S/V Deep Playa - Pearson 424

Dawn and I went to Port Townsend, WA last weekend. We unfortunately did not sail instead we took the land dinghy (Subaru Forester) and all of our standing rigging and chain plates to Port Townsend Rigging to have it inspected and plan for its replacement. Port Townsend Rigging comes highly recommended. In fact, I can’t think of any boat services in Port Townsend that people don’t like. I have not had any work done by PT Rigging in the past and this was my first time meeting them.

I had an email exchange with Lisa to get a ballpark estimate and I had a great phone conversation with her as well. Lisa and Dan were flexible and willing to meet with us on a Saturday which we really appreciated. This would allow them to see what we had and to and allow us to make the go\no-go decision.

Lisa and Dan are the nicest people and easy deal with. They explained everything in lots of detail which if you’ve seen my wiring diagram you know I love! Even better, they took the time to answer questions not just about the standing rigging but some of my other rigging projects. They even did the unthinkable which is recommend where we could save a few bucks by reusing components of our existing rigging or where my other plans were unnecessary and costly (e.g., custom fabrication Vs. off the shelf parts).

Big takeaway from that is they’re hired. They’re going to do all of our standing rigging. Dawn and I are going to sand and polish our chain plates. We’ll have more on that process in a future post.

Dawn and I have started our annual cleanse diet which kind of messes with you with the first couple of days (headaches, low energy, weird tummy stuff) but now we’re back to more normal energy levels. We’ve still managed to be down at the workshop though cleaning up some of the aluminum ends from the spars.

Once they are cleaned up we’ll take them over to Asko for galvanizing.

This weekend we’re also going to drill tap and dry-fit all of the electronics we plan to attach to the spars. That sounds pretty simple, but first I have to round up all the bases, get bolts, and then I can start the drilling, tapping, etc. When I am done that I’ll give the green light to Seaview to do the final prep and paint the spars.

The final plan for the weekend is to complete some more hose installations including the new strainer for the anchor washdown.

Should be a good weekend of getting stuff done and eating super cleanse healthy.

I've been updating the drawing so it's more detailed than the original version. I'm getting to the point of needing to determine the number and size of things like terminal blocks, ring terminals, heat shrink tubing, etc.. Along with this I'm also getting ready to dry fit everything to the spars down at the yard before the final prep and then painting of the spars. I'm spending a lot of money having these things painted and I'd rather bounce the drill off the unpainted sand blasted spars than the newly painted spars.

If you follow @DeepPlaya on twitter you know a lot of this stuff, but for those of you who only read the blog here’s the full scoop.

Wednesday afternoon we moved Deep Playa over to A dock where Seaview uses the fixed mount haul out cranes (you could pull your dinghy this way) to remove masts. Because the cranes are fixed height you have to time all of this with the right tide to allow them to lift or lower your masts successfully. We got there right on time which in boatyard time means we were early. We milled around then docked and went to work. Basics steps to de-rigging your boat are as follows:

1. Remove all of your sails and running rigging
2. Unhook all of your mast lead wiring. This may require cutting some wires, you can add a terminal strip afterwards.
   You might want to lift the mast and see if there any connectors within the mast instead of cutting directly.
3. Remove any boots around the mast if it is keel stepped
4. Attach crane to the mast and snug it slightly so it will keep anything from falling over
5. Pull all the cotter pins from the rig and loosen all the turnbuckles. Depending on your rig some can be removed before others.
6. Snug the crane
7. Completely remove disconnect all the standing rigging (Thanks Tom for the clarification)
8. Lift the mast off of it’s step, being careful to lead all the wires cleanly out.
9. Put the masts on a cart and take them to the yard or lower and fasten them on deck.

So, that’s the ideal way to do things assuming everything goes perfectly. I did not remove my wiring before I got there so I had to quickly do that. I ended up cutting the thick data wire to the RADAR (which I plan to upgrade) only to learn there was a connecter under the mizzenmast. The main could not be picked form its maststep. The aluminum mast was fused to the steel step, horrible combination of metals.

 Because they couldn’t get the main out and it was dark we had to wait to finish pulling the rig until the following morning. They managed to get the mast out by grinding off the bolt heads holding the main maststep to the boat, then the pulled the whole mast, step and all up a few feet and knocked the step off the mast with a hammer. With the step removed the whole thing slide right out.

Now that the rig is down the boat was hauled and setup on jacks in the yard.

I spent the remainder of the day removing hardware from the masts. This went much better than the booms. There was a lot more hardware that easily unscrewed. I still have quite a bit left to do, but it feels good to be making progress rather than waiting to start.

You can see more pics of the refit as it goes along in our 2009 Refit set on Flickr.

As part of “The Refit” we’re going to have the spars refinished. In order to do that you have to remove all of the hardware from the spars (masts, booms, spreaders). You can pay $80 an hour to have to the yard do it, or you can buy a $180 drill press and spend a lot of your own hours doing it. Since we have a workshop, that’s pretty much a no brainer. The Ryobi Drill press was acquired along with some cobalt drill bits ($45!!!). The drill bits were worth it. They have definitely held up and I’m am very abusive to drill bits. When working with metal you need to let the bits cool down more than I do. when I using standard bits they were burning up lik emad; these are holding up very well.

We haven’t pulled the entire rig, just the sails, running rigging and booms. I’ve completely removed all the hardware from bottom booms and only had one real oopsy and that was when I broke the off a piece of the boom end cap that holds the outhaul. I’m not even sure these cast aluminum caps are going to be worth re-using so I’m not that concerned about it to be honest.

Thus far everything has been going pretty well the booms were a good step project to working on the masts when we have the rigged pulled.