SV Panta Rhei Retirement Trip

We accomplished the sail repair and it is back in service. It wasn't easy. Here is the rest of the story.

Our sail is tri-radial construction. It has all sorts of layers of light strong materials sewn together with the warp of the cloth engineered to give maximum strength in the direction it is needed with minimum weight. Basically, our sails have lots of seams and in between those seams the sail cloth is light and...sun sensitive. The tear in the sail was in one of those areas and the repair is accomplished with some miracle tape. We set out to use that tape but as we did so, it began to rain. The tape doesn't stick to a wet sail. The rain was coming from a thunderstorm which turned out to be an especially energetic and long lasting one. The wind peaked at around 25 knots (if you can believe our wind gage which is broken for direction and suspect for speed) seas got rough and the crew got rain soaked. All this is pretty tough on our wounded sail. We've reefed it, but the damage is in the top part of the sail which is what remains up after you reef. That's when we noticed that the sail was now ripping along a seam below the tear where the sail connects to the sail track car. The rip was growing at a dangerous rate due to the high wind. We dropped the sail and proceeded for a while under jib alone and waited for the storm to pass. But we didn't have infinite time. Daylight was wasting. By 10:30 am we thought we could proceed with the repair. In the rough seas and now not so strong wind we took the sail off the mast and laid it on the deck. This is a lot of sail on a little deck. The jib lines were hitting the crew as they flailed when the boat rolled (a flailing line can hit very hard) so we rolled up the jib and started the engine. We were trying to get a stable work platform. As it worked out, we could barely stay in place while we worked. The first repair was the ripping seam for the sail track connection. The sun had caused the thread to fail and the stitch was just unraveling. The underlying material was ok. So we set to work with needle and thread. There is a plastic reinforcement that needs to be sewn through in that area and it is just barely possible to push a needle through it by hand using a "palm". It is slow going. We divided the job in two and worked for 4 hours to sew it with two of us working at a time. By then it was 4 pm and daylight wasn't going to last long enough. We started taping the sail. This tape is miracle stuff IF YOU APPLY IT RIGHT. The sail had dried (mostly...) by this time and we worked as a team to bring the parts together on a flat surface and apply the tape...inches at a time. By 6 pm we had the sail taped. Getting the sail back on the mast took another very difficult hour. It's HEAVY and it has to go on the mast just so else we will create a new problem (it will rip again!) when we try to raise it.

Just as darkness came, we were under sail again. Now it is morning and our repairs are still holding except for one seam in the big rip. Maybe the tape isn't a miracle?

Victory declared! I wonder how long before we have to do this again? We have another 20 days to go to first port in the Marquesas. We don't have enough fuel to motor that far.

Trip log: 11825 Distance to go: 2684 nm Course: 252M Distance from Wreck Bay in Galapagos: 466 nm Solar output for the day: 61 Ahr