Opua: clutter in the cockpit
Opua: clutter in the cockpit
Sails are naturally graceful shapes. Triangles with curves.
New Zealand went on summer time last Sunday, which marks the start of the Opua Cruising Club Wednesday evening race series, and I watched the start from the cockpit with a glass of wine and a plastic measuring cup of freeze dry spaghetti Bolognese.
Twenty-one boats started. Almost all are familiar to me from past races.
The sun was moving in and out behind low clouds, scattering shifting patterns of light and shadow on the hills, the water, and elegant sails moving silently away to the north.
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I took all seven cockpit line bags and the dodger ashore this morning for repair.
The dodger was made here and survived a circumnavigation quite well, needing only one zipper and a chamois-like piece on the trailing edge, which I often hold on to for balance, to be replaced, before it might be good for another.
The plastic mesh bags, used mostly to control the ends of lines, have been on the boat for more than a decade. One of them needs new grommets. Almost all need new edge trim. I bought them in the U.S. and have discovered that the company that made them is no longer in business. With minor repairs, they probably will last longer than I will.
I had neither a dodger nor line tail bags on EGREGIOUS, and often in the Southern Ocean when waves crashed into the cockpit, had to go out to clear the ends of sheets that were blocking cockpit drains.
I finally put a dodger on RESURGAM.
I have mixed feelings about them, and have only the smallest dodger that covers the companionway. Many cruising boats try to turn the cockpit into an enclosed back porch. I like the openness of not having the dodger up, but also like being able to stick my head out the companionway to look around without getting a face full of water.
The cockpit is now free of bags and cluttered with lines.
I can’t see myself sailing with all these loose ends, though once I did.
From left to right on the port side in the photo above, they are the mainsail outhaul, the genoa car control, the jib furling line, and the jib sheet.
Below them in the photograph are various cleats, a Bose cockpit speaker, a vestigial shore electrical power connection from when we lived aboard at Constitution Marina, and a white rectangle covering the hole where the control panel for the hydraulic backstay and boom vang, which long ago died, once resided.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010