Sqoop: a square-rigged sloop

I’d been meaning to pull apart and inspect the three winches on the boat ever since I purchased her, and today was the day.  After surrounding the work area with a towel (to prevent parts from falling into the watery deep) and carefully removing the round spring clip  from the top spindle, I was able to pull off the drum housing. The roller bearings all looked to be in good shape and well greased.  Some of the pawls were fine and just needed to be re-oiled.  Some were crusted with gunk and either frozen in position or very hard to move.  One of the pawl springs had disintegrated which meant another trip to McClendon’s to find a replacement. Here is the “before” picture of the starboard winch once I had removed the pawls and springs from the drum housing: After giving everything a good scrub with WD-40: And now everything is dried, reassembled and re-oiled: Happiness is a smoothly turning winch with crisply clicking pawls! CAM CLEATS Next...

Quick terminology review:   Shrouds  are lines that keep the mast upright port and starboard.   Stays keep the mast upright fore and aft.   Spreaders are horizontal spars attached between the mast and shrouds about midway up the mast; they function to stabilize the mast and increase the angle the shrouds attach to the masthead.   Chainplates are the beefy SS steel fixtures that are bolted to the side of the hull; they give the turnbuckles at the bottom of the shrouds a strong and secure place to attach.  Whew, that review was for my benefit, not yours! On the Laguna 26, the spreaders are oriented perpendicular to the boat’s longitudinal axis.  This is not ideal for a square-rigged vessel because when the yard-spar is hoisted up the mast, it also needs to remain perpendicular to the longitudinal axis to prevent damaging the shrouds ; this limits the wind angle the sail can effectively capture.  This picture shows the limited angle (essentially...

This bamboo version of the yard-spar, including the dowel inserts, epoxy filler, fiberglass wrapping and all attached hardware ended up weighing 12.5 pounds.  That’s less than what I estimated a similarly sized aluminum tube would weigh, which is a real bonus, since every extra pound we hoist up the mast will increase the dynamic loads on the mast and rigging once the boat gets rocking to and fro out on the water. Now that I have a strong, sturdy and lightweight spar to attach the head of the sail to, I needed to figure out how to attach all the following: 1) The halyard (the line that raises the sail and keeps the yard-arm balanced horizontally) 2) The braces (the lines on each end of the yard (“yardarm”) which control the spar) 3) Some way to secure the yard-arm to the mast while still allowing it to rotate about, and slide up/down the mast 4) The three grommets/rings at the head (top edge) of the sail...port, starboard and center 5) Some sort of padding to protect the ma...

The yard is a spar that the top of the square sail gets attached to; together they are hoisted up the mast with a halyard when the sail is raised.  When I sized the yard-spar, I intended that it be fabricated out of aluminum tubing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W3XYiaP2WimTIslNXU_52wk01va0YgxlUhcxD0XA3LY#bookmark=id.7ujeuw3cel9g  A modern production sailboat has an aluminum mast, aluminum boom, aluminum spinnaker pole, so of course it’s going to be made of aluminum, right?  Well, I happened to be reading one of Patrick O’Brian’s novels that is set in the Far East, and he describes the use of bamboo in the rigging of the local sailing vessels, so that got me wondering if it might work for my application.  I did some investigating and found a company in Portland that sells Tre Gai bamboo, one of the strongest species that is commercially available for structural applications, so I ordered a seven foot section.  The upside of bamboo is that it’s ...