Mending the Main Sail
16 May 2008 | Charleston, SC
Philip

Monday May 12, 2008, dawned bright, and I was outside the UK Sails office as it opened at 09h00. After a brief conversation with Tripp, he indicated that he couldn't help us. Too much sail had to be put under the arm of the sewing machine for a repair to be practical. The loft in Annapolis could do the work, but that wouldn't help us. Next we called North Sails, and had a great conversation with Josh, who kindly offered to come right over and take a look at the sail. Within 30 minutes Josh was dockside with some colleagues, and after a brief tour of the Liberty Schooner, had the sail in a dock cart bound for his shop.
In the mean time, Sharon and Ruthie had arrived, and Sharon went right to work as the boat mom, sorting out and organizing all the stores, and preparing the boat for sea. The decks were washed down, and tools and spare parts inventoried.
The Raymarine chart plotter C70 we had on board only had charts for South East USA, and so, we picked up another chip from Westmarine, but if only it were that easy! When the new chip was inserted it caused the machine to go into a cycles of rebooting itself. A call to Raymarine indicated that the firmware had to be upgraded and they would send the 4.29 release on a compact flash card by DHL. No problem, another reason to spend another day in Charleston.
The following day Josh at North Sails called back and said, after looking at the sail, that the amount of work to patch it would approach the cost of a new sail, and even then the new fabric would be stronger that the old fabric, possibly causing it to rip in a big wind. So the sail was coming back to us un-repaired.
Around this time our crew member Jim came by with some bad news. While underway from Miami, his doctor had called him with the results of some tests he had done. Being 100 nm off shore meant he didn't get the message until his arrival in Charleston. The bottom line was, he was lucky to be alive, and was advised to returned to NJ, and have an angioplasty procedure done as soon as possible. So with some sadness Jim was sent home.
Wednesday, saw the crew hard at work repairing the mainsail with herring bone stitches, and 3M 4200. Yes you read that right, 4200 worked great to adhere the patches to the sail and take the strain off the stitches. Everybody put in some time, but is was Captain Cheyenne and Ekkehart that did the heroes portion of the work. All told 50 man hours went into repairing the sail. Well done!