning I took the motor to Specialty Marine, where we took the lower unit apart and found the pinion gear, which engages both forward and reverse gears, was ground to a pulp. It took a day to get quotes for replacement gears, and now I've ordered them to be delivered directly to the mechanic. $200 in parts!!! Can you believe that?! I mean, it's just machined metal guys, get a grip!