Gas Cylinder Woes and other things

 Well I can't say as it comes as a great surprise, the writing has been on the wall for getting on for two years if not longer. Now it's official, Calor are discontinuing the 4.5kg Butane and 3.9Kg Propane gas cylinders.

That's a bloody nuisance because our gas locker, like most on older (and many newer) yachts is not large enough to carry the next size up. So Calors magnaimous offer of a free exchange to a larger cylinder is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

The 6Kg cylinder has a diameter of 256mm compared to the 240mm of the 3.9kg cylinder so it's just possible that our gas locker is wide and long enough to accomodate the larger cylinders in the horizontal plane but ...

The bigger cylinder is 495mm high compared to the 340mm height of the smaller cylinder. That's just over 6 inches in old money and that ain't gonna fit by a good 3 inches at least.

So what are the options?

Well right away we can rule out one of the options being bandied about on Social Meeja - refilling the smaller cylinders from larger ones. Apart from being illegal, it's bloody dangerous. And that is the end of that. Period.

So, the first option is to simply switch to Campinggaz. However, there are serious drawbacks. Not the least of them by far is that Campinggaz is horribly expensive. It's exactly the same Butane gas as in Calor Butane cylinders but about 50% more expensive. Furthermore, the cylinders are much smaller therefore they won't last anything like as long. However, on the up side they are (currently at least) widely available both in the UK and on the continent (unlike Calor).

A switch to Campingaz may be the only short term viable solution when our current supply of Propane runs out.

Another option being widely suggested is one of the several refillable cylinder options such as Safefill. However, their smallest (5kg) cylinder has a diameter of 310mm. It ain't gonna fit! Add to that, it can only be refilled on some, not all, petrol station forecourts that have an Autogas pump (and some other locations). And Autogas is in a slow but terminal decline. That's not a total show stopper as two full cylinders would last us all season (just about) but then we're talking about over £200 per cylinder! So they won't fit and with adaptors etc. it's an outlay of getting on for £450 for something that will be inconvenient to refill when we're out and about and may have a limited lifespan.

There are other refillable cylinders (Gaslow etc) but similar problems apply. Not liking that plan.

So what next? A bigger gas locker???

It will be a bloody nuisance but it is going to need looking at for several reasons.

The primary reason is the very reason why we use 3.9kg Propane rather than 4.5kg Butane. Butane cylinders stop gassing (generating gas from the liquid in the cylinder) at lower temperatures, Once the temperature gets into single figures, they become less effective and below freezing they pretty much don't work at all. Now as things stand, we don't know how much time we'll be spendind on board in the winter (virtually none for the next yesr or two, that we do know) but our long term plan has always been to live on Pagan year round and, depending on circumstances beyond our control, that may still happen. So Butane is not a good option.

So the question is going to be whether we can change out the current gas locker for one large enough to accomodate two 6kg cylinders and still make it gas tight and draining overboard well above the waterline. I thing we probably can, albeit it is a pain in the bottom to have to do it.

On the up side, two 6kg cyilnders would comfortable last us six months at least ... and that's on current usage (see below).

So there we are with the gas. It's either costly Campinggaz and maybe six to eight weeks of gas capacity or a new gas locker and bigger Calor bottles. Either way it's a PITA!

And that brings me back to plans I may have mentioned previously to wit reducing our gas usage (which is only used for cooking) by partially switching to electric cooking methods.

To recap, we've been considering increasing the battery capacity by adding a battery bank under the Port side saloon settee, contriving ways and means to fit as much solar charging capacity as we can to maintain that battery bank, and then using that bank to power, via an inverter, a microwave, a Ninja Foodi multi-function cooker and, probably, an electric hot plate (they're not expensive). We certainly can't create a system with enough juice to run two or more such devices at once but we don't really need to. Any one of the three at a time will suffice. 

To that end, we recently bought the 6l Smartlid version for use at home and we love it! However, it may be a bit big for use on the boat so the 4.7l Mini may be the better option although it doesn't have the same range of functions and it's capacity, whilst adequate for meals for two, would be restrictive when we have guests or crew aboard. 

We had already all but decided to turn the navigation table area into an extension of the galley and now my mind is all but made up on that. We hardly ever use it as a navigation area (we normally navigate electronically) and it's a bit cramped to sit at for long periods so I can't really use it as an "office". If space to lay out a chart is needed, we can use one side of the saloon table just as easily.

So I think that whole project is going to have to move up the agenda. That said, I am still determined that the next headline item expenditure has got to be the new sails. We ain't a sailing boat at the moment! We're a motor boat with big dishrags!!

So to finish (for now) this item off, the question is whether, if we go down the route of cooking electrically as much as possible (and I'm hopeful we'd be able to do so at least ever other day), do we then really need to worry about the gas bottle size and type or would Campingaz suffice? Perhaps the only way to answer that is to try it and see (with the caveat that swapping the 3.9kg propane bottles for 6kg propane bottles may be a short lived option).

Well, sufficient unto the day thereof. All of the above will have to wait until Spring at least. And on that front, the planned late Autumn working trips didn't happen because the weather was utterly shite. We decided there really wasn't any value in my spending two weeks on board, with all the expenses that entailed (my travel, Jane's costs getting to and from work etc.) when realistically I wasn't going to be able to make much, if any, progress on the jobs that need doing.

The down side of that decision is that the pressure is now on come the Spring.

At the very top of the list is addressing the ongoing leaks on deck. The latest leak is caused by the forward hatch Perspex no longer sealing at the corners. I can see only two options, it's either a new hatch or try and inject a sealant or glue (probably epoxy) into the gap that's formed due to the Perpex becoming slightly distorted. I'll be trying the latter option first but I'm not wildly optimistic.

And once I've killed all the leaks (if I ever do, it seems to be a never ending vicious circle) I really want to get the blasted forecabin refit finished. It's been dragging on for far too long and I'm really not good at picking up the thread of interupted jobs again. Hey ho.

In days of old, by now I'd be seriously into planning our summer adventures to far flung places (well, the Solent, the Channel Islands etc.). I can't realistically see when we're going to get back to that. In fact, I'm wondering just how much actual cruising we'll get to do this year at all as there's so much to do on the boat and our opportunities to crack on with the work are so limited at present.

Ah well, onwards and upwards. 

In, out, shake it all about!

 You will recall, dear reader, that when I last posted we were due to lift out the next day

Pagan waits patiently for her lift out ...

And lift out we duly did.

The couple of days on board swinging about mid-river had their moments. That's where the shake it all about comes in as it got a bit bouncy for a few hours! 

Battery capacity was heading towards being an issue by the morning of our lift out and had we not lifted I would have had to either move onto the river pontoon to plug in or run the engine for a couple of hours before the end of the day but other than that everything was satisfactory.

So now we're back in our accustomed spot in the boatyard with a winter of jobs planned.

Top of the list is further investigation into the faulty depth sounder. It remains to be seen whether it's an easy fix or whether we're going to have to throw money at it.

Then there's a whole raft of stuff to do ...

All of the deck wiring needs remaking (radar, VHF antennas, masthead lighting feeds etc).

We're also going to have to knuckle down and remove and re-bed every single deck fitting (stanchion bases, rail fittings, deck eyes etc.) that hasn't already been done as we've got two that have now developed leaks and the rest are sure to follow

On a similar vein, I'm going to have to clean out and reseal the keel to keel foot joint (which I last did seven years ago) as four years ashore has caused the sealant to dry out and likely as not some movement of the keel with carrying the weight of the boat for so long.

And then there's the question of running rigging, sails, solar panels, batteries etc. as already discussed.

I'm leaning towards making the rigging and sails the next priority as we currently have a motor boat and not a sailing yacht. That might be slightly contentious though as replacing the anchoring gear had been considered a higher priority. I'm also considering getting quotes from local sailmakers for the new suite of sails althogh they'll have to be competitive with Crusader (on the South coast) who we've previously bought sails from and been very happy with the quality and the price. Either way, if we're going to have new sails for next season, we're going to have to get moving on ordering them soon and that means having the rig set back up in order to measure up for the new sails.

Anyway, I've got two one week working trips coming up this autumn before we put the boat to bed for the winter. And then come the spring I've got another two one week or so trips so in total I've got about four weeks to get everything done before we, hopefully, get to go sailing again properly!

Oh and I realise I forgot to mention that we were able to sort out the insurance, once the standing rigging was replaced, with our former insurer GJW on the basis of the pre-purchase survey we had done in 2016. We will need a full survey by 2026 but that shouldn't be a problem. And the insurance came in substantially cheaper than before too! (Albeit we have cut back our cruising grounds to UK and Ireland Coastal dropping the Northern Europe Coastal and Inland waters cover as we have no need of it for the next year or two at least).

And finally, I am going to make a real effort to keep the blog up to date on a more regular basis! 

That's all for now ...

We went, we saw, we came back again!

 So the day finally arrvied after so long and Pagan went back in the water after four long years ashore on the 12th of this month.

Relaunching is always a bit nerve wracking and after so long ashore it was doubly so.

The biggest worry, of course, is that something will leak and as is the usual practice as soon as she was in the water, whilst still in the slings, I went through the boat from stem to stern checking everywhere a leak could occur. Happily, she was watertight so we were towed round to the river pontoon to crack on with recommissioning all the systems etc.

My biggest worry was that we'd have a serious engine problem. To my delight, the engine started quite happily albeit after a lengthy pre-heat (not particularly unusual with Mercedes OM636 engines with the original series glowplugs) and ran very happily

For all of about fifteen minutes then it died ...

There followed a very frustrating couple of days trying to find the problem. It was immediately obvious that we had a fuel starvation problem and it didn't take long to ascertain that we weren't pumping fuel from the tank to the engine via the fuel filters. But the why was a mystery.

Being an old but for it's day quite sophisticated design of engine, the OM636 has quite a powerful engine driven fuel lift pump which not only pumps fuel from the fuel tank to the engine fuel filter (via, in our case, an additional CAV filter and water trap) but also pre-pressurises the fuel feed into the injector manifold. It's not a complex design of pump and it uses plungers rather than a diaphragm so for it to completely fail to pump fuel at all is unusual to say the least.

Furthermore, mounted on top of the fuel pump body is an additional manual priming pump which has a completely independent action. It too is remarkably effective at pumping fuel and for both pumps to completely fail would be exceptionally unlikely. So from pretty much the start I was looking for another possible common cause of the problem.

And I was pretty sure the problem was likely to be an air leak rather than a blockage as a blockage would have led to a vacuum between it and the manual priming pump and that I wasn't getting.

The problem was I couldn't for the life of me find an air leak anywhere! Getting desperate, I decided to rig up the hand pump we use for syphoning fuel from cans to the fuel tanks with a temporary pickup fron a 10l jerry can and attach it to the fuel line at the tank outlet.

That enabled me to pump fuel through the entire system, or not as the case may be. And pump fuel it happily did most efficiently and as the glass on the CAV filter bowl filled up the source of our woes became patently obvious as diesel squirted merrily out past the O seal between the bowl and the filter body around the back of the filter up against the bulkhead it's mounted on.

Totally hidden by the filter body, the O seal had not quite been in its groove when I refitted the bowl after changing the filter element. It did the same thing on two further attempts until at last I persuaded the bloody thing to stay where it was put and got a seal.

That solved the problem entirely. Now the engine ran happily and fuel was being pumped as it should be. 

We grabbed the chance to attach ourselves to an ad-hoc club outing to Burnham Yacht Harbour so there ensued a frantic rush to get everything else ready to go. And almost everything worked as it should with one vital exception ... the depth sounder hull unit isn't sending any data to the instruments. 

Around the shifting shallow waters of the Thames Esturary, that's usually a bit of a show stopper but I know the river well and as long as we didn't do anything daft we could safely potter down to Burnham and back without the depth sounder.

So down to Burham we duly pottered without incident. It was great to be out and about again, however briefly, even if it was under motor (we're nowhere near ready to set sail again!).

Unfortunately, just as the party was about to get started we received word of a family crisis and we had to promptly head back upriver, abandon the boat on the river pontoon and dash home which cut our "holiday" short by several days.

In our mad dash to get away several things either had to be left as they were or were forgotten about. One that had me worried before we were half way home was that I realised we'd left our recently rejuventated outboard unsecured on the back of the boat. My old mate Tony sorted that for us, retrieving it and putting it under lock and key in the container.

The yard very kindly moved Pagan onto her swinging mooring a couple of days later and with the crisis dealt with (it turned out to be nothing serious, happily) I returned on board yesterday pending a lift out today or tomorrow (it's going to be tomorrow now as timings didn't work out today). I had to be down early enough to hitch a lift out to the boat on the trot boat because the dinghy was quickly rolled up and stuffed in one of the cockpit lockers! And I forgot to retrieve a lifejacket too!!

Oh well, never mind. 

I was now faced with a crucial decision.

Since we bought the first yacht and moved her to Fambridge in 2011, the first thing we've done when arriving on board (except during the time we were in a mud berth) has been to move the boat over onto the river pontoon (top middle in the above pic). However, we do have to pay to spend the night on there (albeit at a discounted rate as moorers). And a key discussion we've been having is the growing need to reduce the time we spend alongside in marinas and harbours as berthing fees just keep going up and up.

So I thought ... I've got water, I've got reasonably well charged batteries, I've got gas and diesel ... I actually don't need to go alongside at all. So I haven't! As I haven't any pressing need to go ashore either, the dinghy is still in the locker too.

We're expecting to lift out tomorrow afternoon around two-ish and then we'll be back in our yard cradle for the winter. There's much still to do!

The v-berth refit is still some way from being finished. I need to deal with the leak that has developed around one of the stanchion bases before I can continue with that job (sigh) and then I've got all the trim to make and fit, the new lockers and shelves to construct and finally the deadlights (covers that hinge over the portholes to block the light and improve the insulation) and deck hatch insert (which will do the same thing) to make. And there's a fair bit of finishing, painting and varnishing to do.

Then I've got to get to the bottom of that dead depth sounder. Not sure what the answer to that is going to be yet.

And we need to sort through the running rigging and decide what can still be used and what needs replacing before the spring. I suspect the bulk of it is past it's useful life. Hopefully too we'll be in a position to order new sails in time for next season as the current set are now pretty much done for.

There's a whole long list of things I could bore you with but apart from the above they won't stop us getting out and about on the water next year so how far down that list we get this winter matters little.

Once Pagan is ashore and sorted ready for the winter I'll be away home again pronto but we've got two week-ish long maintenance trips before the winter really sets in planned and the same again in March / April so as long as the piggy bank recovers from being hammered recently we'll hopefully be a lot further down the to-do list when we go back in next year

(I'll post soon-ish about forthcoming plans when we've made some!)

More boat bashing ...

They say that the liveaboard cruising life, to which we aspire, is in reality fixing yachts in exotic places. Well at the moment we're doing an awful lot of yacht fixing in rather less than exotic Essex!

The big job during this trip has been to get everything ready for the masts to be refitted. A key part of that job was to make up new backing plates for the mizzen mast forward shroud chain plates. To that end, I'd ordered up some A4 (marine grade) stainless steel plate of the right width and thickness and twice as long as each plate needed to be and cut it in half at home.

To my utter annoyance, I forgot to put the chain plate I'd taken home back in the van but that's not the disaster I thought it might be for reasons I'll come to below.

Usefully, I have a small pillar drill (thanks Laurins!) on the workbench in my container which, with suitable (and suitably expensive) drill bits made light work of drilling the holes in the plate.

You can see the difference in size between the new plates and the original! This should be more than sufficient to stiffen up the area of deck that is causing concern.

The starboard side plate I waa able to refit as can be seen.

I'm not showing you my efforts at glassing it in though! That was a bit of a disaster which I'll need to do some tidying up on.

On the port side, I've done all the preparation ready to fit the plate which I'll do next week.

With the masts down, it would have been crazy not to sort out the rest of the through deck fittings associated with the rig. So I'd already re-bedded the starboard side main mast chain plates, now it was the turn of those on the port side.

That meant dismantling the locker above the port saloon berth and taking the front of the cupbooard in the heads. 

Fortunately, on this side of the boat there was no need to remove the below deck element of the chain plates as we haven't had the same water ingress as you'll recal was evident on the starboard side.

So I didn't have to resort to wood butchery of the locker structure again, just get the nuts off and remove the deck fittings.

Once they were off, the wisdom of doing the job was very evident. What sealant had orginally been used 44 years ago (not a lot by the look of it!) was dried out and perished. You really don't want water getting into the deck around these fittings as the deck in this area is two layers of GRP with a balsa wood core. If water gets into that core, it rots out and you get spongey decks and a big repair problem. We haven't got that far yet and now we won't!

The sander came out for a play to sand down the deck paint and old sealant to give a clean flat surface. Then a good dollop of marine grade sealant (but not Sikaflex for those in the know, Sika 295 is actually an adhesive and not what you want to use here 'cos you might need to remove the fittings again some time) and everything could be reinstalled and bolted up good and tight. 

With that done, bar the one chain plate to be fitted next week, we were ready to have the masts refitted and it just so happend that I got a message from Dave the Rigger to say he could install the new rigging on Monday and be around if I could get the crane booked next week. The crane was duly booked for Wednesday so that's hopefully all happening next week (the one wrinkle is that as of today there is a thunderstorm alert for Wednesday so we'll see what happens)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was a whole lot of other jobs to be tackled. 

With help from my mate Tony, we'd run a new cable the length of the main mast for the VHF antenna.

 I'd installed the Rolls Royce of marine VHF antennas, the superb Metz Manta, but the VSWR (the main measure of the effectiveness of an antenna installation, I won't bore you with the technicalities) was rather poor.

The standard cable universally used for the job is called RG58 and it's rather thin stuff and really not suitable for cable runs over 10m at the most. As our mast is over 11m high and then there's the cable from the mast foot to the navigation table where the radio is installed, that's getting on for 15m!

The ideal cable to use would be stuff called RG213 which is very low loss but it's pretty thick and inflexible stuff. Given that the cable needs to exit the mast through the side, trying to get RG213 around that bend would be a right faff and potentially even impossible. The next best choice would be RG8 but that's nearly as thick and only slightly more flexible. Salvation is at hand though in the form of RG8X cable which is only a little thicker than RG58, nearly as flexible but has about half the loss per metre.

So that's what we've used! And boy did it need doing! The existing cable was badly corroded internally and the outer sheath was falling apart. With a new cable run below decks (when I get a round tuit) we should have significantly better transmission and reception on the VHF set which is, of course, a vital safety item.

With all the things that HAD to be done, done, I've been pottering around, when the heat permitted, on whatever job from the lengthy to do list took my fancy. I shan't bore you with all the details, it's all been odd jobs that could be done in an hour or two rather than anything epic.

So tomorrow I shall be running Jane home as she has to be back at work on Monday and then I'll be back down for a few more days by the end of which we'll hopefully have a fully rigged sailing yacht again. We should now be able to sort out insurance and in the hope and expectation that this will be the case, we've booked for Pagan to be launched on the 9th of September when we're back down for our final fortnight of the "season".

She'll only be in the water for a few weeks which may seem a bit pointless but there's method in our madness. Apart from the contractual issues (we've been ashore for nigh on four years on a berthing contract that only permits six months ashore per annum!) which to be absolutely fair and clear the marina have been very good about, the last thing we want to do is launch next spring and find we've got a show stopping problem that means we've got to immediately haul back out again.

With Pagan having now sat ashore for so long, we simply don't know whether the engine will even start and if it does start will it run OK? Are all the systems working? Is everything water tight? And so on.

Splashing her for a couple or three weeks gives us the opportunity to test everything and find out what still works and what doesn't. Hopefully then come the spring we'll actually be able to get some sailing in!

Keep bashing ...

 So following on from the first post about our fortnight of unplanned boat refitting ...

The starboard chain plates cleaned up nicely with no signs of any worrying corrosion etc. So they were refitted with nice new sealant to keep the water on the outside where it belongs ...

We're one lock nut short as I rejected one of the existing nuts as it had a crack in it. So as the chain plate pictured is the easy one to get at, if you look closely you'll see there's only one nut. An A4 stainless 10mm nut (they don't come cheap!) has been added to the shopping list.

We then ran into a fairly major problem around the mast step which took several days to engineer our way out of.

Let's just say that when the boat was built, they didn't take into account a need, forty odd years later, to access the nuts on the back of the bolts that secure the mast foot to the deck! We were able, with care, to cut access holes sufficient to get at the nuts from below although now that has to be made good again before the rig goes back on

The hot weather was really not helping progress by this stage. I'm not by nature or inclination a morning person but by lunchtime the temperature was reaching levels I find difficult to tolerate. So we'd get two or three hours work in before it got too hot to carry on and then hopefully another hour or two when it cooled down later.

One job that definitely needed doing before we abandoned ship ahead of the predicted really hot weather today and tomorrow (and we had to be home by tomorrow lunchtime anyway) was to remove one or both of the mizzen mast forward lower chainplates.

These chainplates are mounted half way along the extensive winch shelf either side of the cockpit and they have a small stainless steel backing plate to spread the load. That plate is obviously nowhere near big enough as the winch shelves are getting distorted upwards causing cracking in the gelcoat.

And as can be seen from the photo of the underside, in the cockpit locker, there's obviously been some water getting through as there's signs of rust around one of the nuts.

Grinding off the resin that had been slapped over the nuts and backing plate in hot weather was a lovely job but it had to be done so that we could decide what needs to be bought to sort this problem out.

With the fitting and plate removed, the holes in the deck were temporarily taped over to keep any rain out and we set about packing up and heading for home.

I've located a source of suitable A4 stainless plates of the right size and thickness at a reasonable price so they need to be ordered ahead of the next trip down in a couple of weeks or so. We also need to remove and re-bed the port side main chain plates - it's very obvious that the sealant under all the deck fittings has long since past it's use by date and everything needs re-bedding. We'll do what must be done now, now e.g. anything to do with the rig, everything else will have to wait a while but not too long!

We also need to sort out the mast electrics whilst the rig is down. I've ordered new low loss RG8X coaxial cable to replace the old thing RG58 that's currently on the main VHF antenna. On a run of 15m plus, RG58 just isn't good enough. There's also the dodgy steaming and deck light to sort out, it works when it feels like it and usually doesn't work when you need it! I think we'll just replace the damn thing and have done with it.

There's a realistic prospect, weather permitting, of being ready to have the rig put back on the boat by mid-August and that will beg the question of whether or not to launch for a few weeks.

We have a fortnight on board in September and I would rather like to spend it on the water rather than working on the boat. Apart from anything else, after four years ashore I would like to find out what works and what doesn't any more sooner rather than later. It would be a real PITA to launch next spring and then have to be hauled out again because of some unforseen problem.

Container Bashing and other things ...

 So here we are back on board for a solid fortnight with a lot to do ... and it has to be admitted that progress has been slow so far.

The priority is to tackle all the jobs that need or ought to be done whilst the rig is off the boat 'cos we really don't want to have to remove the masts again for many a long year.

And at the very top of that list is a job we've known was going to need doing for some time - removing the starboard cap shroud chain plates, cleaning them up (and hoping like hell they're good to be refitted!) and then refitting them with fresh sealant. It needs doing because there's clear signs of water weeping through from on deck and running down the plates either side of the main bulkhead ...

You can clearly see brown streaks, which aren't rust 'cos they're on top of the paint, on the plate inside the wardrobe on the forward face of the bulkhead and the matching plate on the much harder to get at aft face of the bulkhead isn't much better.

The first task was to remove the deck fitting ...

...  and that didn't prove too easy at all! But it came out in the end and then the chain plates themselves had to be removed. Getting at the nuts was easy but to get at the bolt heads and drive the bolts out meant removing the starboard saloon locker front and some butchery of the end structure of the locker itself with the reciprocating saw to cut holes for the bolts to pass through (photos to follow).

So far so good but by this stage I was getting absolutely fed up with not being able to find tools and material in our container next to where Pagan is ashore.

The container was in a reight mess with the work bench covered in "stuff" and access to our storage shelves and cupboard blocked by ladders, timber, two dinghies and all sorts of other "stuff."

So we broke off from working on the boat to have have container bashing session. First up, everything (near enough) out. Then everything back ... tidy!

Well, alright, tidy-ish! By the time I remembered to take a piccy, I was actually using the workbench, something we haven't been able to do for a while, and if you look closely you'll see the parts of the aforementioned chain plate on the bench about to be cleaned up.

In fact, as I write they're cleaned up and ready to go back on the boat but I'll post pics of that later.

The next job is cleaning up inside and out where the plates fit and then they can be reinstalled and we'll move on to the next job. Whatever that is. I'm just taking one job at a time!

P.S. I can hear some folks ask ... what is a "chain plate"? There's probably a few wondering what the hell "standing rigging" is too. So a quick and dirty glossary ...

The Rig: On a sailing vessel, "the rig" is everything associated with the bits you hang the sails on.

So that's the masts, obviously, but also the wires (or on traditional vessels the ropes) that hold the masts up (actually that isn't what they really do but it suffices for simplicity) and the fittings those wires attach to.

Shrouds: The shrouds are the wires (or ropes, see above) that go from the mast or masts to the sides of the boat. There's usually a shroud either side from the very top of the mast called the Port or Starboard "Cap Shroud" and shrouds from about two thirds of the way up the mast leading forward and aft called the Port or Starboard "Forward Lower Shroud" and "Aft Lower Shroud"

Just to complicate matters, Pagan. like most Westerlys, doesn't have forward lower shrouds either side, she has a single "Baby Stay" which serves the same purpose.

Stays: These are the wires that lead fowards and aft from the mast. The forestay goes from the top of the amst (or near enough) to the bow, the Backstay goes from the top of the mast to , you guessed it, the stern. 

Once again, we complicate matters 'cos we're a ketch so our backstay is actually split into two part way down and lands either side of the aft end of the cockpit overlapping the shrouds for the mizzen mast.

And finally, the generic term for the fittings that the shrouds and stays attach to is "Chain Plate". On sailing ships of old, the last few feet of each shroud or stay was actually made of chain and the whroud chains were shackled to a plate or plates securely bolted to the hull sides. Hence "chain plate"

And if you want to know more ... buy a book!

Dismasted!

 Yup, that's right, The masts are down on the ground, not up in the air ...

And that's because it has become all too clear that we're not going to get adequate insurance without a survey which includes a full rigging inspection. Since th e existing standing rigging is now fifteen years old, whilst we might get it signed off as OK for another year or two, it's going to be a constant thorn in our side so it's time to have the whole lot replaced.

That's going to be expensive of course. Several thousand pounds we could have done with spending elsewhere. And whilst the masts are down, there's a list of jobs that need doing or ought to be done before the rig goes back up.

So any prospect of going back in the water in the next month is pretty much done for. Maybe July / August. maybe not, we'll see.