Sqoop: a square-rigged sloop

  The boat came with stainless steel lifelines, covered with some sort of hard plastic sheathing, which was standard for boats built back in the 80’s.  The plastic protects your hands (and the sails & rigging) from the meat hooks that develop over time as the individual strands of the stainless steel wire rope break.  The downside to this covering is that it hides these breaks so a visual inspection gives you very little idea of the wire’s integrity.  I had already encountered a couple meat hooks where the covering had worn away, exposing the wire rope (“Ouch!...what was that? Hey, why is my hand bleeding?”) and rust was seeping through the numerous cracks in the plastic covering; it was time to replace the lifelines. Since I have plans to replace the lower shrouds (also made of stainless steel wire) with single-braid Dyneema rope, I figured replacing the lifelines with this super-strong fiber would give me a chance now to get familiar with the tools and techniqu...

 After living without a mainsail for a few months (to allow rigging the square sail), I reattached the gooseneck, the boom & mainsheet, and rehung the mainsail.  I did this to see if she could sail with a truly loose-footed mainsail from the first reef point.  I attached the first-reef tack cringle to the mast (about a foot above the gooseneck) and attached the first-reef clew cringle to a sheet that ran to block on the corner of the stern and then forward to the unused winch.  Tacking is a challenge since the sheet has to be rerigged through the block on the stern’s opposite corner but that could be solved by attaching an additional sheet to the clew cringle; much like the foresail.  Flying the main this way allows for the elimination of the boom, which I’d like to do eventually since it will avoid shading the future solar panels that will reside on the future Bimini cover.  The sheet angle using this arrangement bisects the mainsail’s luff (good) and ...