This morning the crew helped swap out Sirocco's racing mainsail for the cruising mainsail. This is no easy task as Sirocco has the Harken battcar system with numerous shackles attaching the sail to the mast. And Sirocco's main is very large. It was hot out and it took a couple of hours to bend on the cruising main and rig the various reefing lines.

We then motored out to set the weather mark for the Oceanside Yacht Club's "Race your Home" race. After we set the mark, Lee had difficulty getting the transmission into gear. We motored back to the slip to pick up an additional crew member and had problems again. Hmm. We wanted to practice man overboard drills so we did that for a couple of hours under sail but once again when it came time to put the boat into gear, we had problems. Lee had to manually shift the transmission from the linkage.

We had a severe engine vibration with Sirocco that was finally just recently eliminated when we replaced the two-blade folding prop with a three-blade folding prop. Sirocco's engine vibration problem has a history of many different attempts at diagnosing the problem including new motor mounts, new cutless bearing, shaft alignment several times, new injectors, rebuilt injector pump, and on and on. Our first attempted fix was to replace the original 2 blade feathering prop that came with the boat with a 2 blade folding prop but that didn't help. Finally, three years and many $$ later, we decided to try a three blade folding prop and now the Yanmar purrs like a kitten. Lee was concerned that years of excess engine vibration would result in premature wear on the transmission. Now we're afraid his concerns are coming true. And only 13 days to departure. The adventure begins!