Progress!
Rigging Up the Hauling Bridle
How do you know if you’re making progress? You spend a day or two trying to accomplish frustrating and stressful activities, and in the end you feel really burnt out and defeated but in fact you have learned new and valuable lessons.
That’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of days. Here’s the story: We bought a new 9.9hp Yamaha outboard engine for our dingy. This thing is heavy, around 90 pounds. You can’t just carry it around under your arm (at least I can’t) and throw it up on it’s mount on the back of the boat. So what we did was wheel it in a cart from our car to the boat on the dock. To get it on the boat you normally use a lift, but we couldn’t use that to get it off the dock unless we turned the boat around and had the stern (back end) of the boat over the dock.
So… We spent two or so hours trying to back into our slip and could never get aligned right after probably a dozen tries. We’ve done this before on other boats but the Good Karma is special and we could not figure out the technique. In our defense, there was also quite a bit of wind which always adds to the difficulty of docking. We finally just docked in a position, bow in, but in a location where we could lift the outboard motor off the dock.
Then we had the challenge of figuring out a motor harness that really wasn’t made for the motor we have. Then we figured out how our lift works, but has a lot of tricks that had us in precarious positions several times. Fortunately, all our mountaineering experience with ropes and hauling systems paid off and not only did we not drop the engine, we actually got it mounted correctly. It was way, way harder than we imagined. Ug!
Today we figured out how to haul our dinghy onto the davits, pictured above. That was also quite the challenge, mainly because we have zero experience with such a system. It looks like a simple hauling system, but no, many subtleties. In the pic is one of the davits (a little crane) and at my feet is a hauling bridle to lift the dinghy and keep it level. The bridle is homemade, or should I say boatmade. It works pretty well. I look happy, but that’s only because Shelly told me to smile (grrrrr).
Still not done but should be by tomorrow morning. I’ll post pics of the final system when it is complete.
Progress. We are way closer to having the boat ready to finally leave and start moving down the coast!
Posted in Sailing by Mark with 2 comments.
For instructions on how to rig anything please reference old MacGyver episodes.
MacGyvers got nothing on me..;)