210: CRITICAL RIGGING TIPS & MAINTENANCE FROM A PRO

In this video, we are going to share with you five rigging tips for a healthier rig. They are where to store your jib sail pre-feed and why, how to rig your reefing lines to minimize tension and line shredding, what actions you need to take to keep your jib furler functioning properly, and why, of all the standing rigging, you might have failure in this one, how to tension the headsail and why an annual inspection is important, and how to tidy your lines to avoid twisting, plus a whole lot more. So sit back and enjoy this video. This morning, we're headed to Kayakamoto to meet with a rigger who is going to make sure everything's okay, especially because in a few months, we're gonna head out to sea again, down to Panama. So we wanna make sure we are good to go for the next year or so. And then he's going to fix our jib sail. It just needs to be sewn in a few places. So we're at Tom, the rigger's sail shop, and he is helping us take down the headsail, which we've never done before. And this place is really cool. It's in a little back bay in the middle of nowhere. Wow, it came down fast, and I didn't have to do anything. Can't leave this pre-feed up because the little piece of Velcro will burn and then it'll fall off. Okay, notice how this goes on. Yeah. Okay. Notice how burnt the Velcro is already. It used to snap in place, but then Profro stopped doing it that way. So after you raise the sail, you take it off and hide it somewhere where you have it inside. Single-line reefing doesn't work. There's too much friction because by the time you go up to it, you probably don't have a block there either. No, I don't. There's no block in the aft. So you're pulling through that line, going down through a sheave, a sheave. And so to get 50 pounds of force on the sail, you got to put like 200 on the line. And you never get as much tension aft as you do forward because there's three blocks in between those two places. So to do it correctly, if you want to stay in the cockpit, you want to have one line aft. Instead of running the rope from aft underneath the sheave, you run it over top and it comes down through that turning block. Got it. Into the cockpit. And then you have another line that ties onto here and comes down and goes aft to the cockpit. So you got the block for it. You're just missing a deck organizer and a clutch. Or you can just man up and walk out here and you can hook it, hook this directly on. So what I would do is to flip these around. So you bring that aft reefing line over the sheave, run it straight to the cockpit, skip the forward reef altogether. Got it. Then you get two more blocks. And then this, you just take this and use like a soft shackle or something and hook it onto here. First reef is on this side, or you can do both on the same side or whatever. So this hooks, clips directly into that. But yeah, you have to come up here to do it. But you do anyway. You do anyway. How does the sail look in general? It's great. Really? Yeah, yeah. Oh, good. Yeah, these sails are practically indestructible. Keep the cover on them. Okay. They'll last for 25 years. They don't get too stretched? Nah, whatever. You're not racing. No, we're definitely not racing. You're not a catamaran. Yeah. Who cares? Starting here. The whole leech has double layer of, it's like 10 ounce cloth all the way to here. And then starting at the third reef, it starts going in. So the entire head is double. From the top three battens, all that is double layer. And the whole leech is double layer. It's an excellent way to build a sail to make them really, really strong. Oh, that's good. Because the leech and the head that wear out earliest from sunlight damage, from clogging. Clogging, yeah. Good, you get the nice one. These right here, it's probably too late by now but that's like a good regular maintenance thing. If you can take out these two bolts, these are what hold the cage in place and put Tefgel on it and put it back in. And then this, one of the failure modes. That looks horrible. Failure modes for these is that they reconnect the roller to the foils and make the whole thing work. If these rust out, which they do, this will slide down inside the foil and sit down on top of something down underneath here that doesn't spin. And then you'll end up grinding the bottom of your tubes up and trying to furl it and be like, this is really sticky. And usually it's all corroded together and that's like a 15 to 20 year thing. So the other thing is like that one probably come out. But I think that all of these are set screws. Sometimes they had set screws, sometimes they had screws with a tip on it that slid into a hole. But a lot of them, especially in the old ones, they used to hold them down here with a screw that was only threaded into the plastic. They had all kinds of horrible ideas and they tried lots of bad things over the years. But the simplest solution is if these don't come out or if they're stuck or if this starts sliding, you just drill a hole through the whole thing and then tap it out and put a bolt. As long as you don't touch the wire inside, you're golden. You just want something that goes through, all the way through, just bolted together. And there's no reason you can't put it here too. Okay. That's going to be five, 10 years from now or tomorrow. No, it's getting closer than that. That means the hole's getting a little bit loose. Should we do a preemptive attack on that and do it now? I mean, I would definitely try and get these out, but I still can't. I'm enamored with these hound heads. The nice part is that it's a good way to center your drill bit and you can just run right through and the thing strips out. Right, right. So you drill it out and hopefully they're either the same size or drill it oversized, tap it out bigger to eight millimeter. We need to get- It's six right now, I guess. So you can tap it to eight or to five sixteenths or whatever taps you have. Changing out the first reef line. And why is that? Well, because we've shredded another reef line. Right. So we've changed our practice of how we reef now, with the rigging change. So that should reduce the amount of wear. I feel like I'm at the dentist and he's just finished with my mouth and he's getting ready to tell me the good news or the bad news. Dr. Tom. The only thing, we were just talking about that shackle. Sure. It enlarged the hole a little bit. The shackle's kind of small. You could get a bigger shackle. Each of those plates. Right. You got three of them. Each of them has a hole. So you can put a shackle if the hole gets too large. Okay. Use any of them. There's still that much aluminum to- Good. It has to break through. And the shackle's strong enough, do you think? Yeah, the shackle's strong enough. Okay, cool. Well, we should get a bigger shackle. If it was bigger, it wouldn't cause that to- Right, because it wouldn't move as much. Because it wouldn't be a point load. It would fit the hole. How many more years do you think, just in general, does our rigging have? Depends on what you do with it. How paranoid do you get with it? I can tell you if it's about to fail, other than that. It's hard to know. It could be 10 years, or 20 years, or two years. But 10 years, usually you get your rigging switched out? People say that. Insurance companies and people who just want to make a lot of money at rigging. But no, I've seen 25, 30-year-old rigs that were perfect, and seven-year-old rigs that were screwed. How do you find leopard rigs? Are they- Too much in the spreader ends, but other than that, they're all right. Everything looks in pretty good shape? Yeah, yeah. Good. The thing I keep an eye on is the upper end of the forest. Everything else here was done with double pass. It presses the stainless steel onto the wire and leaves the ridge. Okay. One right here and one on the other side. Then they take it, turn it 90 degrees, and do it again. So the first one, you can see the diastereoid here. One place it's been worked on once, and right on either side of this, what used to be the ridge, has been worked on twice, and that's where they fail. And probably water and salt can get in there. It compromises the metal. Stainless steel sets up a galvanic cell. Are you familiar with that? Within itself, in the presence of salt water or any electrolyte and no oxygen, it will set up a galvanic cell between the chrome and the steel. And it's crevice corrosion, and that's why your swages fail. You'll see like this, but it'll be a bigger splotch of surface corrosion. And then you can take a little file or something, and I use my calipers and scrape that off and make sure there's nothing happening. Generally speaking, when a wire breaks in there, you'll be able to see it. It'll separate about that much. It'll be down in there. You're unlikely to see that. If it hasn't happened yet, it's usually a result of improper swaging. Hopefully, you can keep the shrouds tight enough so that when you're on full sail, the lured one isn't flopping because that can allow the mast, when the sail gets unloaded, you go over a wave, it allows the shock loads to come onto the mast if the shrouds are too loose. Unfortunately, with the catamaran, they're so lightly built that oftentimes you can't tension them up enough to keep that from happening because it all does just bend almost. What you doing? Changing the second reef lines. I think you should leave your headsail up from there anyway. Okay, well. Take it down and look at things. That's the first time I've heard that. And why would we take it down? I have white. So if you park the boat for any amount of time, you want to take this off because the whole time it's up there, this thread's going to be burning. Took me forever to figure this out. Oh, so you've already put it in. Okay, got it. Main thing with these is you want to take the tension up. You can keep this track running. That's all right. I can't hit her hard. There we go. So we've got an issue with our- Oh, it's stuck? Yeah, the jib is stuck. Tom's going back up the mast to try and figure out why. Profero in their infinite wisdom only taps the foils and it's like a set screw going into the aluminum, the big heavy aluminum casting that joins the two pieces. Right. So everyone else taps the big aluminum piece in the middle and the screw just goes, the head sits in there. Profero hasn't figured that out yet. But that's not what's going on. What's going on is simply that it's a little bit of play in those. And so when there's some tension on the foils, it tries to open up that joint and it's catching on the slide here. So I don't think there's really anything you can do about it to make it better at this point. We'll just have to have someone go up. Is that what helped? Was that you were able to be up there? Yeah, it helps a lot. If you'd go up, it's really easy. If not, you probably could have gotten it by bringing it down and back up and down and back up. How do you know how tight to make it? Look to see, because it's just starting to get a little fold there. Okay, got it. Okay, perfect. Let me take that off. Oh, this is falling off. That's as good as you get. It is? Yeah. I was gonna say I could replace it with one of this style of cleat, but that's it. So yeah, what you want to do is once you tension it, it's got some tension on it now. See how wrinkled the leech is? It messes up the shape of the sail. To avoid it getting destroyed, sometimes you need to screw up the shape of the leech. Smooth. Okay. You know? Got it. The problem is if it's fluttering, it'll self-destruct. So that's what this leech line is for, is to keep it from fluttering like that. Okay. At the expense of the shape. But probably, I don't know, it's only gonna do that on certain wind conditions and certain bale angles. Wrap it around in a circle, and it makes... Oh! You just lay it back and forth over your hand. Oh! Interesting. Okay. So it's like saddles. And that way, it's never actually making a loop. Oh, wow. You don't put any twists in it. It makes it run easier. Because you don't have all those little... Right! Oh, that's so cool. After you've been doing it for a while, it gets better and better as the line gets fewer twists in it. And then you can just finish it off the normal way. The normal way. Best thing I've learned all year. Ain't that pretty?