Start of "phase 2"

Stewart and I arrive on Sunday May , one day behind schedule due to mud slide west of Golden. We waited for a while, were told that the road may not open at all that day so we decided to head south via the crowsnest route. This added about 500 km to the trip; we overnighted in Hope and arrived about noon on Sunday.
I got up the mast and installed the repaired wind transducer which now works!! I went up again to the spreaders to clean off the moss that had grown underneath; i didn't need to worry about an upper body workout that day.

Terry came over Monday evening and Tuesday morning we got the new battens for the mainsail to replace the old ones that were severly twisted due to improper flaking of the sail over winter.

We tested the drogue: this worked well but the retrieval was a bit of a rodeo. I'll need to add an eye splice at the end of each bridle to facilitate bringing it in via a winch. Also the storage bag Neil is making is critical, since pulling it out of a duffel bag results in a large rat's nest that needs to be sorted before deploying it; this is all well and good in the gulf islands in 10 kts of wind - it would be a real rodeo in storm conditions when you would be doing this for real.

We spent the night at Montigue harbour, then used the next day [yesterday] to adjust compass [ not a success] and test fly the various storm sails and genakker. All was successful other than the compass adjustment.

Today we sailed off the buoy and out to Satellite channel before turning on the engine for the final run home. PS: the batteries barely got the engine started so it is definately time to retire these old guys.

As luck would have it there was a 'master mariner' [ not sure that that is , but it is on his business card!] at the boat next door when we arrived. I asked him about compass adjustment, he said it sounded like our adjusters were maxed out and gave me some things to do. If that fails, i'll have to resort to spending some partial BU's to get it done by a pro.

Stewart and I have cleaned up the boat, will have a pub meal and tackle winches tomorrow before Stewart flies back tomorrow evening.

Over and out,
Bruce