Sunday 19 June 2016

Tom Tom

I may have spoken about sailing vessel Tom Tom before on the blog. Chris on Tom Tom started in England. Sailed single handed to Martinique. I met him there. He sailed single handed to San Blas. Unofficially part of the BPO. No single handlers allowed. He had crew from San Blas to Galápagos. He was single handed from there to Tahiti. He had crew on and off to Australia. He missed the Indonesian part of the BPO and sailed from MacKay, Australia to Rodriguez single handed. 5 days from Rodriguez his fore stay broke. He was able to use the Genoa halyard and the spinnaker halyard to stop the mast from coming down. He was in winds up to 30 knots. How did you spend Fathers Day you ask. I spent a good part of day helping Chris on Tom Tom. Yesterday we replaced his fore stay which is the wire at the front of the boat that holds the mast up. There is a tube that goes over the fore stay that has a track that the sail slides up through.  It is for furling the foresail. It comes in sections & he had the sections straitened. We put some of the sections in upside down yesterday not realizing the track was not symmetrical. The sail wouldn't go all the way up the track when he tried yesterday and again this morning. We had to take it all down and put the pieces on the right way up & put it back the whole works back up. Chris is not fond of going up the mast. He was up 3 times. Once to figure out why the sail wasn't going up. Once to take the pin out at the top of the mast to lower the fore stay and the furling mechanism. Once to put the pin in after we got it up again. Winding him up in the bosons chair 3 times was a great workout. 
He discovered that one of the stays going half way up to the spreader has a strand broken. I went up & put a line around the spreader so if it breaks from here to Mauritius he has a backup. 
Tom Tom is the boat between the 2 catamarans that is not under the end of the rainbow. It is the one to the right of that boat under the rainbow. It is against the concrete wall sporting its Genoa all nicely furled. Chris couldn't be happier. 

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