The boat is pretty much ready for the launch....
Hard to believe I've been working on it 10 days now - Time is defiantly flying
Everything looks good
- of course the sails didn't show up ... same thing every year ..
- well it doesn't look like there is any wind until late Friday so that helps ..
I'm playing with the idea going over night to Union Island .. but I'm not sure If can do that to my Brother ...:-) waves are "low"
Otherwise we will start around midnight - Kind of have to, to make sure I can check into Grenada on arrival day....

Adrian is flying in Wednesday from NY... This will be great ...


I was doing the annual maintenance on the winches over the last couple of days
This time I actually took the time to take the motor driven winch apart as well..
Whoever installed it, didn't do it right (I would not be surprised if it was Benetau -just to cut corners..)
The base plate is supposed to be screwed to the boat and then the standard winch will screw onto it from the top (this allows easy disassembling of the winch for regular maintenance) Of course on my boat somebody decided that that was to much "trouble" and instead used longer screws to bolt everything together with one screw ......This required me to go below and undo the nuts inside before I could take the unit apart ....
It took me much longer to take everything apart then to fix it and install it correctly..

Also one of the head sail winches is assembled in the wrong position (rotated 180 deg) this prevents anybody from doing proper maintenance on the winch, because you can not remove the gears. There is not enough room to slide them out sideways ..

I did try (again) to remove the winch but without any luck - Trying to remove it, would probably brake the gel coat where it's mounted to ( they must have used 5200 or so)
Therefore all I can currently do, is clean the gear assembled , smear new grease onto them and spray new oil into the ratchets .... The ratchets are really the problem - if they ever get stuck because of old grease building up, this could create a rather dangerous situation for whoever is operating the winch !!!!!

Now this was definitely a Benetau France screw up, as those are factory standard winches ! (hard to believe that happen after they had built several hundreds of them (I think I'm somewhere in the 800 range )