We had our Etchells fleet party tonight. Besides the class dues and the election of officers and the eating and drinking we had awards and some roasting of various fleet members. Last year my co-owner and I were new to boat ownership and had no end of troubles with our rigging on the Hooked on Tonics. Halyards broke or went up the mast two or three times, and we had a problem with our forestay right when we launched the boat. So we got very good at taking our mast down and re-running halyards. It's a complicated job, and it felt like we were always doing it last summer. The silver lining is that I really do feel a kind of mastery of the rig and its repairs that I didn't have before.
The mast is a metal cylinder, about forty feet long. It has lines running inside it that come out through small openings at the top and the bottom; these halyards are what you pull on to raise or lower the sails. There are some partitions within the metal cylinder separating some lines from others, and there are some bolts and dividers in there to maintain rigidity in the mast itself. Basically it is a 40 foot long black box, with small slots at each end. Somehow you are supposed to feed a floppy line into a slot at one end and then manage to pull it out the slot at the other end. So when a halyard gets stuck inside it is a production to get it out -- it can get tangled up on other lines or on bolts or partitions inside this cylinder that you can neither see nor get to. Lots of contortionist moves, peering with a flashlight, groping around with a coathanger or whatever you can get, and patient rotation of the mast and attempts to disentangle the invisible knot, are required. One ingredient we came to rely on was an electrician's snake -- a long and semi-rigid length of wire that is used by electricians to run electrical wires behind walls over long distances. This guy Dave in our fleet had a snake and we Hooked On Tonics girls were forever calling him to borrow the snake so we could fix one or another of the problems with our rig. He was eager to help and we were effusive in our praise and thanks for his willingness to lend us his snake. His wife was none too pleased when we were always calling and leaving messages on his machine requesting her husband's snake, and going on about how we really couldn't live without it, nothing else was long enough or stiff enough to do the job. You can see where this is going. It became a big joke around the fleet.
Anyway, we got our very own snake tonight, to do with as we will. (And this year, we will NOT have the same rigging troubles, so we won't need to use it hardly at all.) I'm feeling like a well-equipped gal. Give me a call if you need to borrow a snake.
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