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| Cedric of Fred's Marine, Pointe A Pitre, Guadaloupe, scales our mizzen mast, winched up via our bosun chair. |
“Honey, that doesn’t look right,” is undoubtedly
invokes dread when my husband hears it. Didn’t help that we were getting rained
on while heading into the wind and knew we would be for a while.
Even though my lack of
sailing know-how is still somewhat appalling, I’m not completely clueless. We’re pretty good about keeping
ship-shape, which among other habits means when we’re moving on the water,
nothing’s loose. All parts are
tied, cinched, strapped or stowed. So when I saw a turnbuckle dangling rather
than solidly attached on both ends with a thick wire cable, I drew Wayne’s
attention to it immediately.
This particular turnbuckle’s
purpose, along with a couple similar cables and turnbuckles (shrouds / stays),
is to keep our mizzen (rear sail) mast
connected. Even though we’ve yet to
our mizzen sail, the unplanned disconnection of a large pole that rises over 20
feet through our boat would be very, very bad.
Wayne “MacGyvered” the mizzen shroud to
connect the disconnected part to our boat’s port jib winch. This rendered that particular and
frequently used sail unusable, given the wind direction, forcing us to “motor”
rather than sail in to our destination, Pointe A Pitre. But, we got there safely; no mishaps.
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| Wayne removes his "MacGyver" fix, as it served its purpose. |
However, this makeshift
repair was not practical over the long haul. Dutifully, we set out to integrate Wayne’s mechanical
know-how and my ancient high school French “skills” to find help in Pointe A
Pitre’s Bas Du Fort marina.
Naturally, it was lunch time, shops were closed for it, so we had to
wait….
Our first stop we found
someone with the know how, but when we asked him when he could do the repair,
he said, “Never; I’m so busy I shouldn’t be in the shop right now!” Serendipitously, when we figured we’d
finally find someone to help us address another issue, regaining our reverse
gear by replacing our current propeller, we struck gold. Cedric at Fred’s Marine couldn’t help
us with our propeller, but said he worked on rigging. Noticing a turnbuckle in their inventory similar to ours, I
asked, “Could you help us fix our mizzen standing rigging?” He responded, “I
can look at it right now on your boat, if you’d like.”
And he did. Not only that, he also re-attached our
flag halyard line, our windex (wind direction indicator that sits atop the
mast) and inspected all our other “mast holders” (shrouds and stays). Three out of four lower stays were
cracked on the mainmast. We
replaced all of them as Cedric was able to complete the work in the next few
business days.
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| Cedric diagrams our standing rigging issues. |
The total for this work,
parts and labor, was ~$1300, not chump change for us. We had planned to replace these stays in about 6 months,
when we expect to be back in the U.S.
Wayne figured it would’ve cost us a bit less in the U.S., maybe a couple
hundred less, though he budgeted for more than that.
We felt a lot better getting
this fixed before we set out for a 40+ mile sail to our next country,
Antigua. Cedric even talked us out
of making some repairs, offering simpler, more cost effective alternatives, so
we feel he had our best interests at heart.
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| Even with our repair bill in hand, we were grateful for the work Cedric did. See the swage crack on the terminal end Wayne's pointing to? Keeping it in place, unaware of its defects, could've been disastrous. |
“You dodged a very expensive
bullet,” fellow cruising friend Scott Dickens (see http://home.earthlink.net/~kimdickens/
for more on Scott & Kim) emailed, when he heard. We agree, and are grateful to Cedric and Fred’s Marine.
Cedric also put us on track
with the folks who were able to help us regain reverse gear…. More on that in
another post.
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